Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory

by E. V. Zenker

CHAPTER II

PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON

Biography — His Philosophic Standpoint — His Early Writings — The "Contradictions of Political Economy" — Proudhon's Federation — His Economic Views — His Theory of Property — Collectivism and Mutualism — Attempts to Put his Views into Practice — Proudhon's Last Writings — Criticism.

he man who had such a powerful, not to say fateful, influence upon the progress of the proletarian movement of our century was himself one of the proletariat class by birth and calling.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born 15th January, 1809, in a suburb of Besançon. His father was a cooper, his mother a cook; and Pierre Joseph, in spite of his thirst for knowledge, had to devote himself to hard work, instead of completing his studies; he became a proofreader in some printing works at Besançon, and as a journeyman printer wandered all through France. Having returned to Besançon, he entered the printing house again as a factor. In the year 1836 he founded, with a fellow-workman in the same town, a little printing shop, which, however, he wound up after his partner had died in 1838, being determined to change the occupation he had followed so far, for another for which he had already long been preparing by diligent study both during his wanderings and in his leisure hours in past years. Proudhon's activity as an author began in the year 1837. The Academy at Besançon had to award a three years' scholarship, which had been founded by Suard, the secretary of the French Academy, for poor young men of Franche-Comte who wished to devote themselves to a literary or scientific career. Proudhon entered as a competitor, and won the scholarship. In the memoir of his life, which he drew up for the Academy, he said: "Born and reared in the midst of the working classes, to which I belong with my heart and in my affections, and above all by the community of sufferings and aspirations, it will be my greatest joy, if I receive the approval of the Academy, to work unceasingly with the help of philosophy and science, and with the whole energy of my will and all my mental powers, for the physical, moral, and intellectual improvement of those whom I call brothers and companions, in order to sow amongst them the seeds of a doctrine which I consider as the law of the moral world, and hoping to succeed in my endeavours, to appear before you, gentlemen, as their representative." As to the studies to which he devoted himself in Paris for several years after receiving the scholarship, Proudhon relates himself that he received light, not from the socialistic schools which then existed and were coming into fashion, not from partisans or from journalists, but that he began with a study of the antiquities of Socialism, a study which, according to his opinion, was absolutely necessary in order to determine the theoretical and practical laws of the social movement.

It gives us a somewhat strange sensation to learn that Proudhon, the father of Anarchism, made these sociological studies in the Bible; and this Book of books is even to-day the most important source of empiric sociology. For no other book reflects so authentically and elaborately the development of an important social Individualism, and in Proudhon's time the Bible (in view of the complete lack of ethnographic observations which then prevailed) was also almost the only source of studies of this kind. And if also it must be admitted that these studies could not fail to be one-sided, yet it cannot be denied that Proudhon proceeded in a way incomparably more correct than most social philosophers have done either before or since, for they have built up their systems generally by deductive and dogmatic methods.

An essay which Proudhon wrote upon the introduction of Sunday rest, from the point of view of morality, health, and the relations of a family estate, brought him a bronze medal from the Academy, and he was able afterwards to say with truth: "My Socialism received its baptism from a learned society, and I have an academy as sponsor"; certainly a remarkable boast for one who denied all authority.

Proudhon appears to have travelled very quickly along the road which led from the regions of faith to the metaphysics prevailing at that time; and already he took for his criterion—as he tells us later in his Confessions—the proposition (drawn up according to the Hegelian theory, that everything when it is legalised at the same time brings its opposite with it), "that every principle which is pursued to its farthest consequence arrives at a contradiction when it must be considered false and repudiated; and that, if this false principle has given rise to an institution, this institution itself must be regarded as an artificial product and as a Utopia." This proposition Proudhon later on formulated as follows: "Every true thought is conceived in time once, and breaks up in two directions. As each of these directions is the negation of the other and both can only disappear in a higher idea, it follows that the negation of law is itself the law of life and progress, and the principle of continual movement." Here, indeed, we have Proudhon's whole teaching; with this magic wand of negation of law he thought he could open the magic world of social problems, and heal up the wounds of the social organisation.