Proudhon in his book upon property did not answer the question put in its title, What is Property? as he had promised in the introduction. From his statement "property is theft," which was uttered with so much éclat, and of which, according to his own account at least, he was prouder than if he had possessed all the millions of Rothschild—from this paradox one might conclude, and certainly the great majority of his readers do conclude usually that Proudhon was an enemy of property in general. That is not at all the case. "What I have been seeking since 1840 in defining property," said he much later (in Justice, i., p. 302), "and what I wish to-day, as I have repeated over and over again, is certainly not abolition of property. For this would be to fall into Communism with Plato, Rousseau, Louis Blanc, and other opponents of property, against whom I protest with all my strength. What I demand from property is a balance." But all his life Proudhon was unable to dispel the misunderstanding which he carelessly brought upon his doctrine in his first writing by a talented paradox. We say carelessly, for the concluding answer which Proudhon gives to the question, "What is property?" was, even in his first work, not "property is theft" but "property is liberty;" only the use of all his great scientific apparatus was quite superfluous, because it was in no way connected with the chief purpose of his book. Proudhon might just as well have placed the supposed conclusion, the Ten Commandments of his economic doctrine, at the beginning of his book, for they were arrived at not by the method of science but of speculation. These Ten Commandments run:
(1) Individual possession is the fundamental condition of social life; five thousand years of the history of property prove it; property is the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against all right; suppress property and maintain possession, and you would by this one main alteration transform everything—laws, government, economy, statesmanship; you would make evil disappear from the earth.
(2) Since the right of occupation is the same for all, possession changes according to the number of possessors; thus property can no longer be created.
(3) Since the result of labour remains the same for the whole of the community, property, which arising from the exploitation of others and from rent, disappears.
(4) Since every human work necessarily arises from a collective force, every piece of property becomes both collective and indivisible—to be exact, labour annihilates property.
(5) Since every capacity for any occupation, including all the instruments of labour and capital, is collective property, the inequality of treatment and of goods, which rests upon the inequality of capabilities, is injustice and theft.
(6) Trade necessarily presupposes the freedom of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged; but since value is determined by the amount of time and expense which each product costs, and since freedom is inviolable, the workers remain necessarily equal in reward as also in rights and duties.
(7) Products are only exchanged again for products; but since every bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and unjust. Take heed to this, the first and the most elementary principle of economics, and pauperism, luxury, servitude, vice, crime, and hunger will disappear from our midst.
(8) Men are already, before they fully agreed to do so, associated from the physical and mathematical law of production; the equality of external conditions of existence is thus a demand of the justice of social right, of strict right; friendship, respect, admiration, and recognition alone enter into the province of equity or proportion.
(9) Free association, or freedom which limits itself to expressing equality in the means of production and equivalence in articles of exchange, is the only possible, the only right, and the only true form of society.