It hardly need be observed that the rise and prosperity of these institutions must stand or fall by the correctness of the assumption of fixed values and of the monetisation of all products. Proudhon's opponents wished to make out, that in view of this knowledge his sudden arrest and imprisonment in Saint Pélagie, by which he was divested of all responsibility for the liquidation of the company, was not altogether unwished for by him. But this is contradicted by the attempt which was renewed later on to realise the project of the People's Bank. We have, indeed, no cause to suspect Proudhon's good faith in the matter; on the other hand, the supposed originality of this idea of his is all the more open to suspicion, because in all essential particulars it reminds us too closely of the "labour paper money" of Rodbertus that was to be issued by the State after the determination of values, an idea with which Proudhon's economics had many points in common. There is a still greater similarity between Proudhon's projects and the Boards of Trade thought of by Bray ten years before the beginning of the People's Bank; and it is also like John Gray's Central Bank.
In later years Proudhon not only outwardly, owing either to compulsion or prudence, renounced all immediate realisation of his intentions, but even became convinced and expressed his conviction in his work upon the federative principle (Du Principe Fédératif, 1852), that ordered anarchy was an ideal, and as such could never be realised, but that nevertheless human society should strive to attain it by means of federative organisations, as he had sketched it in his earlier writings. Even in this period of mental maturity, when removed from political agitation, he remained the sworn enemy and direct opponent of the Communists, and wished to see the great problem of the best arrangement of society solved, not by universal levelling down, but by the general perfection and development of society; not by revolution from which he had gained nothing but disgust and disillusionment, but by evolution. "If ideas will rise up," he used to say, "then even the paving stones would rise up themselves if the Government were so imprudent as to wait for this."
With true prophetic insight Proudhon perceived the fact that even in human society revolution is everything; with a clearness of vision such as none before him, and only very few after him, have possessed, he always insisted upon the organic character of human society and the natural continuity between animal and human social life; and in this lies his greatness, which will never be diminished by any of his numerous errors. But while he thus with one foot for the first time trod upon the ground of a new discovery, with the other he stood on the standpoint of social philosophy of previous centuries. He could neither externally nor internally disassociate himself from its baseless assumptions of a social contract, the absolute rights of man, a moral order of the universe, and similar ethical views of politics; and herein lies the contradiction upon which his great mental talents were shipwrecked. If we once regard human society as Proudhon did, as something real, the product of nature which is moved and develops itself according to the laws of the rest of nature, then we have once for all given up the right to mark out for it a line of development determined merely by speculation, or to demand from it that it should move towards any particular goal, however well-intentioned it may be. A breeder may produce in his pigeons or fowls a certain kind of feather or a certain form of pouting, but he cannot change the pigeon into a hen. The artificial selection of breeding is all that man can do (pour corriger la nature) against the free progress of natural development. This is not so insignificant as one may be inclined to believe at the first glance. The latter belongs to the category of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and of that Utopian social philosophy which began with Plato, and in all human probability will not end for a long time. Proudhon wished to unite both, one with another,—to unite water with fire. Like all Utopians, he desired—he who all his life, in his numerous writings, so frequently confuted and sneered at them—that the human race might be metamorphosed in order to accept unanimously his ideas about society. For that the men of his day were not fit for a true democracy—that is, for anarchy—he was honest enough to admit.
"Nothing is in reality less democratic than the people," said he, occasionally, and he did not allow himself the least delusion as regards their slavish love for authority. For that very reason, he thought democracy must be changed into "demopædy," and a complete revolution of a popular spirit must be caused by education. But to prove that, even with the help of democracy, people would not be ripe for pure democracy, or, rightly speaking, for anarchy, we can quote an authority which he never doubted, namely, himself. In an access of pessimism, he said once, "I have thought I have noticed (may philosophy pardon me for it!) that the more reason develops in us the more brutal becomes passion when once it is let loose. It appears then that the angel and the biped brute which together compose our human nature in their intimate union, instead of mingling their attributes, only live side by side with one another. If progress leads us to that, of what use is it?" This is a bad look-out for the great moral revolution upon which Proudhon more and more based all his hopes.
Proudhon has had the most varied judgment passed upon him. Some have treated him as an obscure pamphlet writer. Louis Blanc calls him a prizefighter; Laveleye, in a history of Socialism, only considers him worth mentioning in order to call his ideas "the dreams of a raving idiot"; Karl Marx denies him either talent or knowledge; many have considered him as a Jesuitical hypocrite; others, again, his followers and representatives, have called him the greatest man of the century. Ludwig Pfau called him the clearest thinker that France had produced since Descartes. But the spectacle is by no means new. In reality, but little courage and wit are to-day needed to acquire the applause of an ignorant multitude which has no idea of Proudhon's train of thought by the condemnation of the father of Anarchism. "Justice must be done to all, even to Louis Napoleon," exclaimed Proudhon, to the great astonishment orbis et urbis after the coup d'état; and not to take a lower standard than the father of Anarchism, we exclaim also, "Justice must be done to all, even to Proudhon."
The most usual reproach which is cast against Proudhon is that he is contradictory and confused. This reproof is generally made by people who know no more about Proudhon than the paradox "Property is Theft," and from this one expression call him confused and contradictory.
Proudhon saw very clearly the end before his eyes, strove to attain it unfalteringly and steadily, and amid all the variety of the developments in which he preached his ideas to the world for a quarter of a century, never betrayed one iota of its contents. The contradiction from which his work suffered lay deeper. It lay in the form of his thought, and partly in the period to which he belonged. Placed on the boundary line between two epochs of social science and of social forms, one of which is marked by dogma and the other by induction, he had not the strength to break completely with one or give himself up completely to the other. His whole life and thought was a constant fight against dogma in every form. He fought against social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a moral order of society—two propositions which can never be proved by experience, but rather contradict all experience.
In the same way this internal contradiction is shown in the principal work of his last period, the Justice dans le Révolution et dans l'Église, in which Proudhon endeavours to show these two separate worlds in their marked difference one from another without suspecting that he himself fluctuated between both.
After he, as a logical idealist, had denied all external force and all authority, and nevertheless as a realist had supported society as the unalterable condition of human life and civilisation, he seeks at the same time to save anarchy and society by a new bond between individuals who have been set free and find this in some internal necessity and internal authority, in a principle which acts upon the will like a force, and determines it in the direction of the general interest independently of all consideration of self-interest.