"Set up above all this a grand jury, legislature, or national assembly, appointed directly by the whole country, and charged not with appointing the cabinet officers,—they have their investiture from their particular constituents,—but with auditing the accounts, making the laws, settling the budget, deciding controversies between the administrations, all after having heard the reports of the Public Department, or Department of the Interior, to which the whole government will thenceforth be reduced; and you will have a centralization the stronger the more you multiply its foci, a responsibility the more real the more clear-cut is the separation between the powers; you have a constitution at once political and social."[160]
5.—PROPERTY
I. Since Proudhon sanctions only the one legal norm that contracts must be kept, he can approve only one legal relation, that between contracting parties. Hence he must necessarily reject property as well as the State, since it is established by particular legal norms, and, as an involuntary legal relation, binds even such as have in no way entered into a contract. And he does reject property[161] absolutely, without any spatial or temporal limitation; nay, it even appears to him to be a legal relation which is particularly repugnant to justice.
"According to its definition, property is the right of using and abusing; that is to say, it is the absolute, irresponsible domain of man over his person and his goods. If property ceased to be the right to abuse, it would cease to be property. Has not the proprietor the right to give his goods to whomever he will, to let his neighbor burn without crying fire, to oppose the public good, to squander his patrimony, to exploit the laborer and hold him to ransom, to produce bad goods and sell them badly? Can he be judicially constrained to use his property well? can he be disturbed in the abuse of it? What am I saying? Is not property, precisely because it is full of abuse, the most sacred thing in the world for the legislator? Can one conceive of a property whose use the police power should determine, whose abuse it should repress? Is it not clear, in fine, that if one undertook to introduce justice into property, one would destroy property, just as the law, by introducing propriety into concubinage, destroyed concubinage?"[162]
"Men steal: first, by violence on the highway; second, alone or in a band; third, by burglary; fourth, by embezzlement; fifth, by fraudulent bankruptcy; sixth, by forgery; seventh, by counterfeiting. Eighth, by pocket-picking; ninth, by swindling; tenth, by breach of trust; eleventh, by gambling and lotteries.—Twelfth, by usury. Thirteenth, by rent-taking.—Fourteenth, by commerce, when the profits are more than fair wages for the trader's work.—Fifteenth, by selling one's own product at a profit, and by accepting a sinecure or a fat salary."[163] "In theft such as the laws forbid, force and fraud are employed alone and openly; in authorized theft they are disguised under a produced utility, which they use as a device for plundering their victim. The direct use of violence and force was early and unanimously rejected; no nation has yet reached the point of delivering itself from theft when united with talent, labor, and possession."[164] In this sense property is "theft,"[165] "the exploitation of the weak by the strong,"[166] "contrary to right,"[167] "the suicide of society."[168]
II. Justice demands, in place of property, a distribution of goods based on the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to.
Proudhon calls that portion of goods which is assigned to the individual by contract, "property." In 1840 he had demanded that individual possession be substituted for property; with this one change evil would disappear from the earth.[169] But in 1841 he is already explaining that by property he means only its abuses;[170] nay, he even then describes as necessary the creation of an immediately applicable social system in which the rights of barter and sale, of direct and collateral inheritance, of primogeniture and bequest, should find their place.[171] In 1846 he says, "Some day transformed property will be an idea positive, complete, social, and true; a property which will abolish the old property and will become equally effective and beneficent for all."[172] In 1848 he is declaring that "property, as to its principle or substance, which is human personality, must never perish; it must remain in man's heart as a perpetual stimulus to labor, as the antagonist whose absence would cause labor to fall into idleness and death."[173]
And in 1850 he announces: "What I sought for as far back as 1840, in defining property, what I am wanting now, is not a destruction; I have said it till I am tired. That would have been to fall with Rousseau, Plato, Louis Blanc himself, and all the adversaries of property, into Communism, against which I protest with all my might; what I ask for property is a BALANCE,"[174]—that is, "justice."[175]
In all these pronouncements property means nothing else than that portion of goods which falls to the individual on the basis of contracts, on which society is to be built up.[176] The property which Proudhon sanctions cannot be a special legal relation, but only a possible part of the substance of the one legal relation which he approves, the relation of contract. It can afford no protection against a group of men whose extent is determined by legal norms, but only against a group of men who have mutually secured a certain portion of goods to each other by contract. Proudhon, therefore, is here using the word "property" in an inexact sense; in the strict sense it can denote only a portion of goods set apart in an involuntary legal relation by particular legal norms.
Accordingly, when in the name of justice Proudhon demands a certain distribution of property, this means nothing more than that the contracts on which society is to be built should make a certain sort of provision with respect to the distribution of goods. And the way in which they should determine it is this: that every man is to have the product of his labor.