Be it noted to Godwin’s credit that he despised violence. And in this position he is far removed from both the true communist and the anarchists of action who followed him.
The next anarchist to be examined is Pierre Joseph Proudhon of Bexancon, France (1809-1865). Proudhon drank deeply from Godwin’s well and came forward with certain modifications and extensions of the Godwin doctrine.
Proudhon acknowledged a debt of gratitude to both Plato and Thomas More, a pair of dedicated socialists (see Plato’s “Republic” and More’s “Utopia”) and busied himself with some practical means for implementing the socialist dream.
Like his precursors, he was fundamentally opposed to property ownership. His most famous work, “Qu’est-ce que La Propriete?” (“What Is Property?”), got him into immediate difficulties with the government. Proudhon, in this opus, declared that “property is robbery” and set about outlining a social order in which no property could be privately owned.
The Encyclopedia Americana says that Proudhon was the “first to formulate the doctrines of philosophic anarchism.”
It is probably true that there are no better writings extant extolling individualism as opposed to collectivism than Proudhon’s early essays. Yet, it should be recalled that Proudhon’s aim, in addition to a society free of governmental coercion, was a state in which property as a private device was abolished.
It is also interesting to recall that Karl Marx was deeply moved by Proudhon’s arguments. The first of Proudhon’s writings appeared in print in 1840 and formed the basis of Marx’s first expostulations which appeared in 1842. Shortly thereafter, Marx veered away from Proudhon’s individualism and contrived his concept of collectivism as the natural and the inevitable course of history.
Marx, however, was never an anarchist, despite the well-known phrase frequently attributed to him that in time the government of the proletariat would simply “wither away.” This phrase should properly be attributed to Lenin.
However, it is known that Marx did make an attempt to lure the anarchists of France into the first “Internationale” and was hooted down for his pains. The anarchists of that time were shrewd enough to sense that the enlargement of government into a general holding company for all property, would never result in the abolition of private ownership of property. Rather, it would result in the perpetuation of a privileged class of persons who would have possession of the property to the exclusion of all others, the very contingency the anarchists sought to avoid. And since the aim of the anarchists was to eliminate exclusive ownership, they could not agree to the Marxist arguments respecting the usefulness of a government as the repository of all property.
We pass from Proudhon to another noteworthy anarchist, the Russian Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921). In his hands, the doctrine of anarchism took on an international aspect. In point of fact he added little to either Godwin or Proudhon, except the more grandiose concept of a world order. He suggested that ALL governments must be overthrown either peacefully or in any other manner after which “the present system of class privilege and unjust distribution of the wealth produced by labor that creates and fosters crime” would be abolished.