Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
Karl Gruen was the German who first sought out Proudhon,
and in Die Sopiate Bewegung in Frankreich he describes their earliest
meeting. Proudhon was living in ‘a student’s room,’ with a bed,
a few books standing on a cupboard, and a table spread with news­
papers and reviews o f economics. Gruen saw him as ‘a tall,
sturdy man... dressed in a knitted woollen jerkin, with clattering
sabots on his feet.’ He had ‘an open face with well-sculptured
brow and fine eyebrows,’ a domed cranium and a massive lower
face. But the feature that fascinated Gruen was the slight cast in
the ‘fine, clear eyes.’ Proudhon’s way o f speaking was energetic,
with a peasant vigour and clear pronunciation, and his language
was ‘crowded and concise, with an exquisitely appropriate choice
o f expression.’ He gave the impression of calm and self-assurance.
Proudhon showed a particular eagerness to discuss German
philosophy, and Gruen told him o f the ideas o f Feuerbach, de­
claring, ‘And thus anthropology is metaphysics in action,’ to
which Proudhon replied, ‘As for me, I am going to show that
political economy is metaphysics in action.’ The conversation
then turned to Hegel, whose ideas Proudhon had already en­
countered through Willm’s expositions. He was now anxious to
find out from his new German friend whatever he might have
missed in Hegel’s thought. ‘He was greatly relieved,’ says Gruen,
‘when I told him how criticism dissolved the Hegelian bombast.’
Proudhon, indeed, discussed questions o f this kind with all his
new friends, and the dialectic seems to have become the principal
subject o f the interminable conversations in their dingy little hotel
rooms o f the Left Bank. Marx and Bakunin, as well as Gruen,
took part in these discussions, and the former claimed, when he
delivered a final attack on Proudhon after the latter was safely
dead, that he personally ‘injected him with Hegelianism, to his
great prejudice, since not knowing German, he could not study
the question in the original.’ In disposing of this claim we may
note not merely Proudhon’s interest in Hegel as early as 1840 and
his conversations with Gruen before he actually met Marx, but
also the fact that the all-night conversations on Hegel also went
on with Bakunin.
According to Herzen, Proudhon was very intimate with Bakun­
in, and the references to the latter that appear in Proudhon’s
correspondence certainly lead one to believe that a great deal of
affection existed between the two great anarchists. In 1851 Proud-