Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
hon wrote to Herzen that he had been weeping over Bakunin’s
‘slow assassination’ in the fortress of Schluesselberg; ‘Herzen,
Bakunin, Edmond, I love you!’ he cried, ‘you are there, enshrined
in a heart which for so many others seems to be o f marble!’
When Herzen arrived in Paris during 1847, some years after
Proudhon’s original meeting with Bakunin, the latter was living
with the musician Reihel in the Rue de Bourgogne. ‘Proudhon
often went there to listen to Reihel’s Beethoven and Bakunin’s
Hegel— the philosophical discussions lasted longer than the
symphonies... In 1847, Karl Vogt, who also lived in the Rue de
Bourgogne, and often visited Reihel and Bakunin, was bored one
evening with listening to the endless discussions on Phenomen­
ology, and went to bed. Next morning he went round for Reihel,
as they were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he was sur­
prised to hear conversation in Bakunin’s study at that early hour.
He opened the door— Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the
same places before the burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing
their brief summing-up o f the argument' started overnight.’
It seems evident, then, that at this time many people talked to
Proudhon about the Hegelian philosophy, and increased his
knowledge o f its implications, but none o f them, despite the
Marxist claims, introduced him to Hegel. As a final point in this
controversy, it should also be remembered that Proudhon never
admitted to being a Hegelian in the full sense. Some o f Hegel’s
forms o f argument appealed to him, but he adapted them de­
liberately to his own philosophical attitude rather than, as Marx
suggested, distorting them through ignorance. This is evident
from the following passage o f De la Justice-. ‘The Hegelian formula
is a triad only by the sweet will or an error o f the master, who
counts three terms where only two exist, and who had not seen
that an antinomy cannot be resolved, but that it indicates an
oscillation or an antagonism susceptible only of equilibrium.’
Thus the criticism o f Proudhon which Marx later made in The
Poverty of Philosophy, for not having ‘been able to rise higher
than the first two rungs o f the simple thesis and antithesis,’ and
for ‘being stricken with sterility when it is a question o f giving
birth to a new category through the labour of dialectical confine­
ment’ is devoid of point, since Proudhon never set out to become
a Hegelian acrobat; the fact that the perpetual antinomy can
always be detected in his thoughts is not a product o f mis-