Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
understanding, as can be seen from another passage in De la
Justice, where he says: ‘The antinomy cannot be resolved. There lies
all the imperfection of the Hegelian Philosophy.’ Thus the debate
on who taught Proudhon Hegelianism dwindles into pointless­
ness.
In general, Proudhon seems to have found his philosophical
discussions with the German expatriates more stimulating than
convincing. ‘You can say almost the same about their philosophy
o f history as you can about their dialectic,’ he remarked. ‘It
makes one think; it brings out the truth; it has nothing absolute
about it, and, too frequently, nothing certain either.’ Yet these
encounters broadened his philosophic viewpoint and helped to
systematise his thought, so that he never again produced a book
as chaotic as The Creation of Order.
A lesser, but perhaps more gratifying, result o f Proudhon’s
meeting with the Left-Hegelians was the realisation that he had
already a considerable reputation in Germany, where he was
regarded by many younger thinkers as the best o f the French
socialists. This interest merits some explanation. The whole of
the German Left-Hegelian school— Ruge and Gruen as well as
Marx and Engels— was dominated by the idea of building a
world brotherhood of socialists. With this aim in view, they
founded the Annales Franco-Allemandes as an organ of inter­
national co-operation. Their initial effort was disappointingly
unsuccessful. They secured the collaboration of only one impor­
tant non-German, Michael Bakunin, who delivered in the pages
o f their review his famous dictum, ‘The urge to destroy is also
a creative urge,’ and the Annales Franco-Allemandes appeared,
ironically, without a single French contributor. Even settlement in
Paris did not bring the German socialists into much closer con­
tact with their French counterparts, with the sole exception of
Proudhon, and the reasons for this failure are fairly clear.
First, as Pierre Haubtmann has pointed out, while the Germans
regarded anti-religious propaganda as a necessary part of their
revolutionary programme, almost all the leading French socialists
claimed at least a quasi-religious inspiration. The disapproval felt
by the Germans for this flirting with religion was shown in a
letter written By Engels in 1843: ‘It is... entirely remarkable
that... the French Communists, who belong to a nation
famous for its unbelief, are themselves Christians.’ Only Proud-