Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
ciently interesting to keep his promise o f publication, and he
offered a thousand francs for the first edition. ‘A thousand francs 1 ’
Proudhon complained disgustedly in his diary. ‘N ow I understand
how the Government counts on the fatigue o f socialism, on the
exhaustion o f couragel’ He considered the offer for three weeks.
Then he gave in and remarked bitterly: ‘I accept. If a second
edition materialises, it cannot be worth anything more to me, after
which all will be said. Tw o thousand francs for ten years o f studyl’
During the remaining months while Proudhon finished his
book, his mood swung continually between confidence and pessi­
mism, and at times attained an unusually humorous detachment
in which he jested at his manifestations o f both the more extreme
moods, for in July he told Ackermann: ‘... a year from now I
shall either have fallen completely into absurdity and ridicuje
through my theories, or I shall have inaugurated the greatest, the
most radical, the most decisive revolutionary movement that has
been seen in the world. Perhaps, however, I am neither bordering
on a downfall nor near an apotheosis, and it may be with my plans
as with so many things that appeared mountains to their authors
when really they were only molehills.’
The System of Economic Contradictions, or, The Philosophy of
Poverty, appeared in October, 1846, and Proudhon, sending a copy
to Bergmann, announced it as marking a decisive moment in his
life; from its success or failure he would discover whether he
should continue as a business man or whether he would fulfil ‘a
nobler role.’
Within the two volumes of this ambitious work Proudhon
set out to investigate the whole economic basis o f contemporary
society. Into the social vision o f every philosopher, no matter how
much honest reasoning and painstaking observation may have
gone to make it, there enters always an important element derived
from the particular bent o f his personality. Authoritarians, like
Plato, direct their ideas towards a static social order. The doc­
trines o f Hegel, and their Marxian derivatives, are also o f this
nature, striving to arrest the movement they see in society into a
final synthesis where, since the contradictions are resolved, move­
ment will presumably end. Other philosophers, like Heraclitus,
see in struggle and movement basic elements in the natural order.
Proudhon was one of these, and, while in his Economic Contra­
dictions there indeed appears the hint of a synthesis, it is kept very