Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
far in the background. It is the actual play o f Contradictions in
which Proudhon is really interested; the thread o f Hegelianism
that runs through his book is both tenuous and alien. Indeed, he
draws more from Kant than from Hegel, and one can foresee the
later stage of his development in which he would abandon the idea
o f synthesis for that o f a dynamic equilibrium between eternally
opposing forces.
Proudhon’s world view was in fact essentially Zoroasterian,
dominated by the vision o f a new struggle between Ormuzd and
Ahriham in the guise o f clashing economic and moral trends.
Though suggestions o f reconciliation appear in his book, its main
purpose was to show the great panorama of the world of contra­
dictions, and he had too much love for the vision he created to
mitigate its portentous quality. Just as Milton and Dante allowed
no heavenly beatitude to break the impressive horror of their hells,
so Proudhon did not spoil his spectacle of the earthly inferno of
economic chaos by the celestial light of a Utopian solution. He
promised to resolve the contradictions at a later date.
It would be hard to compress into a few pages an adequate
summary of this sprawling, vigorous and combative work. But in
his final chapter, Proudhon fortunately provided a brief recapitula­
tion of his theme, and I begin by quoting from this.
‘The essential contradiction o f our ideas, being realised by work
and expressed in society with a gigantic power, makes all things
happen in the reverse way to that in which they should, and gives
society the aspect of a tapestry seen the wrong way round or a
hide turned inside out... The non-producer should obey, and
by a bitter irony it is the non-producer who commands. Credit,
according to the etymology of its name and its theoretical defini­
tion, should be the provider of work; in practice it oppresses and
kills it. Property, in the spirit of its finest prerogatives, is the
making available of the earth, and in the exercise of the same pre­
rogative it becomes the denial o f the earth.’
Economic Contradictions discusses all these phenomena, both as
regards their potential value to humanity and their actual malig­
nancy, and, in the process, shows the fundamental division within
the communist solution which, taking fraternity for its principle,
destroys it and leads to monopoly. But the section written with
the greatest vigour, destined (and doubtless intended) to shock
readers more than any other part of the book, is that ‘On Provi­