Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
realities, which have no fulness of existence.’ (2) ‘God is necessary
to reason but rejected by reason.’
As the positive element in his world view Proudhon sets up
man. But, since man’s actions are thwarted and turned to evil,
the other side o f the contradiction, responsible for these miscar­
riages, must itself be evil. And since God, the complement to man,
is the other side, God must therefore be evil. In Proudhonian
logic the conclusion is inescapable, and, if it needed any reinforce­
ment, the idea had that element of high paradox which Proudhon
could never resist. Like Property is Theft, God is E vil was a phrase
to startle and provoke the world.
The title page o f Economic Contradictions bore the motto Des-
truam et Aedificabo. Proudhon destroyed to great effect, but the
building is less evident, and it is not easy to decide in concrete
terms what Proudhon had in mind for the solution of social prob­
lems. Such familiar Proudhoniana as the equalisation o f property,
the dissolution of government, and free credit, push their way
rather feebly through the rank tangle o f false theories which
Proudhon fells with such prodigal zeal. An even more significant
idea is little more than sketched in when he talks o f the organisa­
tion of work, and declares that here is no place for capital or
government to interfere; the organisation o f work is the business
of the workers themselves.
In general, his conclusion is variously expressed in the terms
‘synthesis’ and ‘equation.’ For instance, he declares: ‘It is not
towards destroying monopoly, any more than work, that we
should tend; it is, by a synthesis which the contradictions o f mono­
poly renders inevitable, towards making it produce in the interest
o f all the riches which it now produces for a few.’ But, as we have
seen, the synthesis, at least in the Hegelian sense, is not a concept
which Proudhon adopts in any full sense. The idea of balance is
much more to his taste, and rather than imagining a reconciliation
o f opposites, I think we can reach a much better idea o f what he
had in mind if we conceive the contradictions brought into a
dynamic equation which has the effect of raising their struggle to
a higher plane where it will become a regenerative and construc­
tive rather than a stultifying and destructive force.
Proudhon reverts to his days among the Lyons workers when
he gives us the hint that this dynamic equation will be found in
‘a theory of M U TU A L ITY.’ This Mutuality he defines as ‘a