Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
licans and radicals to the conservatives and Jesuits, including the
Jesuits of the University.’ Yet there was a perceptible change in
his attitude towards his critics. The tendency to conciliate had
gone; now he almost gloried in the feeling of being opposed, and
when the Comtesse d’Agoult deplored his talent for making
enemies, he answered: ‘The number o f adversaries frightens you;
I, on the other hand, am animated by it.’
But it was still with little equanimity that, nearly a year after­
wards, he read what was not only the most scathing criticism of
his book, but also the most ruthless attack he experienced during
the whole of his career. It will be remembered that Karl Marx
never replied directly to the letter in which Proudhon had so
clearly underlined their differences of outlook. In June, 1847, t^ie
reply was made indirectly, when Marx, in a volume of 220 pages,
applied his critical rod with stinging violence to his former friend’s
new book.
In parody of Proudon’s sub-title, Marx called his book The
Poverty of Philosophy, and the very name suggests its tone, the
carping, vicious superiority of a man who prides himself on his
academic learning, laying down the law with blistering sarcasm to
the self-taught writer who presumes to tread on the sacred ground,
not merely of philosophy, but of German philosophy. This can be
illustrated fairly by a brief passage from the preface: ‘M. Proudhon
has the misfortune to be singularly unrecognised in Europe. In
France he has the right to be a bad economist, because he passes
for a good German philosopher. In Germany he has the right to
be a bad philosopher, because he passes for one o f the strongest
French economists. We, in our quality of German and economist
at one and the same time, wish to make our protest against this
double error.’ Such heavy debating-society wit, interspersed with
occasional bursts o f personal vituperation, persists to the end of
the book.
Much o f Marx’s attack is based on what we have already shown
to be the irrelevant accusation that Proudhon had founded his
dialectic approach on a misunderstanding of the Hegelian theory.
But The Poverty of Philosophy broadens soon into a more general
attack on Proudhon’s real and apparent inconsistencies, and here it
must be admitted that any book by Proudhon contains enough
chaos in its argument, and enough overdone violence o f expres­
sion, to make it a prize for the stickler for systematic thinking and