Proudhon - A Biography

A PERSONAL PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
write Proudhon I had been a confirmed anarchist of an already old-
fashioned kind, since for a while I believed, like Kropotkin and
other nineteenth-century pioneers in the movement, that the anarchist
society was an immediately proximate possibility. Even when the
hopes of achieving it in Spain dissolved with Franco’s victory in
1938 , I still, like many of my associates, believed that the outcome
of World War II might well be a wave of worldwide unrest and
rebellion out of which a new society would emerge in which people
would have the good sense to break the moulds of power rather
than merely transfer authority from one set of rulers to the other.
That, of course, did not happen, and at the same time I had
become disillusioned with the sectarian narrowness of so many old-
movement anarchists. I moved aside rather than away, without
abandoning my beliefs in the essential anarchist teachings of free
co-operation, mutual aid, decentralization, and federalism, though
I ceased to share my former comrades’ romantic belief that they
could be achieved by violent means, which I had come to recognize
as another kind of power. How more completely, after all, can one
exercise power over others than by killing them, even if the killing
is in the name of liberty?
For some years I did not even call myself an anarchist because
of the name’s association with attitudes which I felt to be at best
naive and at worst anti-libertarian. It was at this period that I was
drawn to Proudhon, in part as a reaction against the ‘true-believer’
phase on which I had embarked in my book on Kropotkin, The
Anarchist Prince. Orthodox anarchists in the 1940 s based their criticisms
of present society and their proposals for the future on Kropotkin’s
communist anarchism and Bakunin’s insurrectionism, with revo­
lutionary syndicalism thrown in for flavour, and they looked on
Proudhon, as they looked on Godwin, with a mixture of suspicion
and condescension. True, he was the first man openly and proudly
to call himself an anarchist. But his Bakuninist-Kropotkinist critics
saw in him a fatal tendency towards gradualism, a small craftsman
kind of individualism, and an obsession with credit schemes like
the People’s Bank which struck them as suspiciously bourgeois.
They had not read enough of his books— the best are not translated
into English— to realize that all the basic aspects of their own
teaching were there in Proudhon, together with a distrust of excessively
close association among producers which he shared with Godwin
though not with Kropotkin and the syndicalists. They also forgot
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