THE MAN OF AFFAIRShairsplitting arguments. In criticising these inconsistencies, Marx
scores a number o f minor points against Proudhon, but all the
time, eluding such a mind as his, there is the fact that the very
disorderliness o f Proudhon’s thinking is a necessary accompani
ment of its remarkable fertility, originality and plasticity— quali
ties in which Marx’s own thought was markedly lacking.
Marx also objected to the fact that Proudhon was not only
unable but also unwilling to abandon his essential moralism, and
he was clearly exasperated by what he called the ‘economico-
metaphysical’ methods used in Economic Contradictions. Indeed, as
Pierre Haubtmann has indicated, the core of Marx’s attack is
really to be found in his detection o f an idealist under-current in
Proudhon’s thought, verging at times on the mystical and ex
pressed in a language that betrays the Bible student of long stand
ing for whom religion was an inescapable and perpetually impor
tant factor in human life. Marx’s objections on these grounds are,
of course, not without their ironical elements, when one considers
the strong ‘economico-metaphysical’ element that eventually
emerged in his own theory of historical materialism.
The Poverty of Philosophy aroused little interest when it appeared
and subsequently can have done little harm to Proudhon’s cause,
since the only people who read it with enthusiasm were already
fanatical Marxists. However, there is no doubt that Proudhon
was intensely vexed by the character o f Marx’s attack. ‘I have
received a libel by a Doctor Marx,’ he told Guillaumin in Sep
tember, 1847. ‘It is a tissue of abuse, calumny, falsification and
plagiarism.’
He read carefully and annotated profusely his own copy o f The
Poverty of Philosophy, which has been preserved by his descendants,
and this fact leads one to suppose that he intended, at least at the
time of reading, to make some reply, while his diary yields enough
references to Marx to make it seem certain that he was by no
means so untouched by the attack as his absolute silence in print
and relative silence in letters might suggest. On the 20th Sep
tember, for instance, he remarks: ‘All those who have spoken of
it (Economic Contradictions') up to now have done so with extreme
bad faith, envy or stupidity’; Marx’s name stands at the head of
the list of critics which follows this remark. Three days later ap
pears a hastily pencilled note: ‘Marx is the tapeworm of socialism!’
Why Proudhon did not make a more public refutation o f The