Poverty of Philosophy is a question we may validly ask. Benoit Malon
has suggested that, since Marx was an unknown in France and
Proudhon a celebrity, the latter calculated that it was better to
leave his ‘terrible contradictor’s’ book in obscurity rather than
draw attention to it. In fact, however, Proudhon never flinched
from replying to his critics, no matter how formidable or how
obscure, while a glance at his annotations of Marx’s text shows
that, unlike Malon, he does not appear to have regarded Marx’s
work as a ‘terrible contradiction,’ but rather as a tissue of irrele-
vancies, calumnies and insults.
The lack of a published answer seems, indeed, more explicable
by reference to external events. Proudhon, if we can judge from
his letter to Guillaumin, does not appear to have studied The
Poverty of Philosophy until September, 1847. Within the next two
months he experienced an acute family crisis, which I shall
describe shortly, and no sooner had he passed through this than
the February revolution swept him into a period o f intense activity
that lasted several years, until the memory of Marx’s attack had
ceased to trouble him. We can legitimately regret that Proudhon
did not undertake an answer, for it might have provided a valuable
critique of the Marxist position at an early stage of the conflict
between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. But we must also
grant that circumstances in all probability rendered it difficult or
impossible for him to make such a reply at a time when it would
have seemed relevant.
8
For more than a year after the publication of Economic Contra
dictions Proudhon was so occupied with the extra-literary side of
his life that he was unable to pay any close attention to the plans
he had already made for a book that would serve as a constructive
supplement to his destructive criticisms of society. The last six
months o f 1846 were spent almost wholly in the Midi, where the
court cases of the Gauthiers required his continual presence, and
he began to grow impatient even o f the relaxed tyranny which
his part-time transport work imposed upon him. ‘I can no longer
endure Lyons,’ he complained to his mother in the autumn. ‘I
would much rather be a country policeman at Cordiron than live
as I do. I am submerged in commerce and all its villainies, and I
breathe only for the day when I shall say goodbye to the office.’
THE MAN OF AFFAIRS