Proudhon - A Biography

A PERSONAL PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
the United States, the only country in the world I have been unable
to enter, and I settled down with great satisfaction to be a writer
in my own country, which I have in no way regretted. I had found
that, despite the anarchists, I still believed in anarchism, not as a
formula for the immediate changing of society, but as a criterion,
as a standpoint from which to judge and criticize existing society,
and by which to shape one’s actions so that the libertarian and
mutualist elements that exist in every society might be constantly
activated and the authoritarian elements diminished.
Towards the end of his life, in that seminal work Du Principe
fakratif, Proudhon summarized the whole development of his thought
in a brief paragraph:
If in 1840 I began with anarchy, the conclusion of my critique of the
governmental idea, I had to finish with federation, the necessary basis of
the rights of European peoples and, later, of the organization of all states...
Public order resting directly on the liberty and conscience of the citizen,
anarchy, the absence of all constraint, police, authority, magistrature,
regimentation, etc., will be the correlative of the highest social virtue—
and, beyond that, the ideal of human government. O f course, we are not
there, and centuries will pass before that ideal may be attained, but our
law is to go in that direction, to grow unceasingly nearer to that end,
and it is thus that I uphold the principle of federation.
In that conclusion, of holding to the ‘law’ even if the ideal could
not be immediately attained, Proudhon was recognizing what all
ageing anarchists must do if they are not to lose heart: that there
is still work to be done and victories to be won in the most imperfect
society, and that the important immediate task for the anarchist is
to prevent society from congealing into a static form, whether
hieratic or Utopian; to sustain the everlasting possibility of change,
and actively promote it. As I say in the book: ‘The dynamic society
was always his ideal, the society kept alive and in movement by
perpetual criticism, and such a society can never be built on a fore­
ordained plan.’
It has often been said of George Orwell that the man, as an
exemplary figure, was more important than his works. One is often
tempted to say the same of Proudhon, when one regards the single­
mindedness of his life, the dogged insistence on speaking with his
own voice, not seeking to attract followers by anything but the
good sense of his words and strenuously avoiding forming those
who were attracted into anything resembling a sect or a party. He
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