Proudhon - A Biography

A PERSONAL PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
there; it was only in matters of tactics that his successors have ever
really differed from him.
If I were asked now for my view of these books and their relative
importance, I would admit that, like all of us, Proudhon produced
his share of trivial and transitory works. But there are at least six
books that retain their importance as seminal works in the anarchist
'canon. Qu’est-ce que la propriek? (translated by Benjamin Tucker as
What is Property?) made the crucial distinction between absolute
property, with its power to exploit others, and the basic right to
possess a dwelling, a workplace, tools, or land one can work, and
the product of that toil, that one must have in order to be tmly
free. Whether one sees this right applied individually, or collectively
by groups of neighbours or co-workers, it remains essential to anarchist
economics. Confessions d'un revolutionnaire combines a great deal of
interesting autobiographical writing with one of the best analyses
of the events of 1848 and of why that revolution, ‘made without
ideas,’ as Proudhon put it, led inevitably to the adventurism of
Napoleon le Petit; here, Proudhon brilliantly demonstrates the fallacy
of trusting to universal suffrage, or any other kind of suffrage, as a
protection for democracy. The immense, four-volume De la justice
is undoubtedly Proudhon’s philosophical masterpiece, both a splendid
exposition of the fact that true justice lies outside institutions created
by authority and a remarkable piece of polemical prose which dem­
onstrates why Proudhon won the admiration of critics like Sainte-
Beuve and Baudelaire and even of the grand proseteur, Gustave
Flaubert. Neither of these fine books has yet been translated.
But the books that for me seem to contain the real essence of
Proudhon insofar as he has relevance in the late-twentieth-century
world are Idee generate de la rh>olution... (translated as General Idea of
the Revolution by John Beverley Robinson), Du Principe federatif, and
De la capaate politique des classes ouvrieres, whose final pages Proudhon
dictated to Gustave Chaudey from his deathbed. Idee generate, more
than any other of his books, lays out the ramifications of anarchist
thought as they affect society at all levels, from the workshop and
the commune through the region and the nation, to the whole
world. It is a classic of free organization, rivalled only by Kropotkin’s
two great works, Mutual A id and The Conquest of Bread. Du Principe
federatif gives the political aspect of the socio-economic expositions
of General Idea, showing how the application of the federal principle
on the level of the country, the continent, and the world can provide
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