A PERSONAL PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITIONa viable and less perilous alternative to the nation-state. De la capacite
politique arose out of the revival of the workers’ movement during
the early 1860 s, which led to the foundation of the International
Workingmen’s Association, largely through the activity of Proudhonian
Mutualists, just before Proudhon’s own death. Written at a time
when Louis Napoleon was trying to hang on to his empire by
resorting to the voting game that had put him into power in the
first place, it is a remarkable exposition of the way in which working
people can control their own economic and political destinies without
becoming involved in the power plays of either imperialists like
Napoleon III or authoritarian socialists like Karl Marx and his
followers, who had replaced the Jacobins as the left-wing advocates
of centralized authority.
■ Proudhon’s relevance to modern society is an example of the way
in which a writer’s significance can seem to change with changing
historical circumstances. He began, in Qu’est-ce que lapropriete? , as an
advocate of the peasant and the small handcraffsman, the workers
as he had known them in Besangon and in the workshop quarters
of Lyons and Paris. Later, as railways developed and the industrial
revolution spread in France, somewhat later than in Britain, he
adapted his ideas to allow for the association of workers on a larger
scale. But he did so with misgivings, since his heart was in a society
where work relationships were on a more intimate scale, and in
consequence he gained the reputation, among Marxists and even
among anarchist communists and revolutionary syndicalists, of being
a pre-industrialist thinker, speaking for a past age of small proprietors.
But history has turned on its axis, and now, in a post-industrial
age, we are beginning to look again at our economic and social
relationships, and to realize that the mass stmctures of the recent
past have themselves become obsolete. In such a situation Proudhon
seems to be transformed from a retrograde into a progressive thinker.
I am not admitting that he was ever out of place, for I think that
in their day both the Marxists and the revolutionary syndicalists
were wrong in accepting so uncritically the phenomenon of large-
scale and centralized industrial organization. But I think that today,
now that we know all the social, economic, and ecological evils of
industrial gigantism (and of political gigantism as well), Proudhon,
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