THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
outline o f Proudhonian thought, his egalitarianism, his theory of
property, his ideas of a natural, immanent justice. A t the very
beginning of his career, with only a comparatively slight prepara
tion of experience and study, he had evolved the social attitude
which he would maintain throughout his life; what he did in later
years was to expand and illuminate it by insight, observation and
study, and to extend it into new fields of thought.
Indeed, it is interesting to encounter here hints o f even the
minor arguments which Proudhon developed subsequently. For
instance, his later condemnation of Rousseau’s idea o f the Social
Contract is anticipated by a very perceptive passage on the faults
of the eighteenth-century thinker: ‘In founding right on human
conventions, in making law the expression of wills, in other
words, in submitting justice, and morality, to the decision of the
greater number and the rule of the majority, he plunged deeper
and deeper into the abyss from which he believed he was emerg
ing, and absolved the society he accused.’
There is a provocative similarity between this criticism of
Rousseau and that which William Godwin had made nearly
fifty years before, and further parallels between the two writers
appear in their ideas on equality and on the injustice o f what
Godwin called ‘accumulated property.’ Yet there is no evidence
that Proudhon had read Godwin1 and it seems likely that
these closely similar thinkers reached their conclusions by
mutually independent reasoning on the principles and events of
the French Revolution.
Indeed, the search for shaping influences in connection with
Proudhon’s ideas is an involved and often thankless task. His
thought seems to contain an unusually high proportion of gen
uine originality, and when he borrowed an idea he would work
it over in his own mind to such an extent that it emerged in a state
o f renewal, adapted to suit that fluid dialectical battleground
which represented the nearest approach to a Proudhonian system.
5 He was, indeed, a voracious collector of ideas and information;
his reading was vast, while he readily made use o f his friends to
inform him on questions where they had expert knowledge;
Pauthier instructed him on Chinese philosophy, Tissot on Kant,1 In 1846 , in Les Contradictions Economiques, he mentions Godwin while dis
cussing Malthus, but since he classes him with Owen as a ‘communist,’ it
seems probable that he had not read Political Justice.