Gruen and Bakunin on Hegel. At the same time, he often dis
agreed with his informants on the meaning o f the facts they gave
him.
So far as general influences are concerned, he was a child of his
age to the extent of accepting the wider ideals o f the French
Revolution, but even here he reacted against the Jacobin tradi
tion, and rejected Robespierre as emphatically as he did Napoleon.
I have already shown how far Christian theology influenced him,
principally through Bergier, and his polemical style carries many
echoes of the minatory utterances of the prophets, but, while his
morality was often that of the Old Testament, he accepted and
used the Mosaic codes in a completely unorthodox manner.
The influence o f classical antiquity was less prominent. He
rejected the authoritarianism implicit in Plato, and the Greek
philosophers with whom he had most in common were Herac
litus and the Stoics, yet even here the link seems adventitious— a
parallelism of attitude rather than a direct filiation.
Apart from the Bible, the only influences which Proudhon
admitted, when he talked on the subject to his disciple Amadee
Langlois in 1848, were Hegel and Adam Smith. Kant, Fourier
and Saint-Simon, however, were certainly evident, though un
acknowledged, partners in his development. In later years he
grew steadily more independent of the theories of others;
Michelet and Herzen influenced him a little, but from the rest
o f the leading figures of his day, whether liberal intellectuals like
Renan or professional revolutionaries like Blanqui, he reacted
with more or less violence.
Even in the cases where influence is evident, Proudhon never
stood in the relation of a disciple to a master; his attitude was
usually that o f a critical and rather noisy student, and he ended
invariably by giving some individual twist to the doctrines of his
teachers. His dialectical method, for instance, seemed out
rageously heretical even to such unorthodox Hegelians as Marx
and Engels, while Kantians like Tissot were equally distressed by
his cavalier use of the antinomies. O f Fourier and Saint-Simon
his treatment was yet more ruthless; acknowledging that they had
perceived certain things with an unusual clarity, he did not
hesitate to denounce their general systems as misapplications of
these insights, though he took from them what he found accept
able. In other words, Proudhon demonstrated a healthy eclectic
THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY