THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
‘I speak to you with my accustomed frankness; you know that I
do not love false modesty; with you, who are my friend, any other
language would seem to me hypocrisy and lies.’
His object, he told Bergmann, was ‘ to determine the idea of
justice, its principle, its character and its formula,’ particularly as
exemplified in the institution of property. The style would be
1 "rough and sour,’ and irony and anger might even be too evident,
for ‘when the lion is hungry, he roars.’ Finally, Proudhon had no
doubt at all of the originality and timeliness of his book. ‘In the
philosophic sphere,’ he told Ackermann, ‘ there exists nothing
like it.’ He worked quickly at his task; the book was finished by
the end o f April and, a publisher having been found more quickly
than Proudhon feared, it appeared at the end of June.
3
As the first book o f a man, little more than thirty years old,
who had educated himself under exceptionally difficult circum
stances, Qu'est-ce-que la Propri e (What is Property?) was in every
respect a remarkable work. The Proudhonian fire, the zestful writing,
the love o f paradox, the flair for the shattering phrase, the personal
bitterness and the eloquent invective, all the qualities that inspired
his best work were already there in full measure. For the quality
of its prose alone, it could bear comparison with the work of
many of Proudhon’s better-known literary contemporaries; it had
all the vigour of conception, the sense of structure, the verbal
proportion, which made his most ruthless critic, Arthur
Desjardins, admit in the end: ‘This plebeian sculpts his phrases
with a profound art, the art of the great classicists. He, no less
than Molifere, should have belonged to the Academie Francaise.’
As for the quality of the contents, and what perhaps concerned
their author just as much, their originality, another enemy can
testify— Proudhon’s most bitter ideological rival, Karl Marx.
Writing in the Neue Rbeinische Zeitung in October, 1842, Marx
was one o f the first people outside France to recognise What is
Property? He called it a ‘penetrating work.’ Three years later, in
The Holy Family, he expanded this first comment by saying:
‘Proudhon submits the basis of political economy, property, to a
critical examination, and it is truly the first decisive, vigorous and
scientific examination that has been made of it. Here is a great