Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
scientific progress, which revolutionises political economy and
for the first time permits one to make a true science out o f it.’
I What is Property? opens with one of those bold passages which
tended to become Proudhon’s speciality in political writing. ‘If I
were asked to answer the following question: “ What is slavery ?”
and I should answer in one word, “ Murder!” , my meaning
would be understood at once. N o further argument would be
required to show that the power to take from a man his thought,
his will, his personality, is a power of fife and death, and that to
enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question:
“What is property?” may I not likewise answer, “ Theft” ?’
Hardly noticed at first, ‘Property is Theft’ was to become one
of the great phrases of the nineteenth century, bandied about
between anarchists and conservatives, borrowed by socialists
and communists, and suspended like a sensational placard above
the popular image of its author. Ironically enough, Proudhon
did not even mean literally what he said. His boldness o f expres­
sion was intended for emphasis, and what he wished to be
understood by property was what he later called ‘the sum o f its
abuses.’ He was denouncing the property o f the man who uses
it to exploit the labour o f others without any effort on his own
part, the property that is distinguished by interest, usury and rent,
by the impositions o f the non-producer upon the producer.
Towards property regarded as ‘possession,’ the right o f a man to
control his dwelling and the land and tools he needed to work
and five, Proudhon had no hostility; he regarded it as a necessary
keystone o f liberty, and his main criticism of the Communists
was that they wished to destroy it.
However, this was by no means clear to those whose know­
ledge of his work was limited to a single phrase, and often, in his
intense annoyance, he found himself classified with the Utopians
he detested as an enemy o f property in every form. Yet the more
his celebrated maxim was misunderstood, the more closely he
clung to it. One of his most bitter reasons for anger against the
state socialist Louis Blanc was that the latter accused him of
stealing the phrase from the Girondin Brissot, who had said, in
his Recherches pbilosophiques sur le Droit de Propriete et sur le Vol\
‘The measure o f our needs should be that o f our fortune...
Exclusive property is a theft in nature.’ Proudhon eventually
solved this question to his own satisfaction by declaring that