Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
anyone who might previously have equated property and theft
did not know the real meaning of what he said; by showing the
true significance of the formula, he alone had discovered it, and
it was his ‘most precious possession.’ For a man who was later to
contest the conception of property in ideas as fervently as that of
property in goods, this was certainly an odd exhibition of
obstinacy.
Even when he was writing What is Property? Proudhon must
have realised the effect his bold opening statement would have on
many readers, for he hastened to reassure them by remarking, ‘I
am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition,’ and to argue
that in his work he was merely anticipating history and delineating
the course of progress. Fie stood as an investigator, a seeker after
truth, and denied any ambition to become a party leader, or the
founder o f a school. ‘I build no system. I ask an end to privilege,
the abolition o f slavery, equality o f rights, and the reign of law.
Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha and omega o f my argument:
to others I leave the business of governing the world.’
Throughout Proudhon’s career as a social thinker this concep­
tion o f justice remained the most important of the few general
principles between which, in his quasi-Heraclitian view, life
moved as a kind of fluid equilibrium. And in this early work he
described and praised it in words no less definite than he was to
use in later years. ‘Justice is the central star which governs society,
the pole around which the political world revolves, the principle
and regulator of all transactions. Nothing takes place between
men save in the name o f right, nothing without the invocation of
justice.’
Justice is the social motive which man ‘at war with himself’ has
perverted to his own detriment by making it subject to the fallible
sovereignty of the human will, expressed in the principles o f the
French Revolution. It is upon a return to the idea o f immanent
justice that Proudhon bases his attack on property.
He begins by disposing of the three most familiar justifications
for property. To the assertion that it is founded on occupation, he
replies that ‘the right to occupy is equal to all’; to the argument
that it is based on civil law, he replies that the law is merely a
convention which can be revised to suit social realities, and to the
argument that it springs from work, he makes the obvious retort
that all workers are not proprietors.