Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
society which entitles him to be regarded as the first libertarian
theoretician. Some o f the more extreme revolutionaries o f 1793
were given the name of ‘anarchists’ by their enemies, but they
never took to the epithet, and, for the most part, their ideas were
far from anarchistic in the true sense, and much nearer to the
concept o f class dictatorship later put forward by Blanqui and the
Marxists. But Proudhon was the first man voluntarily to adopt
this name o f ‘anarchy’ for the form of society he envisaged, and
actually to mean by that word— philological stickler that he was—
a society without government.
So we come to the final conclusion that neither communism nor
property is suitable as a basis for a just society. Their aims are
good, but their results are bad, because communism rejects in­
dependence and property rejects equality. But the synthesis of
communism and property, which is ‘liberty,’ fulfils these defi­
ciencies, providing a society where equality, justice, independence
and the recognition of individual merits can all flourish in a world
of small producers bound together by a system o f free contracts.
In its rejection of government and o f accumulated property, in
its advocacy o f economic equality and free contractual relation­
ships between individual workers, What is Property? contains the
basic elements o f which all the later libertarian and decentralist
theories— including even those o f such maverick figures as Tol­
stoy and Wilde— have been built.
What, however, strikes one more immediately is the relatively
undeveloped form o f Proudhon’s solution. As Theodore Royssen
has remarked, there is a ‘static’ quality in the method of reasoning
by axioms and corollaries which Proudhon borrowed from the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers; ‘history in the
real sense of the word occupies hardly any place in it.’ 1 This fact
cannot be dissociated from the sharply limited nature of Proud­
hon’s approach to property. For it is clear that what he is discus­
sing is above all property in land, and that his solution is almost
wholly an agrarian one. It was perhaps an inevitable resuit o f his
background that he should look to a society in which every
Claude-Frangois would get his fair share of land and would never
have to fear the threatening hand of the mortgage-holder. And, if
almost no attention is given to industries which cannot be adminis­
tered by one small artisan ‘possessor,’ we should bear in mind
1 Introduction to the definitive edition of Philosophic du Progris, 1946.