for the academicians, and had written his new essay frankly in
the hope of enlisting the public in a militant crusade for changing
the social order. Later he said o f it: ‘The dialectic intoxicated me:
a certain fanaticism, peculiar to logicians, went to my brain.’
The actual points discussed in the Warning to Proprietors add
nothing fundamental to the theory of property Proudhon had
already outlined. The book begins with a short exposition of the
evils of property and once again it is made clear that, despite the
startling sallies to which he gives utterance, his battle is only
against proprietors in the sense of non-workers. Possession
cannot be divorced from work, for that would mean the return
of usury and exploitation.
The latter part o f the Warning to Proprietors consists mostly of
a counter-attack on the Phalansterians and especially on their
ideas of free love. ‘Rather prisoner than courtesan!’ Proudhon
cries. ‘Such is my opinion on all the theories of free love.’ It was
the first o f a series of public skirmishes on this issue that was to
continue throughout his life; all his peasant puritanism, all his
sexual fears, drove him perpetually to war against this one
liberty which to him was libertinage and nothing more.
' But the most significant aspect of the Warning to Proprietors is
that Proudhon no longer addresses the ‘men o f power,’ no
longer summons Louis-Philippe to lead the reform of French
society. It is the populace to whom he now speaks. ‘Rouse
yourself, Briareus!’ he calls, and ends with a passage of deter
mined invocation in which he not only shows himself as the man
o f the people he always remained, but also gives the warning to
the propertied classes that justifies his title and anticipates his
more direct challenges to the bourgeois in the revolutionary days
of 1848.
I ‘Workers, labourers, men o f the people, whoever you may be,
the initiative o f reform is yours. It is you who will accomplish that
synthesis o f social composition which will be the masterpiece of
creation, and you alone can accomplish i t... And you, men of
power, angry magistrates, cowardly proprietors, have you at
last understood me?... Do not expect either by concessions or
by reasoning to make us turn back on what you call fanaticism
and dreams, which are only the feeling of our just rights; the
enthusiasm that possesses us, the enthusiasm of equality, is
unknown to you... Above all, do not provoke the outbreak of
THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY