Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
suggested that here we may detect the influence o f Marx, whom
Proudhon met during the winter o f 1844. However, I think that
in this, as in other points, Proudhon’s debt to Marx is slight, if it
exists at all, and that his concern with association grew mostly
from his connections in Lyons.
There, an all-embracing association o f working men was very
widely discussed from 1843 onwards, before Marx and Proudhon
first met, and Flora Tristan, during her association with the
Lyons groups, actually wrote a book embodying the idea.
Proudhon may have been influenced by her, though there is no
proof of this, or they may both have developed an idea whose
germ they found existing among the workers o f the Midi.
A second reason for doubting Marx’s influence lies in the
marked difference between the methods advocated by the two
men in connection with the idea o f association. Proudhon was
opposed to political action, and he hoped, unlike Marx, that the
desirable changes in society could be brought about without
violence. On the first point he remarks categorically in his diary
for the spring of 1845: ‘The social revolution is seriously com­
promised if it comes through a political revolution.’ On the second
point he notes: ‘The workers, once they are organised and
marching through work to the conquest o f the world, should in
no event make an uprising, but become all by invading all through
the force of principle.’ Again, he remarks: ‘No hatred, no hatred.
Eliminate by principle.’ And he adds a hope of being able ‘to
dispossess the proprietors, at their solicitation and without
indemnity.’ The latter end he expects to achieve by the creation
of economic associations for the exchange o f products and for
co-operative work, and the scene of the struggle he locates, not
in the streets or the parliament house, but in the workshop. ‘The
new socialist movement will begin by... the war o f the work­
shop.’
The associations, which he also calls ‘progressive societies,’
will resolve that antinomy of liberty and regulation which is one
o f the fundamental social contradictions, for their very nature
makes them ‘the true synthesis of freedom and order.’ They will
be formed on a ‘collective and limited liability’ basis, and Proud­
hon sees them organised as a network embracing all the industrial
centres. Finally, he imagines their immediate and cumulative
success. ‘Appeal to the Phalansterians,’ he notes, ‘who will all