wrote the Communist Manifesto, as the protagonist o f an
economic interpretation of history. Political economy, he declares,
is ‘the key to history, the theory o f order, the Creator’s last
word,’ and it will provide the means to organise the whole of
society— government as well as work, family relationships as
well as education. In this attitude there is much that resembles
the Marxist doctrine o f ‘historical materialism,’ but Proudhon
was in no way a proto-Marxist, and both social determinism in
the mechanistic sense and the nineteenth-century myth of the
economic man were foreign to his viewpoint. In his opinion, the
individual will exercises reciprocal action and reaction on the
group’s development; he never subscribes to the positivist idea
of man as completely ruled by external social forces. It is the
organisation of society that he regards as economic in basis and
nature; the motives that move individuals, and the criteria of
justice to which social changes should be subordinated, are not
dominated by economics.
The key to the economic organisation of society lies in the
integration of work, and the key to the integration of work is the
principle of equality. To retain the advantages o f the division and
socialisation of labour while safeguarding the worker from their
evils, to make a balanced apprenticeship the basis of education, to
make woman not man’s equal (which Proudhon regards as
impossible because o f their radically different natures) but ‘the
living and sympathetic complement which completes his person
ality,’ to abolish the proletariat by ending inequality and industrial
servitude— these are some of the social changes which Proudhon
foresees from the application o f economic science to the organisa
tion of work.
How are such changes to be brought about? By the natural
development of a collective consciousness of their necessity,
through which society will move towards reform. But Proudhon
has no fatalistic hope of this taking place without conscious effort
on the part of individuals, for the collective will, if it is not the
sum o f individual wills, is an emergent from them. Revolution
may become a necessity, a right and a duty, but it will be fruitless
if it happens without the existence of the proper vision among the
people, nor will it be consummated without an extension o f these
faculties. ‘No revolution henceforward will be fruitful if a re
creation o f public education is not its crowning feature...
THE MAN OF AFFAIRS