Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
The organisation of education is at once the condition o f equality
and the sanction o f progress.’
The Creation of Order was received in France with silence or
disapproval. Even Proudhon’s friends were unenthusiastic.
Tissot, from the Kantian standpoint, criticised it roundly;
Ackermann declared that the execution was inferior to that o f the
essays on property; Leroux impugned its originality; Bergmann
and Pauthier praised it with reservations.
Proudhon himself, as we have seen, soon became dissatisfied
with it and admitted— even at times exaggerated— its faults.
‘Y ou are right when you say that my last work is less well
written than the preceding ones,’ he told Ackermann, in a fit of
most uncharacteristic humility. Four years later, in the secrecy
of his diary, he was even more severe. ‘A recapitulation of the
studies of a schoolboy, an ignoramus,’ he remarked impatiently.
‘The author thought he was inventing what was known before
him.’ Yet, for all his discontent with the form of The Creation of
Order, he never abandoned its general arguments. The Serial Law,
expressed henceforward with more reserve, remained prominent
among the group o f ideas which represents the nearest thing to a
Proudhonian system, and The Creation of Order, far from making
any break in the continuity of his development, in fact represents
an important transition between the early works of destructive
criticism and the ‘constructive’ books o f his later decades.
Before leaving The Creation of Order, it should be noted that,
though it aroused little attention in Paris, it made a considerable
impression on writers in Russia and Germany; one of them,
Alexander Herzen, wrote in his diary on the 8th February, 1845:
‘This book is an extraordinarily remarkable phenomenon...
Proudhon rises resolutely to the heights o f speculative thought.
He rids himself in a bold and cutting manner of the categories of
the understanding. He shows admirably the weakness of casuality
and substantiality... There is a prodigious quantity of lumin­
ous ideas in this book... His deduction is strong, energetic
and audacious.’
Thus, several years before they actually met, The Creation of
Order wove the first strands of an intellectual bond between these
two important nineteenth-century social thinkers who were later
to have a great influence upon each other’s lives and ideas.