The Anarchē of Spirit^273see further Simon D. Podmore, ‘Struggling With God: Kierkegaard/
Proudhon’, Acta Kierkegaardiana Vol II: Kierkegaard and Great
Philosophers, ed. by C. Diatka and R. Králik (Mexico City/Barcelona/
Sala: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos,
University of Barcelona, Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia, 2007),
pp. 90–103. See also Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self
Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2011), pp. 97–101. See also Jean Blum, ‘Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon et Søren Kierkegaard’, La Revue Scandinave, no.4 (1911),
April, pp. 276–87. On the reception of Kierkegaard in France see
Jon Stewart, ‘France: Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Existentialism
and Poststructuralism’, in Kierkegaard’s International Reception
Tome I: Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009) pp. 421–476. There are passing comparisons be-
tween Kierkegaard’s and Proudhon’s treatments of irony in Winfield
E. Nagley, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 29: 3 (1968), p. 464 (pp. 458–464) and Pierre
Schoentjes, ‘Ironie et anarchie : De l’éthique à l’esthétique’, Revue
d’histoire littéraire de la France, 99: 3 (1999), p. 493 (pp. 485–497),
along with a mention of both figures in Joseph A. Dane’s The Critical
Mythology of Irony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), p. 9.
There is a brief reference to Proudhon in relation to Kierkegaard’s at-
titude towards mysticism and atheism in Régis Jolivet, ‘Le problème
de la religion de Kierkegaard’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain,
Troisième série, Tome 47, N°13 (1949), p. 138 (pp. 137–142).
- As Gregor Malantschuk observes, Kierkegaard most likely
gleaned some acquaintance of French socialism, including Proudhon,
from discussions in the Danish newspapers. Gregor Malantschuk,
The Controversial Kierkegaard, trans. Howard and Edna Hong
(Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980) p. 11 n.36. - “If a man continues with this purely human outlook, then the
unconditioned is the devil, or God is the evil, as modern French phi-
losophy [Proudhon?] maintains, God is the evil in the sense that he
is guilty of all man’s unhappiness; if we could only eliminate the un-
conditioned, knock all ideals out of our heads, everything would go
well – but God makes us unhappy, he is the evil” (JP 4:4911). “But
as a matter of fact it is the eternal that is needed. Some stronger evi-
dence is needed than socialism’s belief that God is the evil, and so it