THE PRISONERbarriers and commercial privileges, colonies, strategic frontiers
and fortresses will all have become redundant. In this way a
social unity will be attained in comparison with which the so-
called order o f governmental societies will appear for what it is—
‘nothing but chaos, serving as a basis for endless tyranny.’
This is the rough plan o f the Proudhonian society, deliberately
broad in its outlines because the very nature o f a free, organic
and perpetually growing society is opposed to any elaborate
schemes o f social organisation; its detailed pattern can only be
expected to arise out o f the day-to-day experiences o f the freely
constituted units within the larger mutualist structure.
The General Idea of the Revolution is a book o f inextricably mingled
faults and virtues. Like everything that Proudhon wrote, it remains
strongest on the attack, when it criticises governments and govern
mental theories, Rousseau and Robespierre, the Utopian socialists
and the Jacobins. When Proudhon has finished with them, the
rational justifications o f authoritarian institutions are torn to
shreds. But the positive aspects o f his work are less impressive,
and this is not wholly due to that vagueness which is inevitable
and even desirable in a libertarian social vision. Beyond that, there
is a certain naive optimism, a tendency to see reason as over
powerful, and a faith in man’s propensity to detect and choose
his own good which is not entirely borne out by experience. The
solution o f social evils does, indeed, by definition rest on a social
level, and will only be reached when political centralisation has
been replaced by a much more basic administration o f economic
affairs than existed in Proudhon’s time or exists today. So much
has been made increasingly evident by the rake’s progress of
politically dominated societies— democracies and dictatorships
alike— during the century since 1851. But that the solution will
be quite as simple a matter o f contractual adjustment as Proudhon
suggested in his more optimistic flights is something which few
would be hardy enough to claim today.
For Proudhon, the period immediately following the publica
tion o f The General Idea of the Revolution was an interval o f tran
quillity, threatened by an oncoming storm in French political life
o f whose approach he himself was uneasily aware. In September
he returned to the more congenial confinement of Sainte-Pelagie,
where he was given his old room and the family was virtually
rednited, dining together every day, either in prison or in the