on his printers and an Imperial reproof to radical thinkers follow
ing on Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III, Proudhon
was able at last to note in his diary: ‘Today, Thursday, my book,
De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans PEglise, was put on sale.’
Metternich once described Proudhon as an illegitimate child of
the Encyclopaedia. The oblique truth of this quip becomes evident
when one reads Justice in the Revolution and the Church, that quint
essential^ Proudhonian book, for in this attempt 10 give a secular
basis to the idea o f justice, the influence o f the French precursors
of the Revolution, Diderot, D ’Alembert and Voltaire, is con
stantly present. Indeed, the link with them is all the more direct
since, by rejecting the political elements introduced by the Jacob
ins, Proudhon returned to the philosophical premises on which
the foundations o f the revolutionary tradition had been laid. His
definition of the aims o f philosophy, and by implication of the
attitude from which he himself wrote his masterpiece, is one with
which none of the Encyclopaedists would have been likely to
disagree.
‘The object o f philosophy is to teach man to think for himself,
to reason with method, to create sound ideas o f things, to formu
late the truth exactly, all with the object o f ordering his life, o f
meriting his own respect and that of his fellows, and of ensuring
himself peace of mind, bodily well-being and intellectual con
fidence.’
In the serene humanity of such an attitude one can detect the
lin g erin g influence o f the age o f reason, o f that secure belief in
the adequacy of scientific method to solve the most abstruse of
personal problems which, stemming from the Encyclopaedists,
reached its harsh flowering in that mood of almost religious faith
in the powers o f science that flourished in the middle o f the nine
teenth century.
But Justice is much more than an expression of the cult of
science and reason. The very exuberance of its form, the vast
proliferation o f facts and ideas, the organic and almost irrational
way in which it sometimes burgeons into rhapsodies of enthu
siasm or Jeremiads o f anger, place it in a totally different category
from the grey scholasticism o f the scientific materialists. It is a
mine of curious erudition, but it is also a furnace o f passion, of
fantasy and of immense insight. More than any other o f Proud
hon’s works, it represents not only his political opinions and his
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE