guarantees, of mutual services, which is the inverse o f the system
o f authority.’
It is towards a realisation o f this conception that we should
always tend. It is true that we cannot attain it completely; a wholly
just society would be perfect, and Proudhon recoils with near
horror from the thought. ‘Obeying only a constant and depending
no longer on variables, its movement would be uniform and recti
linear; history would be reduced to that o f work and studies, or
rather there would be no more history.’ But such conditions exist
— and we would agree with Proudhon that this is fortunate— only
in the minds o f chiliasts and Utopians. ‘The progress o f Justice,
both theoretical and practical, is a state from which it is not given
us to emerge and see the end. We know how to discern gqod from
evil; we shall never know the destination o f Right, because we
shall never cease to create new relationships between ourselves.
We are born perfectible; we shall never be perfect. Perfection,
immobility, would be death.’
Having established the immanence o f Jtistice, Proudhon pro
ceeds, in the remaining eleven sections o f his book, to examine
the aspects it assumes in our fortunately mobile and imperfect
world. It would be impossible to give even a slight idea of the
wealth o f reference and illustration with which he pursues his
investigations and illuminates his discussions; I can only indicate
this fact as one o f the reasons why the reader should himself study
this book, which combines with the merit o f being one o f the
important nineteenth-century works o f social theory the more
wayward virtue of gathering within its three volumes more odd,
abstruse and absorbing scholarship than one is likely to find in
any other book of a similar character. Having said as much, I can
merely give the bare outline o f the arguments embodied in these
crammed pages, conscious that my task is as inadequate as that of
a man who might attempt to reduce one o f the exuberant master
pieces o f Bosch or Breughel to the dimensions o f a thumbnail
sketch.
Proudhon begins by considering the application of Justice to
man’s personal relations. Here it proceeds from ‘the principle of
personal dignity,’ whose law, ‘Respect yourself,’ is the foundation
of the science of morals. Once this principle is established, its
reasonable corollary is that we should respect the dignity of
others as much as our own, and this is the essence o f Justice,
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE