Part Nine

EPILOGUE

M

A N Y writers have sought for the phrase that would arrest-
ingly define Proudhon and the philosophy that emerged
from his impact on the world of ideas and action. Marx dismissed
him as a ‘petty bourgeois/ and several French writers have classed
him as a representative of peasant radicalism. The latter definition
has the greater proportion of truth, for much that is puzzling in
Proudhon becomes clearer when one remembers that in character
he was nearer to the solid French countryman than any o f his
socialist contemporaries.
The combination o f stubbornness and impetuosity that marked
his actions, his suspicion of strangers and his abounding affection
for those who proved themselves friends, his often disastrous
attempts to combine craftiness in tactics with probity in princi­
ples, and his perpetual efforts to reconcile the individualism o f
the typical farmer with the tendency to mutual aid imposed by
their environment on agricultural populations— all these charac­
teristics have their evident roots in that peasant world where he
was born and reared. To the same source we may also trace the
regionalism that made him perpetually conscious of being a good
Franc-Comtois, and the distrust o f the engulfing State that in-