Proudhon - A Biography

EPILOGUE
dilation with the grande bourgeoisie, he did not abandon hope of
gaining the allegiance o f that larger section o f the middle class
whose independence was threatened by the spread of industrial
feudalism. He realised that nothing would be gained by dragging
the middle class down to the level o f the poorest wage-earners;
the progression o f society should be upwards rather than down­
wards, and the revolutionary’s aim should be, not to enslave all
men by pauperism, but to make all men free by guaranteeing
their economic independence. Thus, while the workers alone,
by their recognition o f the mutualist idea, could initiate that
fundamental social change which Proudhon described by the am­
biguous title o f ‘social liquidation,’ they should seek the alliance
o f the harassed middle class, so that the whole community might
move towards liberation without that violence of civil war which
Proudhon always regarded as inimical to the healthy growth of
freedom. Indeed, while recognising the divided structure of
society in his day, and realising that a real class struggle existed,
he also believed that out o f the fluidity of this struggle might
emerge the equihbrium o f mutualism, and for this reason he
sought to avoid any measures that, by institutionalising the class
struggle, might tend to make the division permanent.
A t the same time, he believed that the workers must be clear
in their rejection o f bourgeois ideas o f government, which per­
petuated a system in which the people had no direct voice, in
which freedom o f the Press and sound education were impossible,
in which neither credit nor exchange could be guaranteed. They
must seek to convert the majority to their ideas, and afterwards
establish real popular sovereignty by the power of numbers and
justice. Just how this triumph was to be established, Proudhon
did not say, and it seems almost as though he looked, like God­
win, to the day when the powers o f truth and reason would impose
themselves and almost unaided bring about the flight o f error
and the consequent defeat of the forces of reaction.
Proudhon’s teachings entered the movement o f the 1860’s
partly through The Political Capacity of the Working Classes and
partly through his friends (particularly Beslay and Chaudey, Lang-
lois and Duchene) and his worker disciples, such as the first
secretaries o f the International, Tolain, Limousin and Fribourg.
This first manifestation o f Proudhonism within the socialist
movement was also its purest, for the French section o f the Inter-