PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809-1865) was a French libertarian socialist and journalist. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists. His peasant ancestry influenced his ideas to the end of his life, and his vision of the ideal society almost to the end remained that of a world in which peasant farmers and small craftsmen could live in freedom, peace, and dignified poverty, for luxury repelled him, and he never sought it for himself or others.
His first significant book, WHAT IS PROPERTY? (1840) created a sensation, for Proudhon not only declared, "I am an anarchist"; he also stated, "Property is theft!" He did not attack property in the generally accepted sense but only the kind of property by which one man exploits the labour of another. Property in another sense — in the right of the farmer to possess the land he works and the craftsman his workshop and tools — he regarded as essential for the preservation of liberty, and his principal criticism of Communism, whether of the utopian or the Marxist variety, was that it destroyed freedom by taking away from the individual control over his means of production.
In 1843 he encountered a weavers' secret society, the Mutualists, who had evolved a protoanarchist doctrine that taught the factories of the dawning industrial age could be operated by associations of workers and that these workers, by economic action rather than by violent revolution, could transform society. Proudhon accepted their views and later paid tribute to his working-class mentors by adopting the name of Mutualism for his own form of anarchism.
He took issue with Marx over the organization of the Socialist movement, objecting to Marx's authoritarian and centralist ideas. Shortly after Proudhon published his PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY (1846), Marx attacked him bitterly in a polemic "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1847). The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist/libertarian and Marxist wings of the International Working Men's Association, which has lasted to this day.
He was imprisoned in 1849 for criticizing Louis-Napoleon, and was not released until 1852. From his cell he wrote THE GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION (1851). In its portrait of a federal world society with frontiers abolished, national states eliminated, and authority decentralized among communes or locality associations, and with free contracts replacing laws, the book presents perhaps more completely than any other of Proudhon's works the vision of his ideal society.
Proudhon was a solitary thinker who refused to admit that he had created a system and abhorred the idea of founding a party. His ideas were important in the First International and later became the basis of anarchist theory as developed by Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. His concepts were influential among such varied groups as the Russian populists, the radical Italian nationalists of the 1860s, the Spanish federalists of the 1870s, and the syndicalist movement that developed in France and later became powerful in Italy and Spain. Until the beginning of the 1920s, Proudhon remained the most important single influence on French working-class radicalism.
The following books are in ePUB or PDF format as indicated:
* Essential Proudhon (Anarchist Library compilation, 2016). J. Bates, ed. — PDF
* General Idea of the Revolution (Dover, 2003). J.B. Robinson, trans. — ePUB
* General Idea of the Revolution (Haskell House, 1969). J.B. Robinson, trans. — PDF
* Philosophy of Poverty, The (Duke Classics, 2013). B.R. Tucker, trans. — ePUB
* Philosophy of Progress, The (Left Liberty, 2009). S. Wilbur, trans. — PDF
* Property Is Theft! A Proudhon Anthology (AK, 2011). I. McKay, ed. — ePUB
* What is Property? (Cambridge, 1994). D. Kelley and B. Smith, trans. — PDF
* What is Property? (Duke Classics, 2012). B.R. Tucker, trans. — ePUB
These reprints from the Anarchist Library are also included (all PDF):
* Application for the Suard Pension [1837] (AL, 2017)
* Celebration of Sunday [1839] (AL, 2018)
* General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century [1851] (AL, 2018)
* God is Evil, Man is Free [1849] (AL, 2009)
* In Connection with Louis Blanc [1849] (AL, 2018)
* Interest and Principal [1849] (AL, 2009)
* Letter of Proudhon to Marx [1846] (AL, 2009)
* Letter to Pierre Leroux [1849] (AL, 2018)
* Letter to Several Workers in Paris and Rouen [1864] (AL, 2009)
* Malthusians, The [1848] (AL, 2011)
* Moral Education [n.d.] (AL, 2018)
* Nature and Destination of Government [1849] (AL, 2016)
* Philosophy of Progress [1853] (AL, 2018)
* Principle of Federation [1863] (AL, 2018)
* State, The: Its Nature, Object and Destination [1849] (AL, 2018)
* System of Economical Contradictions [1847] (AL, 2011)
* Toast to the Revolution [1848] (AL, 2011)
* What is Government, What is God [1849] (AL, 2018)
* What is Property [1840] (AL, 2010)
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