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Updated: June 26, 2025
Politics is the science of freedom; the government of men by men, under whatever name it may be concealed, is servitude; the highest consummation of society is found in the union of order and anarchy. We will only select from this Decalogue of Collectivist Anarchism one dogma, the seventh; because it contains a fundamental error of Proudhon's, which must continually produce other errors.
M. Vivien, then Minister of Justice, who was earnestly solicited to prosecute the author, wished first to obtain the opinion of the economist, Blanqui, a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Proudhon having presented to this academy a copy of his book, M. Blanqui was appointed to review it. This review, though it opposed Proudhon's views, shielded him.
All Proudhon's arguments in proof of the impossibility of property are mere dialectic sword-play which hardly anyone takes seriously.
Nevertheless some have wished to represent this as Proudhon's intention; his early release from the prison in which the little book was written as the immediate effect, and as being the thanks of the Emperor, thus representing Proudhon as a mercenary time-server. But this is not in accordance with the facts.
The Congress, however, buried the proposed statute in its sections the last honor for Proudhon's much harassed project. But in the congress of the next year the Anarchists made quite another kind of influence felt. In the meantime the "Alliance" had been absorbed in the "International."
We have already seen to what a complicated organisation of economic life this led in the case of Proudhon's theory; but he did not entrust the maintenance of this economic order to the strong hand of the State, but believed that life, when once brought into equilibrium or "balance," could never fall away from it again. We will not repeat here what an illusion is contained in this.
Carlyle's French Revolution and Past and Present burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's Unto this Last and the series of Fors Clavigera; so did Mazzini's God and the People, Karl Marx's Kapital, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Tolstoy's What shall we do? and so did Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriété? at the time of its birth.
Just as the first critical moves in every science are necessarily entangled in the assumptions of the science which they are intending to combat, so Proudhon's work Qu'est ce que la propriété? is a criticism of political economy from the standpoint of political economy.
Das Elend der Philosophie: An Answer to Proudhon's Philosophie des Elends. If we turn back to the question, What is property? we find this confusion of ideas is answerable for his unsuccessful attempt to prove that labour must create equality and annihilate property. Here, too, the equality of the working days is assumed, and therefore the equality of wages is demanded.
Biography His Philosophic Standpoint His Early Writings The "Contradictions of Political Economy" Proudhon's Federation His Economic Views His Theory of Property Collectivism and Mutualism Attempts to Put his Views into Practice Proudhon's Last Writings Criticism.
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