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Updated: June 26, 2025
The organisation sketched out at the Barcelona Congress is quite in Proudhon's spirit; the arrangement of its members was to be a double one, both by trades and districts, and both divisions had mutually to enlarge each other.
It is limited to giving a rather shallow reproduction of Proudhon's contrast between religion and revolution.
This was the end of the results of his propaganda in Switzerland; for in the popular reflex of Marr's doctrines we can hardly find more than the Radicalism of German Democrats, as preached by Börne, coloured by a few traces of Proudhon's teaching.
These "two men" explain, for him, all economic functions and social problems; the origin of social distinctions, of political privileges, of property, capital, betterment, exploitation, and so on. By these two famous men he lets himself be guided directly into Proudhon's path. "Wealth," declares Dühring, "is mastery over men and things."
Proudhon's activity as an author began in the year 1837. The Academy at Besançon had to award a three years' scholarship, which had been founded by Suard, the secretary of the French Academy, for poor young men of Franche-Comte who wished to devote themselves to a literary or scientific career. Proudhon entered as a competitor, and won the scholarship.
His views as to the nearest goal, after general expropriation and the annihilation of all powers, are almost exclusively derived from Proudhon's, and at most go beyond them only in so far as Bakunin does not recognise as obligatory that coalescence of "productive" groups into a higher collective entity, which Proudhon regarded as an organic society, but merely allows them to remain as groups.
It is, however, quite wrong to regard this dialectic jugglery as the essence of Proudhon's system. On the one hand he attacks the defenders of property, who, after all, are not very difficult to controvert; while, at the same time, his attempt itself does not always succeed.
On the following day, in his Toast to the Revolution, a toast which was filled with allusions to the exciting scene of the night before, Proudhon commenced his struggle against the Mountain. His duel with Felix Pyat was one of the episodes of this struggle, which became less bitter on Proudhon's side after the Mountain finally decided to publicly proclaim the Democratic and Social Republic.
Hitherto Anarchism and at least in this first period of its development we can speak of a party has proceeded quite on the lines of Proudhon's Collectivism. Its main representative is the "Alliance," or rather Michael Bakunin, and after him the Jurassic Federation. This period is, with the exception of a few revolutionary attempts, free from outrage and crime.
The extent to which his teaching impressed the thoughtful members of this society, which included among others Dostojewski, cannot easily be determined, since the companions of Petraschewski, like the Nihilists of to-day, have always liked to preserve a certain electicism. However, one trace of the influence of Proudhon's doctrines upon its members is distinctly visible.
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