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Updated: June 26, 2025
Proudhon has been judged and condemned, though, and wrongly, yet almost exclusively, by this one essay, written at the beginning of his literary career. Friends and foes alike have always contented themselves with regarding the celebrated dictum there uttered, Property is Theft, as the Alpha and the Omega of Proudhon's teaching, without reading the book itself.
During the period when all news from Germany ceased I tried to occupy myself as far as possible with reading. After going through Proudhon's writings, and in particular his De la propriete, in such a manner as to glean comfort for my situation in curiously divers ways, I entertained myself for a considerable time with Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins, a most alluring and attractive work.
But apart from the fact that the innate sense of justice in society is merely a fiction of Proudhon's, as of all earlier or later Utopians, this proposition may perhaps belong to metaphysics or ethics, but certainly not to the empirical science of sociology. For he who puts on the crown, and whom all agree to obey, is really king, even if he has waded to the throne through seas of blood.
And because it has been thought sufficient to catch up a phrase dragged from all its context, so it has happened that Proudhon to-day, although he is one of the most frequently mentioned authors, is hardly either known or read. Although the question of property forms the corner-stone of all Proudhon's teaching, yet it would be wrong to identify it with his doctrine entirely.
When he was tired of walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room, turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of Proudhon's book on the speculator. And while he read, there came from the salon the notes of a Tzigane waltz played on the piano. Caesar was writing something on the margin of a page when there came a knock at his door. "Come in," said Caesar.
But one gift Anarchism certainly did receive from Nihilism: "the propaganda of action" does not spring from the logical development of Proudhon's and Stirner's ideas, and cannot be extorted or extracted from it in any way; it is rather the consequence of the mixture of these ideas with Nihilism, a result of Russian conditions.
Compare these expressions with Proudhon's attitude in regard to the dynastic question described above, and consider, in order to do justice to each, that Egidy as well as Proudhon had in view when speaking a monarch who knew how to surround himself at least with the appearance of "social imperialism."
Hess went farther than Proudhon, in that he differed from Proudhon's carefully thought-out and measured organisation of society by demanding, under Anarchy, the abolition of the influence, in social, mental, and moral life, not only of the State and the Church, but also in like manner of any or all external dominion.
In brief, Proudhon's federalism is a political principle; his Anarchism is a dogma, or at best an hypothesis which cannot even be logically proved from the first-named, for it is not true, as Proudhon maintains, that the idea of agreement excludes that of lordship.
Where could he have found in his life-long wanderings the peaceful leisure in which to develop his thoughts quietly or to express them in a work such as Proudhon's Justice or Stirner's Einziger? Besides, he lacked the gift of mental depth and firmly grounded knowledge.
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