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In What Is Property?, published in 1840, Proudhon defined anarchy as "the absence of a master, of a sovereign" and wrote that "[a]s man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy". In 1849, Proudhon declared in Confessions of a Revolutionary that "[w]hoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I ...
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (born January 15, 1809, Besançon, France—died January 19, 1865, Paris) French libertarian socialist and journalist whose doctrines became the basis for later radical and anarchist theory.
Proudhon was born into poverty as the son of a feckless cooper and tavern keeper, and at the age of nine he worked as a cowherd in the Jura Mountains. Proudhon’s country childhood and 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 like his father could live in freedom, peace, and dignified poverty, for luxury repelled him, and he never sought it for himself or others.
Proudhon at an early age showed the signs of intellectual brilliance, and he won a scholarship to the college at Besançon. Despite the humiliation of being a child in sabots (wooden shoes) among the sons of merchants, he developed a taste for learning and retained it even when his family’s financial disasters forced him to become an apprentice printer and later a compositor. While he learned his craft, he taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and in the printing shop he not only conversed with various local liberals and Socialists but also met and fell under the influence of a fellow citizen of Besançon, the utopian Socialist Charles Fourier.
With other young printers, Proudhon later attempted to establish his own press, but bad management destroyed the venture, and it may well have been compounded by his own growing interest in writing, which led him to develop a French prose difficult to translate but admired by writers as varied as Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Baudelaire. Eventually, in 1838, a scholarship awarded by the Besançon Academy enabled him to study in Paris. Now, with leisure to formulate his ideas, he wrote his first significant book, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?, 1876). This created a sensation, for Proudhon not only declared, “I am an anarchist”; he also stated, “Property is theft!”
This slogan, which gained much notoriety, was an example of Proudhon’s inclination to attract attention and mask the true nature of his thought by inventing striking phrases. 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 the somewhat reactionary atmosphere of the July monarchy in the 1840s, Proudhon narrowly missed prosecution for his statements in What Is Property?; and he was brought into court when, in 1842, he published a more inflammatory sequel, Avertissement aux propriétaires (Warning to Proprietors, 1876). In this first of his trials, Proudhon escaped conviction because the jury conscientiously found that they could not clearly understand his arguments and therefore could not condemn them.
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Proudhon was not the first to enunciate the doctrine that is now called anarchism; before he claimed it, it had already been sketched out by, among others, the English philosopher William Godwin in prose and his follower Percy Bysshe Shelley in verse.
There is no evidence, however, that Proudhon ever studied the works of either Godwin or Shelley, and his characteristic doctrines of anarchism (society without government), Mutualism (workers’ association for the purpose of credit banking), and federalism (the denial of centralized political organization) seem to have resulted from an original reinterpretation of French revolutionary thought modified by personal experience.
Nov 30, 2021 · WHAT DID PROUDHON MEAN BY ANARCHY? PROUDHON’S REVOLUTION. FEDERALISM. NO BLACK AND WHITE. PROUDHON’S ECONOMICS. MUTUALISM. PROUDHON THE PATRIOT. WHY DID ANARCHISM CHANGE? FOOTNOTES. INTRODUCTION. It took me twenty years to get around to reading the works of Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) is usually considered as the father of anarchism, someone who both raised the main ideas of libertarian socialist thought and named them when he proclaimed “I am an anarchist” in 1840.
Jul 10, 2017 · In the mid-1800s, anarchism began to take shape as a distinct political philosophy, thanks to a visionary Frenchman named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The offspring of impoverished rural peasants, Proudhon labored as a cowherd and later as an apprentice printer. (While he was setting type, he taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew.)
Nov 24, 2010 · Author: Robert Graham. Topics: history , Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Source: Retrieved on November 24, 2010 from dwardmac.pitzer.edu. Robert Graham. The General Idea of Proudhon’s Revolution. The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century is one of the classics of anarchist literature. [1] .
Proudhon, the anarchist, accordingly played a pivotal role in the development of Marxian thought, and although Marxists tend to claim the Paris Commune for themselves as it is widely regarded as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution, Proudhon’s influence is undeniable.’
