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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (UK: / ˈ p r uː d ɒ̃ /, US: / p r uː ˈ d ɒ̃, p r uː ˈ d oʊ n /, French: [pjɛʁ ʒɔzɛf pʁudɔ̃]; 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism".
- 15 January 1809, Besançon, France
- 19th-century philosophy
- 19 January 1865 (aged 56), Passy, Paris, France
- Western philosophy
- Overview
- Early life and education
- Legacy
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.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, (born Jan. 15, 1809, Besançon, France—died Jan. 19, 1865, Paris), French journalist and socialist. After working as a printer, he moved to Paris in 1838 and joined the socialist movement.
Aug 22, 2023 · Pierre Joseph Proudhon was a pioneering anarchist who defined many of the ideas behind this ever-popular political philosophy. What were his main ideas?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (pronounced [ˈpruːd ɒn] in British English, [pʁu dɔ̃] in French) (January 15, 1809 – January 19, 1865) was a French mutualist political philosopher who was the first individual to call himself an "anarchist" and is considered among the first anarchist thinkers.
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Jul 19, 2021 · 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.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( UK: / ˈpruːdɒ̃ /, US: / pruːˈdɒ̃, pruːˈdoʊn /, French: [ pjɛʁ ʒɔzɛf pʁudɔ̃]; 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism".
