Proudhon, an Appreciation

...They can be divided into three categories: 1. His criticism of the Jacobin idea of political revolution and centralized government, and his substi tution of a view of social revolution based on a decentralized mutualist economy...

...Nor, indeed, did Proudhon consistently hold this view...

...At the same time, while attacking the utopians for a doctrinaire desire to freeze human lives within a static society, Proudhon was not an individualist in the manner of contemporaries like Stirner...

...His criticism of the Phalansterian and Icarian communists of his time has an extremely topical interest in its anticipation of the situation that has tended to develop in the countries which today claim to be communist and, indeed, everywhere that socialism has taken a centralist, bureaucratized form...

...the war of the workshop," he wrote in his diary, and added another thought that echoed through the history of Latin Syndicalism down to the Spanish Civil War when he noted: "The social revolution is seriously compromised if it comes through a political revolution...

...In Jacobinism, Proudhon saw, not a genuine movement towards liberation, but a "hypocrisy of progress," which, in dreaming of liberty without social vision, merely produced dictatorship...

...To make that class conscious of its role and its potentialities was the final task to which he turned his attention...

...Proudhon's defiance of the increasingly reactionary tendencies that emerged in France during the latter part of 1848 led him eventually to a three-year prison sentence for having the foresight to accuse Louis Bonaparte of monarchical ambitions...

...Private associations are sternly prohibited, in spite of the likes and dislikes of different natures, because to tolerate...

...What should he be...

...Social revolution had become inevitable, Proudhon believed, because of the limitations of the men of 1789, who had ignored the economic revolution called for by the abolition of feudalism...

...he did not believe that liberty could be achieved in a single leap, in a sudden Bakuninist overturning of the edifices of power...

...2. His theory of federalism as a solution to the problems of national administration and international relationships...

...How could universal suffrage reveal the thought, the real thought of the people," he argued in Confessions of a Revolutionary, "when the people is divided by inequality of fortune into classes subordinate one to the other and voting either through servility or through hate...

...In fact, not only was Proudhon as persistent and pertinent a critic of utopian tendencies as either of the German socialists but he also anticipated the very insights for which Coser and Howe appear to regard Marx-Engels as originally responsible...

...And thus he saw the development of society as a progress from the authoritarian concept of centralized power...

...You asked me yesterday," he wrote to them, "whether I would write in a public sheet opinions which I profess and which we hold in common, and you added: `Undoubtedly not...

...The suggestions for social reform which Proudhon puts forward in such works as The General Idea of the Revolution (1851) are in fact not so strictly apolitical as those of later anarchists like Kropotkin...

...is to be found in a lingering utopian influence that made Proudhon desire, even though he declared emphatically "I build no system," to envisage at least the possibility of a permanent social stabilization...

...It was particularly their tendency to erect hypothetical systems which had little relationship to the actual needs of individual men and women that he held against the utopians...

...What is Property...

...What he attacks is the property by which a man exploits the labor of others, the property associated with interest, rent, the wage system...

...it should build upwards from the most primary levels...

...The possession and development in real terms of this idea distinguishes the working class (including the peasants) from the bourgeisie, and gives it a progressive character...

...Nor did he restrict his hopes of internationalism to the political field...

...and the accession of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the Second Republic in 1849 that Proudhon gathered the experiences that were basic to his later and most important books...

...Such generalized suggestions are as near as Proudhon ever gets to the blueprinting of an ideal society...

...In this way the smallest regional or racial enclave could enjoy its independence and participate in federal cooperation with its neighbors of differing outlooks without sacrificing its own way of living...

...It was in the month after the rising, in introducing to the National Assembly a proposal for a moratorium on rents and debts to alleviate public distress, that he defined most boldly the class struggle that had become dramatically evident in French life...

...Everything...

...It was in later works, after he had come into contact with the movement of history through his observation of the industrial proletariat in Lyons and his participation in the revolution of 1848, that Proudhon's social views took on movement and perspective...

...Confederation, like the revolution, should begin with the people...

...to act from judgment, not by command...

...Equality comes to us by a succession of tyrannies and governments, in which liberty is continually at grips with absolutism like Israel and Jehovah...

...he shared the nineteenth-century belief in progress, but he did not trade in teleological speculations, and anything in the nature of a perfect society he came to regard as not merely impossible, but also undesirable...

...Why should we not invite the population to make themselves capable of managing their own affairs and of preparing the way for a confederation of peoples...

...Passive obedience, irreconcilable with a reflecting will, is strictly enforced...

...From the beginning he maintained that the inadequacy of political liberalism in a time of social revolution forced the workers to find their own economic solution...

...there were times when he stressed less the peaceful agreement than the fruitful conflict of a free society, while the very fact that he still envisaged the presence of local "laws" suggests that he felt the need for sanctions of a moral and possibly even a physical character...

...For large-scale industry and transport he envisaged cooperative operation, but his attitude towards such matters was strictly functional, and he held that the invocation of association as a principle would tend towards social rigidity and the destruction of freedom...

...His comparative loneliness in this recognition was illustrated by the fact that, when the Assembly came to a vote, only one man, an old Lyons Mutualist, voted with him, while the utopian socialists demonstrated their failure to recognize the social realities of the time by abstaining...

...Nothing...

...At the same time he was strongly critical of the more fantastic aspects of Fourier's work, and a little later, in 1832, when the Fourierists invited him to edit a paper, he showed an independence that anticipated his later developmnt as a critical, unutopian social thinker...

...IT IS NOT POSSIBLE HERE TO INVESTIGATE the wide influence of Proudhon's theories in the First International and the Paris Commune, in European revolutionary syndicalism and Mexican agrarianism, in such movements of the English-speaking countries as Guild Socialism and the I.W.W...

...As a delegate to the National Assembly, and in his efforts to found a credit bank for the workers, he strove to give some positive social content to the revolution, but it was as a journalistic critic that he was effective...

...What is more to our immediate point is the fact that the split between the social democrats and Proudhon's disciples, which was given finality (over the protesting voices of such socialist pioneers as William Morris, Keir Hardie and Robert Blatchford) in the expulsion of the libertarian delegates from the International Socialist Congress of 1896, deprived the socialist movement of the very points of view that might have helped to correct the more harmful errors of 20th-century socialism...

...Whom do you mean by you...

...Proudhon was not a cyclical thinker...

...shouted his audience...

...DURING THE FORMATIVE, AUTODIDACTIC years of the 1830s, Proudhon's sense of the needs and potentialities of the working class, to which he declared himself to belong "today and for ever, by nature, by habit and above all by the community of interests and wishes," led him through the devious courses of philology and Biblical scholarship, and by way of such curious speculations as whether the Mosaic command, Lo thignob, meant "Thou shalt not steal" or "Thou shalt not lay anything aside for thyself," to a consideration of the economic bases of socialism and, in particular, of property relationships...

...But he was appalled by the ineptitude of the Jacobins and liberals at the head of the second Republic, whose minds were full of the democratic political ideals of 1789 and 1793, but who had no conception of the problems that had gained urgency from the rapid impetus of the industrial revolution...

...It is evident why Marx should have regarded What is Property...

...It was to these reawakened workers that he addressed his last book, The Political Capacity of the Working Classes...

...Proudhon was no millenarian...

...Federalism is the alpha and omega of my policy," he insisted, "and to be realized that solution requires the participation of the whole people...

...which Marx hailed five years later as "truly the first decisive, vigorous and scientific examination" of property, as "a great scientific progress, which revolutionizes political economy and for the first time permits one to make a true science of it...

...Beyond these factors, there is a naively optimistic tendency to see reason as over-powerful, a faith in man's propensity to detect his own good that is not wholly borne out by experience...

...The Republic should have established Society...

...The extent to which Proudhon's contributions to radical thought are overlooked even among radicals was impressed upon me by a recent article in DISSENT (Spring, 1954) in which Lewis Coser and Irving Howe discussed the differences between Marx and his utopian socialist contemporaries in a way which suggested that they considered Marx and Engels to be alone in their anti-utopianism...

...we shall never be perfect...

...as a seminal work in the development of political economy...

...The failure to foster industrial control by the workers led to that doctrinaire reliance on state control and bureaucratic administration which marred the attempt to achieve socialism in Britain...

...As if laying extended claims for Marxian originality, they talked of "the importance of Marx's idea that socialism is to be brought about, in the first instance, by the activities of a major segment of the population, the workers...

...They have made a revolution without ideas," he lamented on the day of the Republic's foundation, and a few weeks later he denounced the palliative measures of the government, such as the herding of the unemployed into the National Workshops, as "the organization of poverty...

...He was one of the few active participants, in France or elsewhere, who immediately recognized the social character of the Revolution and detected the emergence of the working class as an autonomous force...

...Yet in fact the main themes of Proudhon's political philosophy, the themes that have most relevance for the modern student, remain surprisingly constant...

...Thus, while regarding the proletariat as a progressive class which would spread the leaven of mutuality, he did not, like the Blanquists and the Marxists, envisage it as an elite, destined to assume power and govern by class dictatorship, either delegated or direct...

...It was in the decade between the publication of What is Property...

...Such a solution was both unsatisfactory in terms of social reality and unsympathetic to Proudhon's critical temperament, and later, in such works as The Philosophy of Poverty (1846) and its successors, he abandoned the Hegelian formulae and adopted a method of antinomical argument that fitted more closely, not only his own passion for exploring each side of every argument, but also the pattern of mutually warring contradictions which he perceived within society...

...and when the exercise of its rights is limited to choosing, every three or four years, its chiefs and its imposters...

...Having stated his ultimate aim as the liquidation of property, and called upon the proprietors to accept voluntarily the first step in that direction, he added: "In the case of refusal we ourselves shall proceed to the liquidation without you...

...His contact with these men strengthened Proudhon's faith in the workers ("The people are better judges than all their critics") and increased his apolitical bias...

...In the background he saw the anonymous power of the working class, a latent force that would soon play its independent part in the determination of history...

...is more influenced by Hegelianism than any of his other books, and in the acceptance of a stabilizing synthesis (the reign of "Liberty," product of the marriage of property and communism) , there enters a chiliastic element similar to that which brings Marxian history to a halt in the final stasis of eternalized and generalized quasiutopia...

...This elaborate exploration of contradictions is the cause of much of the confusion that has arisen over Proudhon's ideas, but it also gave rise to a more acceptable view of the progress of society, not towards an ideal and a historical construction, but towards a dynamic and developing equilibrium of varied forces...

...Always, he stood out against the proliferation of new and aggressive national states and sought to encourage any kind of decentralist tendency that might set the tide of events running in the direction of an international outlook...

...the desire to see the working people learn to manage their own affairs with a minimum of intervention (already a sharp divergence from the utopian preoccupation with societies planned from above) ; the fear of Jacobin nationalism implied in the hope for a "confederation of peoples...

...The lack of a strong federalist policy left socialist parties everywhere helpless in the face of the temptations of nationalism and the threats of war...

...His brief and dramatic interval as a man of action was ended, and it is in the books of the period after his entry into prison that we encounter the development and refinement of his contributions to socialist thought...

...But if little attention is paid here to industries that cannot be run by independent artisan "possessors," we should remember that up to 1840 Proudhon had slight contact with the industrial revolution that was developing during the July monarchy in France...

...Labor alone, he contends, is the basis of value, but it does not confer a right to property, since labor does not create the means out of which the product is made...

...CRAMMED WITH A BAROQUE ABUNDANCE Of scholarship and written in a classic prose that was admired by Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire and Flaubert, these later books, from Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849) down to the posthumously published Political Capacity of the Working Class, cover a vast range of miscellaneous topics, from theories of taxation to studies of the social relevance of art, from literary copyright to Biblical exegesis...

...As a young printer in Besancon, he supervised the production of Fourier's Le Nouveau Monde Industrial et Societaire and was fascinated by its author's strange combination of insight and eccentricity...

...Any agglomeration of men, comprised within a clearly circumscribed territory and able to live an independent life in that spot, is meant for autonomy...

...The laissez faire bourgeois ideology eschews mutuality, and consequently the bulk of the middle class declines into a subordinate stratum at the mercy of the monopolists whose viewpoint it still accepts...

...This attitude is closely linked to a view of revolution as a spontaneous social force, not created politically, but rising from the needs of the people and irresistible in its eventual triumph...

...Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings...

...In opposition to the centralized nationalism of Jacobin democracy, Proudhon's vision is characterized by the utmost degree of administrative decentralization...

...The arguments for workers' control of industry, for regional and local autonomy as an antidote to bureaucratic centralism, are convincing, but only the hardy idealist would suggest today that the solution can be quite so simple a matter of contractual adjustment as, in his more optimistic flights, Proudhon suggested...

...3. His theory of the political function of the working class as an autonomous revolu tionary force moving towards its own liberation...

...At no time during his career could Proudhon be regarded as favor able to the Jacobin attitude, but it was the experience of 1848 that revealed to him in full the hollowness of a political revolution unsup ported by a revolution in economic relationships...

...What he is discussing is property as seen by the peasant, and his solution is an agrarian one...

...And this means does not consist only of the raw material provided by nature, but also of the vast heritage of installations built by our forerunners, the accumulated techniques and traditions of civilization, and, perhaps most important, the element of cooperation in labor that makes each man's work so much more effective than it would be if he acted in solitude...

...slavery...

...Proudhon, we should emphasize, does not set himself up as a communist, even in the sense of the 1840s...

...It is the social war," his rivals shouted...

...IT IS NECESSARY TO DISTINGUISH between what Proudhon meant by federation and what is meant by those who nowadays think in terms of a kind of super-centralized government to administer Europe or the world...

...But the general themes that run consistently through his writings still have a great relevance, and those who are puzzled by the unresolved problems of modern socialism may gain from considering some of the aspects of that libertarian point of view which he represented and which was banished from the orthodox socialist movement more than half a century ago...

...When I employed these two pronouns, you and we," said Proudhon, "it is evident that in that moment I was identifying myself with the proletariat, and that I was identifying you with the bourgeois class...

...Capital is afraid," Proudhon replied, "and its instinct is not wrong: the eye of socialism is upon it...

...This fact cannot be dissociated from the sharply limited nature of Proudhon's experience at this time...

...Liberty adequate and compatible with order, that is all the reality which is contained in power and politics...

...In his reaction from utopia he was as disinclined as Marx to plan in detail for other men, and at times he seems to have retreated into unnecessary vagueness...

...But a number of points demand consideration for the light they throw upon the general Proudhonian attitude...

...history in the real sense of the word occupies hardly any place...

...r In this book Proudhon celebrates the arrival of the urban proletariat as a new social force...

...Contradictions and ambiguities abound, and in this fertile jungle of argument it has not been difficult for the disingenuous to find texts which, wrenched from their contexts, make Proudhon appear as the advocate of reactionary doctrines that are plainly contrary to the general direction of his thought...

...Hence, while safety demanded a strict limitation on the largeness of units, social necessity need set no limits on their smallness...

...them would be to introduce small communities within the large ones Communism is oppression and...

...Proudhon was an aficionado of irony and paradox, and it was therefore appropriate that his introduction to socialism should have come through the utopians he later rejected...

...It was in this way, as "a phenomenon of our collective life," that he assessed political institutions...

...It is true that the solution of social ills rests by definition on a social level, and can only be attained when political centralization has been replaced by a much more basic administration of economic affairs than existed in Proudhon's time or exists today...

...If anywhere, it is in this plan of the federal society that, by the happy process of paradox, we find the utopia of the great anti-utopian, a utopia in negative, with casual agreement replacing minute regulation as its basic pattern...

...Like all other historically significant classes, it has become conscious of its collective identity, and the idea which it pursues as a result of this dawning self-consciousness is that of mutuality...

...They take rather the form of a pluralist socialism, in which the political is subordinated to the social...

...the utopians had declined into minor cults which suffered from the failure of their attempts to create socialist communities in the New World...

...The tendency to concentrate on the industrial worker to the exclusion of other classes resulted in socialist ineptitude when faced by agrarian problems or by situations, like those in the United States and Canada, where large sections of the workers begin to move culturally and economically into the middle class...

...The basic administration should be local and as near the direct control of the workers as possible...

...THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 proved the most important single event in Proudhon's life, as in the lives of a whole generation of European radicals...

...Prison, he wryly declared, was "just like Icaria," but it was remarkably lenient by present-day standards, and, after the frantic activity of the revolutionary year, he made use of his enforced leisure to work out the constructive elements of his social outlook...

...Therefore, while the problem propounded in '89 seemed to be officially solved, fundamentally there was a change only in governmental metaphysics—what Napoleon called ideology...

...Since the "natural groups" which formed the confederation would in their turn be based on the working units—the cooperative associations and productive exchanges—within society, the nature of the state would change from political to economic, and Saint-Simon's vision of the government of men being replaced by the administration of things would be finally achieved...

...An insight into the role of the working class which led him in 1842 to declare: "Workers, laborers, men of the people, the initiative of reform is yours," was confirmed and strengthened when he went to Lyons in the following year and encountered the Mutualists, a proletarian secret society which had abandoned Jacobin ideas of political conspiracy in favor of industrial association...

...In emphasizing as a goal equality of condition, he still defends possession...

...Man...

...At the same time, as becomes evident in his later works, Proudhon was not exclusively—as some of his critics have suggested—an advocate of the individual worker...

...A union between these states would suffer from the inequality between them, and hence he stressed "the interior distribution of sovereignty and government," the breakdown of that national unity—which in history has always been productive of war without and exploitation within—into smaller units where "there is nothing for the bourgeoisie to profit from" and the vigilance of the people can be most actively promoted...

...Let them see, through instruction, science, moral health and patriotism, how to dispense with all ministerial hierarchy, while in the meantime profiting from the little good it will do them...

...In the present essay it is impossible to examine every aspect of this provocative book, which created one of the great political catchwords of the nineteenth century ("Property is theft") and made one of its historic definitions by applying the name "anarchism" to that trend in socialism which regards the elimination of government as of primary importance...

...when this same people, held in restraint by authority, is incapable notwithstanding its sovereignty of expressing its ideas on anything...

...The railway, pioneer of industrialism, had not reached his native Franche-Comte, and the Latin Quarter of Paris, with which he was familiar, has remained to this day a stronghold of small workshops...

...His positive suggestions are indeed considerably less impressive than his exposures of the Jacobin political fixations, and this is not entirely due either to the fact that he himself was personally better fitted for the role of critic or to that lack of precise detail and rigid structure which is inevitable in a libertarian social vision...

...wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation and his discipline...

...What remains most important in Proudhon's criticism of the Jacobins is the shift of viewpoint from politics as a self-subsistent entity to politics as a changing and dispensable social phenomenon, the shift of objective from the seizure of power over men to the achievement of economic organization between men...

...The proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government," he remarked before the revolution was two months old, and after the rising of the faubourgs in June he recognized immediately that "the first and determining cause of the insurrection was the social question, the social crisis, work, ideas...

...even before 1848 he had dreamed of a mutualist association that would spread over the whole world...

...As Theodore Royssen remarked, there is a "static quality" about it...

...The best form of government, like the most perfect of religions," he concluded, "is a contradictory idea...

...Total federalism might be sketched as a destination, but the way there had to be traced through the jungle of nineteenth-century international politics, and often Proudhon was faced with decisions which could not be postponed...

...The essentially sociological aspect of his outlook appears when he discusses the question of property in relation to work...

...to sacrifice himself through unselfishness, not through servile obligation...

...Fidelity to regulations, which are always detective, however wise they may be thought, allows of no complaint...

...towards centralism and bureaucratization) that have become frozen into many areas of socialist practice...

...Perfection, immobility, would be death...

...But the workers, by developing their sense of mutuality, can at last bring justice into the economic life of society by organizing its functions on an egalitarian basis...

...He was in fact so opposed to centralized power that he envisaged federation, not as a means of establishing authority over existing states, but as a way of dissolving them...

...The Communist Manifesto had expressed very similar sentiments to a restricted audience a few months before, but it was Proudhon in this debate who first drew to the attention of the wider public of Europe the fact that socialism would henceforward become identified, not with the plans of utopian dreamers, but with the concrete and daily struggle of the working class...

...The new socialist movement will begin by...

...The real struggle was between the extremes of absolutism and socialism, and for Proudhon socialism was not the rigid doctrine of the Icarians, who take "their hypotheses for reality and their utopias for institutions," but a dynamic and realistic viewpoint based on the observation of society, not as one would like to make it, but as it is, with its inherent contradictions and conflicts...

...Proudhon alone stood as a symbol of plebeian resistance, and his anti-political campaign of 1863, when he called for abstention from voting as a means of undermining the Empire, appealed to a working class that was tired of the existing political situation...

...they added that "Marx found the sources of revolt within the self-expanding and self-destroying rhythms of the economy itself," and that he "gave new power to the revolt against history, by locating it, `scientifically,' within history...

...One such body is the commune, organ of local administration, which should have full independence, unsupervised by any centralized authority, in the conduct of public works and local affairs, even in the making of laws...

...The problem is not to know how we shall be best governed, but how we shall be most free...

...But a man's right to control the house he inhabits and the land and tools he needs to work and live, so long as he uses them for these purposes alone, Proudhon regards as a keystone of liberty...

...Proudhon, moreover, differed from most of the utopians in realizing the need to face the immediate problems of a society yet unripe for revolutionary change...

...In consequence of this principle of absolute property labor—which should only be a condition imposed on man by nature—becomes in all communities a humart, commandment and therefore odious...

...it is also evident that Marx's own conception of socialist economics owed a great deal more to Proudhon than Marxists admit...

...Above the primary level of small autonomous units, confederal organization should become progressively less a matter of administration than of cooperation between the "natural groups...

...The international identity of the workers' interests had long preoccupied him...

...What is perhaps more important for our own day is that he developed them in a way that enabled him to foresee and to warn against some of the more disastrous tendencies (e.g...

...This is the first existing document in which Proudhon assumes an emphatic attitude, and it already incorporates some of the salient elements of his later views—the distrust of authority as such and of centralized authority in particular...

...Proudhon believes that against the grande bourgeoisie, the real capitalists, the struggle must be pursued without hope of reconciliation...

...Universal suffrage was the great watchword of the Jacobins of 1848, and they saw little beyond, but for Proudhon this reform was pointless outside the context of a social transformation...

...Where necessary—but only where necessary—the individual control of work and the direct contact between man and man are replaced by associational bodies...

...their alliance should be sought so that the whole community may move towards liberation without that violence of civil war which Proudhon always regarded as inimical to progress...

...it thought only of establishing Government...

...Litigation would be replaced by the arbitration of ad hoc juries of neighbors, and courts, those beach-heads of autocracy, from which Proudhon himself had suffered, must be eliminated as the first act of the revolution...

...His first paper, Le Representant du Peuple, appeared under the motto: "What is the Producer...

...Other undertakings, like railways, factories and harbors, would be administered by associations of workers, and parents and teachers would come together to conduct a form of education integrated to industrial and professional apprenticeship...

...and after the disillusionments of the Revolution his faith was renewed in the revival of French workingclass activity during the early 1860s, a revival in which he played a considerable role...

...Marx and his doctrines were as yet almost unknown...

...By 1840 these hints had been integrated into his first influential work, What is Property...

...Its complete sensitiveness would be assured by the perpetual revocability of any delegation as soon as it ceased to act in harmony with the group it represented...

...Life, talent, and all the human faculties are the property of the State, which has the right to use them as it pleases for the common good...

...A series of delegations would bring together the common economic interests of the various units, and in each region would coalesce in a central committee whose function would be confined to the coordination of interests in accordance with the general will...

...Such a parody of federation would mean an intensification of the very centralism which Proudhon dreaded, the creation of an authority all the more dangerous because of its concentration of power...

...The Jacobins had been discredited among the more militant workers for their ineptitude during 1848...

...We are born perfectible...

...In his view, society moved, and would always move, by an organic rhythm of constant growth, and even his favorite concept of Justice was not an idealist absolute, but a quasi-anthropological entity that grew with man's development and in a measure shared his limitations...

...Control of production should lie at the point of production, and the social function of distribution should grow upward and outward from that point...

...Such a union must be sought in the harmony of their interests, not in an artificial centralization, which, far from expressing the collective will, expresses only the antagonism of individual wills...

...Yet despite its many important insights, one is impressed by the relatively undeveloped form of Proudhon's thought in What is Property...

...But he does not exclude that larger section of the middle class whose independence is threatened with extinction...

...The scattered apprentice essays of this period, on such subjects as the origin of languages and the utility of Sunday observance, are studded with ideas which intimate the independent development of a social attitude...

...Much of Proudhon's work is outdated, and he would have expected nothing else, for he claimed to erect no foolproof system, he eschewed the idea of establishing a party doctrine, and, having lived through 1848, he was well aware how much events can prove a political thinker wrong...

...I mistrust an author who pretends to be consistent with himself after twenty-five years," he once said, and he would have viewed with ironic contempt any latter-day admirer who tried to establish a faultless canon from his works...

...Finally, a preoccu r pation with political activity, with the mechanics of elections, parliamentary maneuvers and governmental machinery has produced the very Jacobin error which Proudhon castigated—the tendency to seek a speciously easy way out through legislation and regulation instead of concentrating on the basic functional changes in social activity on which, in the end, freedom and security alike depend...

...The members of a community, it is true, have no private property, but the community is proprietor, and proprietor not only of goods, but also of persons and wills...

...ANOTHER REASON FOR THE "STATIC" QUALITY in What is Property...

...On the contrary, he often declared that anarchy—the society of free contracts—might take centuries to mature, and that it was likely to come through a long process of equilibration...

...Unless democracy is a fraud, and the sovereignty of the people a jest, it must be admitted that each citizen in the sphere of his industry, each municipal, district or provincial council within its own territory, is the only natural and legitimate representative of the sovereign (people), and that therefore each Iocality should act directly and by itself in administering the interests which it includes and should exercise full sovereignty in relation to them...

...Imperfection and conflict were the attributes of life as he saw it, and when he considered the nature of war (in War and Peace, 1861) , he saw the end of military struggle only as a transition to an intensification of productive struggle in industry and culture...

...The people are nothing but the organic union of individually free wills, which can and should work voluntarily together, but never abdicate their freedom...