Who is pierre joseph proudhon

Translation M. Philosophy Information portal about Philosophy and Philosophers. Search for:. Category A-New. Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Anarchism. Close Ads. How happens it that, when seeking liberty and equality, they fell back into privilege and slavery? It is, they say, the power to make laws. Another absurdity, a relic of despotism.

The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: for such is our pleasure; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives.

The play is far from ended. The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is the expression of the will of the sovereign: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people.

Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran. Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators.

The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: All men are equal by nature and before the law; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. Men are equal by nature: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: All men are equal before the law. That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him.

Property is the right to use and abuse And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion?

We know what they are, and what they are worth! Spider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the government. The arrogance and the emptiness of their writings, their impertinent pride and their unwarranted blunders, have disgusted me.

Whoever, knowing them, pardons them, may read them. And, because it regards them as a source of profit, it decrees the eligibility of citizens. For of what use would this precaution be, if there were nothing to gain by it? No one would think of ordaining that none but astronomers and geographers should be pilots, nor of prohibiting stutterers from acting at the theatre and the opera.

The nation was still aping the kings: like them it wished to award the lucrative positions to its friends and flatterers. Unfortunately, and this last feature completes the resemblance, the nation did not control the list of livings; that was in the hands of its agents and representatives.

They, on the other hand, took care not to thwart the will of their gracious sovereign. Proudhon turns property back on itself, advancing classical political economy by attacking it. Proudhon and Marx debated spiritedly in both their private correspondence and their published works. As their ongoing exchange progressed, it became increasingly acrimonious, the two apparently competing to provide the dominant socialist model.

For mutualists like Proudhon and Greene, there is nothing inherently exploitative about the fact of market exchange. Conversely, however, the fact of exchange itself is also no proof of the absence of exploitation. The question, then, is whether the parties to a given exchange have traded equal values, the trade taking place in an environment free of the kinds of privilege that close off opportunities for the worker.

Proudhon thus did not believe that violent, political cataclysms, the replacement of one regime of authority with another, could effectuate genuine socialism. Both thinkers argued compellingly that politics could be dissolved within economics.

Further, both emphasized the disconnect between exploited and exploiters, makers and takers, productive and parasitic, industrious and indolent. But where Rothbard sees capitalists as belonging to the former groups, as indispensable entrepreneurs, Proudhon sees just the opposite.

Proudhon and Rothbard made very different predictions about what kinds of economic relationships and organizations a stateless, libertarian society would yield.