Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

French philosopher and author Pier re-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) was the first to call his social philosophy anarchist. He considered state order to be artificial, contradictory, and ineffective, thereby engendering oppression, poverty, and crime. Furthermore, he believed public and international law, along with the varieties of representative government based upon the principle of individual ownership of productive property, are also false. In his important work What is Property? (1840), Proudhon famously proclaimed that “property is theft.” With this, he asserted that authority is incapable of serving as a proper basis for constituting social relations, and the citizen must be governed by reason alone.

An opponent of communism, which Proudhon viewed as requiring the subservience of the individual to the collective, he argued for a system of mutualism that allowed for a synthesis of private property—or possession—and collective ownership that would avoid the extremes of each on their own. In the system, workers controlled their specific means of production and exchanged the products of their labor, with exchange values determined by the amount of necessary labor time involved in the production of the products in question. It was not a system of full equality, since the industrious were rewarded more than those who were less ambitious.

In Proudhon’s system, social affairs would develop in economic organizations and over time the state would render obsolete. In place of political institutions, Proudhon advocated economic organizations such as cooperatives and “people’s banks” as means toward the reorganization of social life. With this, limiting of constraint, the reduction of repressive methods, and the convergence of individual and collective interests creates what Proudhon calls the condition of total liberty, or anarchy; he suggests that it is the only context in which “laws” operate spontaneously without invoking command and control.

In the absence of a governmental state, self-regulating communes would associate in federated networks. Proudhon envisioned Europe as a confederation of federations overcoming national borders. Proudhon’s mutualism achieved great popularity among the working classes during the French revolution of 1848, when workers demanded liberal social, political, and economic reforms. In his General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), Proudhon reflects on the lessons of 1848 and presents a defense of revolution as a permanent and ongoing social process—a necessity of social life.

Proudhon’s ideas came to dominate among those members of the French working class who contributed to the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). During the workers’ revolutionary movement known as the Paris Commune of 1871, the largest political ideological group that participated consisted of Proudhonians. Proudhon’s calls for working-class self-liberation through economic organization contributed to the founding of anarcho-syndicalism, or revolutionary unionism, and influenced the autogestion (i.e., workers’ self-management) movements of the 1960s and 1970s. His followers founded the main organization of the union movement in France, the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour—CGT).

Despite his influence on progressive movements, Proudhon espoused a number of reactionary perspectives. He viewed the family as society’s primary and most significant socializing agent, the source of moral values and social affections, and a bulwark against modern market values. This view of the family has been criticized for upholding a patriarchal vision of women as suited primarily to home, rather than public life. Proudhon was also deeply anti-Semitic and racist, and he claimed the inferiority of certain races and proposed that Jews be expelled from France, arguing that land belongs to the race that was originally born on it.

Bibliography:

Kingston-Mann, Esther. “The Return of Pierre Proudhon: Property Rights, Crime, and the Rules of Law.” Focaal 2006, no. 48 (2006): 118–127.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. London: Freedom Press, 1923.
System of Economic Contradictions: Or the Philosophy of Poverty. Princeton: B. R.Tucker, 1888. What is Property? New York: Humboldt, 1840.
Ritter, Alan. “Proudhon and the Problem of Community.” The Review of Politics 29, no. 4 (1967): 457–477.
Woodcock, George. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Life and Work. New York: Schocken, 1972.
Yarros, Victor. “Philosophical Anarchism: Its Rise, Decline and Eclipse.” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 4 (1936): 470–483.

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