PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH. — French political thinker and economist, born in Besançon on 15 January 1809, died in Paris on 19 December 1864. Of humble family, he had to take up work as a printer at an early age. In 1838 he passed the baccalaureate examinations and obtained a three-year pension from the Academy of Besançon; he made his first contacts with Paris, published his earliest works, and then returned to employment (1843) with a firm of river transport in Lyon. Having settled permanently in Paris in 1846, he formed ties with circles of economists and socialists, and became acquainted with Marx, Bakunin, and Blanc.
Elected as a representative to the National Assembly in 1848, he sought to translate his social reform programs into concrete proposals for a general moratorium on debts and a reduction of rents; but these were not adopted. He resolutely opposed Bonapartist dictatorship: condemned to imprisonment for certain articles he had written, he fled to Belgium; upon his return to France and recognition, he served his sentence. After his release from prison, he deluded himself into believing he could persuade the new Emperor to take the lead in a social revolution. In 1858, for his book *De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Église*, he was again condemned; he fled to Brussels and obtained a remission of his sentence. He returned to Paris at the end of 1862.
Due to the breadth and richness of his ideas, which draw together—through direct experience of a complex historical period—the influences of the most diverse intellectual currents, filtered through the self-taught culture of an autodidact, Proudhon’s thought is difficult to systematize. Although he aligns himself with the tradition of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Cabet, and borrows from Hegel and the left-Hegelians—through his contacts with Marx and Bakunin—an extrinsic imprint of dialectical method, his thought is rooted more in Rousseau in the social sphere and in Smith in the economic sphere. The emancipation of man from servitude and inequality, theorized by Rousseau on the political plane and realized by the French Revolution, must, through the new economic science, extend to the socio-economic plane. After the “political” revolution of the citizen, of the bourgeois, there must follow the “economic,” “social” revolution of the worker. Having violently criticized the cornerstone of bourgeois society, property (*Qu’est-ce que la propriété?*, Paris 1840, where the famous cry “La propriété, c’est le vol!” appears), he subjected the antinomies of the social structure of his time to a particularly harsh analysis (*Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère*, ibid. 1846), with a tendency, however, to note these antinomies rather than attempt to resolve them. He did not move from them toward a revolutionary dialectic; on the contrary, their conflict must be composed into a balance of tensions, a dynamic equilibrium that is “justice.” In his later works, Proudhon sought to provide a more precise framework for his doctrine and popularize it in countless pamphlets and newspapers. In the economic sphere, he advocated the restoration of the exchange of labor networks with goods, and thus the abolition of money and everything derived from it that transforms into capital (“mutualism”); in the social sphere, the new order must be built through free negotiations between organized employers and workers, based on the principle of justice. His perspective then broadened to consider broader phenomena, such as war, whose positive role in historical and social progress he emphasized, and the problem of international organization, which he envisaged as structured, in accordance with his premises, into a federation of democratic communities, widely decentralized internally.
For Proudhon, justice and economic equality were always viewed primarily in terms of political freedom, not merely social justice and equality: because of this essential grounding in the classical ideals of the Revolution (from which stem his defense of small property and his polemic against any excessive state interference), his thought could be defined as “socialism for the peasants” and appeared—even to a far more radical Marx—as typically “bourgeois.” Yet it was precisely for this reason that, through his posthumous work *La capacité politique des classes ouvrières* (1865) and his remarkable “apostolate,” he influenced an important strand of French syndicalist and political thought. Proudhon spent his life in polemic with Christianity: he condemned its concept of “capital” as a betrayal of “justice,” and its notion of “providence” as a “myth” that could stifle revolutionary or reformist impulses; declaring its historical function exhausted, he sought to ground the values he considered “essential” entirely in the earthly realm. For him, Christianity was identified with certain ecclesiastical-clerical environments of the Restoration and the Second Empire: hence the serious limitation of his critique and the fundamental weakness of his attempt to preserve, on the plane of an absolute moral immanentism rather than through a recovered Christianity in its authenticity, those ethical values that were so close to his heart. All his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by a decree of 22 January 1852.