PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH. - French political thinker and economist, b. at Besançon on 15 Jan. 1809, d. at Paris on 19 Dec. 1864. Of a humble family, he had to take employment as a printer at a very young age. Having passed his baccalaureate examinations in 1838, he obtained a three-year pension from the Academy of Besançon; he had his first contacts with Paris, published his first works, then returned to employment (1843) with a river transport firm at Lyons. Having settled permanently in Paris in 1846, he established relations with the circles of the economists and the socialists, and there met Marx, Bakunin, Blanc.
Elected a representative to the National Assembly in 1848, he sought to translate his programs of social reform into concrete proposals for a general moratorium on debts and a reduction of rents; but these came to nothing. He fought decisively against the Bonapartist dictatorship: sentenced to prison for certain articles of his, he fled to Belgium; having returned to his homeland and been recognized, he had to serve the sentence. Having left prison, he deluded himself that he could persuade the new Emperor to place himself at the head of the social revolution. In 1858, for his book De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise, he was again sentenced; having fled to Brussels, he had his penalty remitted. He returned to Paris at the end of 1862.
Because of the vastness and richness of its motives, into which there flow, together with the direct experience of a complex historical period, the influences of the most disparate ideal currents, filtered through a self-taught culture, P.'s thought is difficult to fit into a system. Although it takes its place within the tradition of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, and although it borrows from Hegel and the left Hegelians, through his contacts with Marx and Bakunin, a somewhat extrinsic imprint of dialectical method, his thought proceeds rather from Rousseau, in the social field, and from Smith, in the economic one. The emancipation of man from servitude and inequality, theorized by Rousseau on the political plane and brought about by the French Revolution, must, by means of the new economic science, be extended to the economic-social plane. After the "political" revolution of the citizen, of the bourgeois, the "economic," "social" revolution of the worker is necessary. Having violently criticized the cornerstone of bourgeois society, property (Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, Paris 1840, where the famous cry occurs: La propriété, c'est le vol!), he analyzed with particular harshness the antinomies of the social structure of his time (Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, ibid. 1846) with a tendency, however, to ascertain these antinomies rather than to attempt to resolve them. From them he does not move toward a revolutionary dialectic; their conflict, on the contrary, must be composed into an equilibrium of omissions, a dynamic equilibrium that is "justice." In his subsequent works P. sought to give a more precise picture of his doctrine and to popularize it in countless pamphlets and newspapers. In the economic field he advocates the restoration of the direct exchange of labor for goods, and, consequently, the abolition of money and of everything that derives from it and is transformed into capital ("mutualism"); in the social field the new order must be built through free negotiations between employers and organized workers, on the basis of the principle of justice; the perspective then broadens to the consideration of broader phenomena, such as that of war, whose positivity for the purposes of the historical and social process is emphasized, and to the problem of international organization, which he sees taking shape, in harmony with his premises, as a federation of democratic communities, largely decentralized internally.
For P. justice and economic equality are always seen above all as a function of political liberty, and not merely of social justice and equality: because of this substantial rootedness in the classic ideals of the Revolution (from which derive the defense of small property and the polemic against any excessive state interference) his thought could be defined a "socialisme pour les paysans" and could appear — to a far more radical Marx — typically "bourgeois." But it is also for this reason that he influences, through the posthumous writing on La capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1863) and the Sorelian "apostolate," an entire important strand of syndicalism and of French political thought. P. polemicized against Christianity all his life: he condemned its concept of "charity" because he saw in it the betrayal of "justice," and that of "providence" insofar as it was a "myth" that could check every revolutionary or reformist impulse; and, declaring its historical function exhausted, he intended to give the values he regarded as "essential" in it an entirely earthly rooting. For him Christianity was identified with certain ecclesiastical-clerical circles of the Restoration and the Second Empire: hence the very grave limitation of his criticism and the substantial weakness of his attempt to save, on the plane of an absolute moral immanentism rather than on that of a Christianity recovered in its authenticity, those ethical values that lay so much at his heart. All his works were placed on the Index by decr. 22 Jan. 1852.
Bibliography19 works
Francesco Natale