PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH. — French political thinker and economist, b. at Besançon on 15 January 1809, d. at Paris on 19 December 1864. Of humble origin, 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 scholarship from the Academy of Besançon; he made his first contacts with Paris, published his first works, and then returned to employment (1843) with a river-transport company in Lyon. Having settled permanently in Paris in 1846, he established relations with circles of economists and socialists, where he met Marx, Bakunin, and Blanc.
Elected as 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 they came to nothing. He decisively opposed the Bonapartist dictatorship: condemned to prison for certain articles he had written, he fled to Belgium; returning to his homeland and being recognized, he had to serve his sentence. Released from prison, he deluded himself into thinking that he could persuade the new Emperor to place himself at the head of the social revolution. In 1858, he was again condemned for his book De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise; having fled to Brussels, he was granted a pardon. He returned to Paris at the end of 1862.
Because of the breadth and richness of the themes in which, together with the direct experience of a complex historical period, the influences of the most disparate ideal currents converge, filtered through a self-taught culture, P.’s thought is difficult to frame within a system. Although situated within the tradition of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Cabet, and although, through his contacts with Marx and Bakunin, he borrowed from Hegel and the left Hegelians a somewhat extrinsic imprint of dialectical method, his
thought proceeds rather from Rousseau in the social sphere and from Smith in the economic sphere. The emancipation of man from servitude and inequality, theorized by Rousseau on the political plane and brought about by the French Revolution, must, through the new economic science, be extended to the economic and social plane. After the “political” revolution of the citizen and 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, containing the famous cry: La propriété, c'est le vol!), he analyzed with particular bluntness 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 establish these antinomies rather than to attempt to resolve them. He does not proceed from them toward a revolutionary dialectic; their conflict, on the contrary, must be composed in a balance of omissions, a dynamic balance that is “justice.” In his subsequent works P. sought to provide a more precise outline of his doctrine and to popularize it in countless pamphlets and newspapers. In the economic sphere he advocated 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 sphere, the new order was to be built through free negotiations between employers and organized workers, on the basis of the principle of justice. His perspective then broadened to include consideration of wider phenomena, such as war, whose positive effects on the historical and social process he emphasized, and the problem of international organization, which, in harmony with his premises, he saw taking shape in a federation of democratic communities, extensively decentralized internally.
For P., justice and economic equality are always viewed chiefly as functions of political freedom, and not merely of social justice and equality: because of this substantial rootedness in the classical ideals of the Revolution (from which derive his defense of small property and his polemic against all excessive state interference), his position could be defined as a “socialisme pour les paysans” and could appear — to a far more radical Marx — typically “bourgeois.” But for this very reason, through the posthumous work La capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1863) and the “apostolate” of the Sorell brothers, he influenced an important current of French syndicalism and political thought. P. polemicized against Christianity throughout his life: he condemned its concept of “charity” because he saw in it a betrayal of “justice,” and that of “providence” insofar as it was a “myth” capable of restraining every revolutionary or reforming impulse; and, declaring its historical function exhausted, he sought to give the values he considered “essential” to it a wholly terrestrial foundation. For him Christianity was identified with certain ecclesiastical and clerical circles of the Restoration and the Second Empire: hence the grave limitation of his criticism and the fundamental weakness of his attempt to preserve, on the basis of an absolute moral immanentism rather than that of a Christianity recovered in its authenticity, those ethical values that mattered so deeply to him. All his works were placed on the Index by decree of 22 January 1852.
M. Augé-Laribé, A. Berthod, C. Bouglé etc., P. et notre temps, Paris 1920; A. Cuvillier, P., ibid. 1937; A. Cornu, A. Cuvillier, etc., A la lumière du marxisme, II, 1, ibid. 1937; G. Guy-Grand, Pour connaître la pensée de P., ibid. 1947; J. Bourgeat, P. père du socialisme français, ibid. 1947; E. Dolléans, P., 4ᵉ ed., ibid. 1948. On particular “themes” in P.’s thought: Chen-Kui-Si, La dialectique dans l'oeuvre de P., Paris 1937; M. Amoudrux, P. et l'Europe, ibid. 1945; H. De Lubac, P. et le christianisme, ibid. 1945; P. Hauptmann, Marx et P., ibid. 1947. Francesco Natale