Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Proudhon
Introduction to Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), French writer and political theorist, sometimes referred to as the father of modern anarchism.
Proudhon was born in Besançon on January 15, 1809. Belonging to a poor family, he received scholarships that enabled him to study and to write. In his pamphlet What Is Property? (1840; trans. 1876), Proudhon condemned the abuses of concentrated economic power and private property. His radical theories made him popular as an anarchist thinker, and he was elected to the constituent assembly after the Revolution of 1848. In the assembly, his proposal to levy antiproperty tax on rent and interest was defeated. He also attempted to found a people’s bank at which credit would be provided to borrowers without interest.
Proudhon opposed the view of the French utopian socialists François Fourier and Claude Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, on the ground that society could not be transformed in accordance with a preconceived plan. He envisioned a society in which people’s ethical nature and sense of moral responsibility would be so highly developed that government would be unnecessary to regulate and protect society. Proudhon rejected the use of force to impose any system on people. In the ideal state of society, what he called “order in anarchy,” people would act in a responsible, ethical manner of their own free will.
Proudhon was imprisoned from 1849 to 1852 for criticizing Louis Napoleon. After his release he lived in exile in Belgium. After being pardoned (1862), he returned to France in broken health and died on January 19, 1865.
Proudhon’s greatest work is generally considered his System of Economic Contradictions; or, The Philosophy of Misery (1846; trans., vol. 1, 1888). Other major works are Les idées révolutionnaires (Revolutionary Ideas, 1849), De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église (Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, 3 volumes, 1858), and De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (Of the Political Capacity of the Working Classes, 1863).” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Pierre Joseph Proudhon in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia