Review of What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (1840)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read in English, in Benjamin R. Tucker’s 1876 translation to English.
A book in two volumes (“memoirs”) on the distinction between mere possession and a right to private property. Only the latter is guaranteed by the state.
What is the principle of heredity? What are the foundations of inequality? What is property?
Tucker first translates both Proudhon’s letter to the Academy of Besançon—his home town—and the Academy’s curt reply. The two letters really set the scene. Though he said he lived “in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence”, Proudhon was an orator. A pensioner of the Academy, he was rejected by the Academy. What is Property? is heavy with his rhetoric, but charmingly independent. He is contemptuous of lawyers and physiocrats, but he rejects the “chains of communism” too. He does not understand Ricardo or Mill, but he knows it, and he admits it freely. He thinks of every animal herd wrongly as “a collection of atoms, round, hooked, cubical, or triangular, but always perfectly identical”, which is contradictory to the mature anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, the Darwinian naturalist. Then again, unlike Kropotkin, Proudhon is a reformist, which is not a weakness. He is a misogynist though, and he reveals this in a footnote. It is irrelevant to his argument, except that it puts a crack right through his egalitarianism.
Proudhon’s contradictions are alarming, but he keeps digging toward the truth of his subject to the best of his ability, building up a steam that would drive Europe on its way from the bourgeoisie’s successful class war of 1789 to the broader class war against the bourgeoisie that broke out in 1848 and put this anarchist in parliament. In his positivism, the author thinks that he “contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears.” In reality, he was horny for fame and power, and he got it. His stone remains upon the edifice of philosophy. 185 years of political storms have not thrown it off.