Politics
1809 to 1865, Besançon, France
The first self-described anarchist - property is theft, mutualism, order without government, and a federation of free communes against both capital and the centralized state.
Start learning Pierre-Joseph →The argument behind the most famous slogan in the history of radical politics - that ‘property’ in Proudhon’s precise sense (the right to draw rent, interest, and profit from what others produce) is th…
Proudhon’s positive programme - not just a critique of property but a blueprint: an economy of independent producers and worker-associations exchanging goods at their labour-cost, financed by mutual free credit, w…
Proudhon was the first thinker to call himself an anarchist and to give the word a positive meaning - not chaos but ‘order without government,’ a society held together by contract and reciprocity rather than…
The mature Proudhon’s political theory - a decentralised federation of self-governing communes and regions, bound by contract, that balances the principle of liberty against the principle of authority and stands a…
Proudhon’s refusal of both systems on offer - capitalist property and state communism - and his famous quarrel with Karl Marx, who savaged him in The Poverty of Philosophy : the founding split between libertarian…
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