QuestionsWhat is a just society?Property is theft
What is a just society?Equality

Property is theft

"Property is theft"

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809 · 1865A printer who became a writer, he launched the phrase "property is theft" in 1840 and looked for a society of equals without a state.
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What it claims

Property (the right of increase) is theft; possession through labour is not.

Why

The owner draws an income from a thing without working or producing anything: he receives products in exchange for nothing.

The same idea through history
Jean-Jacques Rousseau1755Rousseau sees in the first man who fenced off a piece of ground and said "This is mine" the real founder of civil society, with its crimes and miseries. He does not say that property is theft: Proudhon draws the legal and economic argument from it.
Jacques Pierre Brissot1780Brissot argued as early as 1780 that exclusive property is a theft against nature. The phrase was therefore not born in 1840; Proudhon takes it up and turns it into a sustained demonstration.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon1840In What is Property?, the phrase is the starting point (chapter I) and the reasoning is carried through to the "right of increase" (chapter IV).
In short

"Property is theft" is an argument by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?, 1840, ch. I-IV, 1840) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: equality). Its claim: Property (the right of increase) is theft; possession through labour is not. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

What is Property?, 1840, ch. I-IV
Valid with an implicit premise

"What is property? It is theft." In 1840 Proudhon launched the phrase to shock, but he defends it with an argument. He does not say that every owner is a thief in everyday life, and he does not condemn possession: someone who farms a field or lives in a house has the right to use it. He targets what he calls the right of increase (droit d'aubaine): drawing an income (farm rent, house rent, interest) from a thing one does not work oneself. His argument: this right contradicts itself, because it claims for one person what the same title gives to everyone, and therefore refuses it to the others.

P1Property, in the lawyers' sense, is the right of increase: the power to draw an income from a thing (farm rent, house rent, interest, profit) without working.
P2This income is not an exchange: the proprietor produces nothing, neither by his own labour nor by his implement, and yet receives products. He receives them in exchange for nothing.
P3The title invoked to found property (occupying a thing, working it) is an equal right for everyone.
P4So, if this title founded a right of increase, everyone would hold it on the same title: the worker would owe the proprietor the rent that the proprietor owes him, and the difference would be zero. Property can exist only if this right is denied to others: it contradicts itself.
P5 · implicit premiseA levy on other people's labour, with nothing given in return, which is possible only by denying everyone else the right one claims, is theft.
P6Possession, on the other hand, is justified by labour and can belong to all: the worker has a right to the product, not to the instrument.
Therefore property (the right of increase) is theft; possession through labour is not.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where the proprietor's income has no counterpart and the right contradicts itself, but where it is not theft: for instance if the law, however unjust, grants this privilege to a few. Nothing in the other premises says that taking without a counterpart is theft.
With P1 to P6 the conclusion follows. Without P5 it no longer does: one can accept that the income has no counterpart and that the right contradicts itself without concluding that it is theft (it would only be an unjust privilege, or an inequality the law tolerates). P5 is thus the premise that carries the moral judgment, and it is the one a defender of property can contest. P6 serves only the second half of the conclusion: Proudhon does not ask us to abolish all use of things, but to replace property with possession.
Analogy. In a class, one pupil makes every classmate pay two euros a week to "keep" the only sunny bench, doing nothing for the others. Proudhon would say: if the bench belongs to everyone on the same title, everyone would have the right to collect the same fee, and everything cancels out. The right exists only because it is denied to the others, and that is why it resembles theft. His opponent would answer: perhaps the pupil built the bench himself.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated by Proudhon (J.-B. Say) attacks premise 6

We cannot do without it: without property, one farmer would contend with another to cultivate a field with no proprietor, and the field would remain uncultivated. The proprietor brings order.

Proudhon replies
Proudhon
Proudhon answers that farmers do not fight the proprietors today because they think them legitimate possessors. He says he proved in chapter II that possession without property is enough to maintain social order, and that it is no harder to reconcile possessors without masters than tenants with proprietors.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The basic disagreement is empirical and still open: can a society that keeps the use of land and tools without letting anyone draw rent from them maintain order and production? Proudhon says so in this book; his opponents doubt that it would motivate people to farm or invest. Our summary does not settle it.
John Locke 1690 · attacks premise 3

The title is not equal for all: it belongs to the one who labours. Everyone owns his own person, hence his labour. By joining his labour to what he takes out of the state of nature, he joins to it something that is his own, and no one else has a right to what he has thus acquired, at least where enough and as good is left for others. That is not theft.

Proudhon replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1690, after the author's death (1865).
Proudhon 1840 · Proudhon's answer to the labour theory (he does not cite Locke in this passage)
Proudhon grants that the worker makes the fruits of his labour his own, but he does not understand how property in products carries with it property in the raw material. The skilful fisherman does not become proprietor of the fishing-grounds, nor the hunter of a canton's game. The cultivator who has improved the soil has a possessor's right of preference, never a property-title to the soil.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both authors accept that the worker has a right to what he produces. They differ on the step from the product to the land itself: does labour give a right to the thing (Locke) or only to what one draws from it (Proudhon)? The debate on this step, and on the condition "enough and as good for others", has remained open.
Karl Marx 1847 · attacks premise 1

Proudhon has the wrong method. To try to define property as an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence. Defining bourgeois property means setting out all the social relations of bourgeois production. Marx here mainly targets the System of Economic Contradictions (1846), but his criticism of method also reaches the 1840 book.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Proudhon in the texts.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Marx and Proudhon disagree on what property is: a right that can be judged from justice and equality (Proudhon), or a set of relations of production that can only be changed by changing production itself (Marx). Each finds the other's approach too abstract or not radical enough; the basic disagreement remains.
Proudhon himself, twenty-five years later 1866 · attacks the conclusion

Our summary: in the Theory of Property, published after his death, Proudhon does not drop his criticism of the right of increase, but he also sees in property a force that can counterbalance the State and protect the individual against it. He no longer asks for its abolition: he wants to correct it and put it at the service of liberty.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1866, after the author's death (1865).
Where the debate stands (our summary)One can read it as a change of position, or as the constant idea that property must be limited by equality and by everyone's liberty. Our summary does not settle it.