Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
A printer who became a writer, he launched the phrase "property is theft" in 1840 and looked for a society of equals without a state.
Life
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), a printer turned writer born in Besançon, published What Is Property? in 1840, answering: 'It is theft'. He called himself an anarchist and defended a society built on labour, exchange between equals and federalism rather than on the state. He matters for questions of justice, property and obedience.
Main works
Argues that property as it exists lets some live off the labour of others: 'it is theft'.
Analyses the contradictions of the economy of his day; Marx would answer with The Poverty of Philosophy.
Written in prison, it sets against government an order based on free contracts between persons.
In his own words
« Why then, to this other question, What is property? can I not answer in the same way: It is theft »
« To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated, regulated, penned in, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, estimated, valued, censured, ordered about, by beings who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue… »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceAn antitheist rather than an atheist: he keeps God as a hypothesis of reason but fights him as man's enemy ("God is evil").
Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques (1846)
Justice is immanent to humanity: a real moral law found in social relations, not a revelation from above.
Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Église (1858)