Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809 – 1865

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French political philosopher and the first thinker to call himself an anarchist. Born to a working-class family in Besancon, he educated himself by night while working as a compositor in a printing shop. His What is Property?, with its famous answer that property is theft, inaugurated the modern anarchist tradition, and his later System of Economic Contradictions, on which Marx wrote a celebrated polemical reply, developed a mutualist economic philosophy. He served briefly in the French National Assembly during the Second Republic and was imprisoned more than once for his writings.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born in 1809 at Besancon, the son of a brewer's cooper. Largely self-educated, he worked as a printer's apprentice, journeyman, and proofreader before winning in 1838 a Suard scholarship from the Academy of Besancon that allowed him three years of independent study. With the funds he produced in 1840 What Is Property?, whose answer 'property is theft' made him at thirty-one the most controversial social writer in France.

His major works include the Letter to M. Blanqui (1841), the System of Economic Contradictions or Philosophy of Poverty (1846) that drew Marx's withering Poverty of Philosophy in reply, the Confessions of a Revolutionary, the General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), the journalism collected as Letters to His Critics, On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858), and Of the Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865). Elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848, he served the Second Republic in parliament until his three-year imprisonment for press offenses against Louis Napoleon.

Proudhon is the principal nineteenth-century theorist of mutualism and of an anti-statist socialism that takes free contract among small producers as its political model. The first to call himself an anarchist, he shaped the federalist and syndicalist traditions of the French labor movement and exerted lasting influence on Bakunin, Kropotkin, and the First International. He died at Passy in January 1865.