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.