Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes on Freedom
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) — the first thinker to call himself an anarchist — gave nineteenth-century French radical philosophy its most influential statement of mutualist freedom. The central thesis, presented across What Is Property? (1840), System of Economic Contradictions (1846), and the late On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865), is that genuine freedom is incompatible with both the accumulated economic property whose productive yield exceeds the labor of its owner and the centralized political authority of the modern state, and the corresponding constructive program is mutualist: a federation of voluntary producer associations bound by reciprocal exchange contracts. The framework shaped the subsequent anarchist tradition through Bakunin and Kropotkin and supplied a principal target for the Marxist alternative the Communist International would consolidate.
Quotes
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“Property is theft.”
Property is robbery! That is the war-cry of '93! That is the signal of revolutions ! Reader, calm yourself: I am no agent of discord, no firebrand of sedition . I anticipate history by a few days; I disclose a truth whose development we may try in vain to arrest; I write the preamble of our future constitution . This proposition which seems to you blasphemous — property is robbery — would, if our -
Attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
“What is government? It is the perpetual state of war between the strong and the weak.”
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“Anarchy is order; government is civil war.”
As man seeks justice in equality , so society seeks order in anarchy . -
Attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.”
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Attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon:
“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled.”
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“Money, money, always money — that is the essence of democracy . Democracy is more expensive than monarchy; it is incompatible with liberty.”
Solution Du Problême Social , quoted by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 328 -
“I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government .”
As quoted in "The Authority Principle" in No Gods, No Masters : An Anthology of Anarchism (1980) Daniel Guérin, as translated by Paul Sharkey (1998), p. 90 -
“I build no system . I ask an end to privilege , the abolition of slavery , equality of rights , and the reign of law . Justice , nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.”
What is Property?(1840) | Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"