Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Quotes on Politics
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) — the first thinker to call himself an anarchist — developed the philosophical anarchism of mutualism in What Is Property? (1840), System of Economic Contradictions (1846), and the late On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865). The famous formula property is theft applies specifically to the accumulated economic property whose productive yield exceeds the labor of its owner; the parallel formula property is liberty applies to the personal possession that serves the producer's own work and life. The constructive program is mutualist: a federation of voluntary producer associations bound by reciprocal exchange contracts, replacing the capitalist wage-labor system without the centralized state apparatus the various nineteenth-century socialist alternatives proposed.
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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“All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.”
Du principe Fédératif [ Principle of Federation ] (1863) -
“All parties without exception, when they seek for power , are varieties of absolutism .”
As quoted in Philosophy at Work : A Constructive Approach to Philosophy (1960) by Ralph Bubrich Winn -
“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 -
“Justice is not the work of the law: on the contrary, the law is only the declaration and application of what is just in all circumstances where men have relations with one another.”
What is Property?(1840) | Chapter One -
“What is conscription? An act of property exercised over families by the government without warning, a robbery of men and money.”
What is Property?(1840) | Ch. IV -
“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" -
“Ch. V, Part 2; this might be the ultimate inspiration of the later slogan coined in 1848 by Anselme Bellegarrigue (and often attributed to Proudhon): " Anarchy is order, government is civil war. "”
What is Property?(1840)