Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Besançon, 1809 – Passy, 1865) was a French philosopher, economist and journalist, regarded as one of the fathers of anarchism and the first person to call himself an anarchist. He lived through the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, and his writings shaped libertarian socialism and mutualism, an economic current based on reciprocal exchange. His influence reaches the history of the labour movement and the debates over property, power and the state that remain alive today.

He was born into a modest family. His father was a cooper and brewer who, as the story goes, sold his beer for no more than the cost of production plus his own wages, because he would have felt he was stealing if he charged more. That instinct for a just price, understood as a strict payment for labour, became one of the roots of Proudhon's thought. As a boy he looked after cows, then worked in his father's workshop, and later as a farm hand and a typesetter. A scholarship allowed him to study for a time at the college in Besançon, but lack of money prevented him from finishing his schooling. He taught himself Latin, Hebrew and the basics of comparative philology while working as a proofreader in a printing house.

Around 1829 he met Charles Fourier, whose conversations in the print shop left a lasting impression on him. After a journey around France in search of work, and the failure of his own publishing venture in 1838, he won a grant from the Academy of Besançon that allowed him to devote himself to writing. His book What Is Property?, published in 1840, made him famous overnight with the phrase “property is theft!”. Although it is often read as a total attack on ownership, Proudhon distinguished between the personal possession defended by workers and peasants and private property in land and capital, which allowed owners to profit without working. The book also drew the attention of Karl Marx, with whom he corresponded and shared an intellectual friendship in Paris. The break came when Marx answered his Philosophy of Poverty with The Poverty of Philosophy, a dispute that helped divide anarchists and Marxists within the International Working Men's Association.

In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly after the proclamation of the Second Republic. There he kept his distance from the republican-bourgeois mood and, through his newspapers Le Représentant du peuple and La Voix du peuple, criticised the national workshops and Louis Napoleon, whom he saw as an enemy of the proletariat. He was sentenced to prison in 1849 and fled to Belgium. When he returned to France he was arrested and held at the Sainte-Pélagie prison, where he wrote General Idea of the Revolution. After a further trial over his book on justice and the Church, and another exile, an amnesty allowed him to return. In 1863 he published The Federative Principle, in which he developed his idea of integral federalism, aiming to decentralise power not only in the state but throughout society.

After his death, his libertarian socialism split into several currents: individualist anarchism, collectivist anarchism, anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with figures such as Kropotkin, Cafiero and Benjamin Tucker. His defence of workers' associations, mutual credit and federation as a way of organising freedom makes him a key reference in libertarian political thought.