Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)

French publicist, economist and sociologist; petty-bourgeois thinker; founder of anarchist theory.

Proudhon was born on January 15, 1809, on the outskirts of Besançon, France, into a peasant and craftman’s family. In his early years, he worked as a typesetter and clerk in a printing house. In 1837, he moved to Paris and engaged in writing activities. In 1840, he published the book, Qu’est ce que la propriété? (What is Property?), in which he put forth the view that “property is theft”. From a petty-bourgeois standpoint, he criticized the private property in the capitalist socialized large-scale production and held that it was possible to overcome the grievances of capitalism by protecting the private property of small producers. In October 1846, he published The Philosophy of Poverty, which systematically expounded his idealist conception of history and reformist economic theory, and attacked the workers’ movement and communism. After the outbreak of the French Revolution in February 1848, he served as editor-in-chief of the editorials, Le Représentant du peuple (The Representative of the People) and La Voix du Peuple (The Voice of the People). In June 1848, he was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly. In 1849, Proudhon was arrested for writing an article against Louis Bonaparte and was imprisoned, and wrote Confessions of a Revolutionary and General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century in prison, from which he was released in 1852. In 1858, in his book On Justice in the Revolution and the Church, Proudhon fiercely attacked the ignorance and tyranny of the Catholic Church, denied the existence of God, and, under threat of arrest again, he went into exile in Belgium until his return to France in 1862, where he continued to preach his reformist and anarchist theories.

From the standpoint of small producers, Proudhon advocated the absolute freedom of individuals, opposed violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, opposed any state and government, and opposed all authority, and he fantasized about establishing private property of small producers and realizing petty-bourgeois socialism through the path of peaceful reforms. In his works such as The Poverty of Philosophy and On Proudhon, Marx profoundly exposed and criticized Proudhon’s idealist conception of history, reformism and anarchism. Proudhon died on 19 January 1865.