Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French philosopher, economist, journalist, and politician who is regarded as the founder of mutualism and anarchism. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist and to use the term in a positive sense. He is also known for his slogan "Property is theft!" and his critique of capitalism and the state. Proudhon was born in Besançon, France, on 15 January 1809. His father was a cooper and brewer, and his mother was a peasant. He received little formal education and worked as a cowherd, printer, compositor, and proofreader. He also taught himself various languages and subjects, such as mathematics, history, literature, and philosophy. He won a scholarship to study at the Besançon Academy in 1838, where he developed his interest in social and political issues. In 1840, he published his first major work, What is Property?, in which he argued that property is a form of exploitation and oppression that violates the natural right of equality. He proposed a system of mutual exchange and cooperation among workers and producers, based on labor notes and free credit. He also criticized religion, marriage, and the state as sources of authority and domination. In 1846, he met Karl Marx in Paris and engaged in a correspondence with him. However, they soon disagreed on various issues, such as the role of violence, the nature of communism, and the concept of class struggle. Proudhon rejected Marx's idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat and advocated for a gradual transition to a decentralized federation of autonomous communes. During the Revolution of 1848, Proudhon was elected to the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly. He opposed both the conservative and the radical factions of the revolution and advocated for a peaceful social transformation based on mutualism. He also founded several newspapers and journals to spread his ideas and to criticize the government. In 1849, he was arrested for insulting President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and sentenced to three years in prison. He wrote several works while in prison, such as The Confessions of a Revolutionary, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, and The Philosophy of Poverty. In these works, he developed his theory of federalism, anarchism, justice, morality, and progress. He was released from prison in 1852 and went into exile in Belgium. He continued to write and publish various works on economics, politics, history, art, literature, and sociology. He also engaged in several controversies with other thinkers and activists, such as Mikhail Bakunin, Frédéric Bastiat, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo, Joseph Déjacque, Charles Fourier, John Stuart Mill, Richard Wagner. He returned to France in 1862 after receiving amnesty from Napoleon III. He resumed his journalistic activity and participated in various cooperative projects. He also wrote his last major work The Theory of Property (1865), in which he revised some of his earlier views on property and advocated for a synthesis between property and community. He died in Passy on 19 January 1865, due to a pulmonary edema. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. His writings and influence have inspired various social movements and schools of thought, such as libertarian socialism, syndicalism, mutualism, anarchism, and cooperativism.