PART II

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Anarchism

ANARCHISM

A CRITICISM AND HISTORY

OF THE ANARCHIST

THEORY

BY

E. V. ZENKER

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

1897

COPYRIGHT, 1897

BY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

On the day of the bomb outrage in the French Parliament I gave an

impromptu discourse upon Anarchism to an intelligent audience anxious

to know more about it, touching upon its intellectual ancestry, its

doctrines, propaganda, the lines of demarcation that separate it from

Socialism and Radicalism, and so forth. The impression which my

explanations of it made upon my audience was at the same time

flattering and yet painful to me. I felt almost ashamed that I had

told these men, who represented the pick of the middle-class political

electorate, something entirely new to them in speaking of matters

which, considering their reality and the importance of the question,

ought to be familiar to every citizen. Having thus had my attention

drawn to this _lacuna_ in the public mind, I was induced to make a

survey of the most diverse circles of the political and Socialist

world, both of readers and writers, and the result was the resolve to

extend my previous studies of Anarchism (which had not extended much

beyond the earliest theorists), and to develop my lecture into a book.

This book I now present to my readers.

The accomplishment of my resolve has been far from easy. What little

literature exists upon the subject of Anarchism is almost exclusively

hostile to it, which is a great drawback for one who is seeking not

the objects of a partisan, but simply and solely the truth. One had

constantly to gaze, so to speak, through a forest of prejudices and

errors in order to discover the truth like a little spot of blue sky

above. In this respect I found it mattered little whether I applied to

the press, or to the so-called scientific Socialists, or to fluent

pamphleteers.

"In vielen Worten wenig Klarheit,

Ein Fuenkchen Witz und keine Wahrheit."[1]

[1] Many words, but little light; a spark of wit, but no

truth.

Laveleye, for instance, does not even know of Proudhon; for him

Bakunin is the only representative of Anarchism and the most

characteristic; Socialism, Nihilism, and Anarchism mingle together in

wild confusion in the mind of this social historian. Garin, who wrote

a big book, entitled _The Anarchists_, is not acquainted with a single

Anarchist author, except some youthful writings of Proudhon's and a

few agitationist placards and manifestoes of the modern period. The

result of this ignorance is that he identifies Anarchism completely

with Collectivism, and carries his ridiculous ignorance so far as to

connect the former Austrian minister Schaeffle, who was then the chief

adviser of Count Hohenwart, in some way or other with the Anarchists.

Professor Enrico Ferri, again, exposes his complete ignorance of the

question at issue sufficiently by branding Herbert Spencer as an

Anarchist. In fact, the only work that can be called scientifically

useful is the short article on "Anarchism" in the _Cyclopaedia of

Political Science_, from the pen of Professor George Adler. All

pamphlets, articles, and essays which have since appeared on the same

subject are, conveniently but uncritically, founded upon this short

but excellent essay of Adler's. Since the extraordinary danger of

Anarchist doctrines is firmly fixed as a dogma in the minds of the

vast majority of mankind, it is apparently quite unnecessary to obtain

any information about its real character in order to pronounce a

decided, and often a decisive, judgment upon it. And so almost all who

have hitherto written upon or against Anarchism, with a few very rare

exceptions, have probably never read an Anarchist publication, even

cursorily, but have contented themselves with certain traditional

catchwords.

As a contrast to this, it was necessary, for the purposes of a

critical work upon Anarchism, to go right back to its sources and to

the writings of those who represented it. But here I found a further

difficulty, which could not always be overcome. Where was I to get

these writings? Our great public libraries, whose pride it is to

possess the most complete collections possible of all the texts of

Herodotus or Sophocles, have of course thought it beneath their

dignity to place on their shelves the works of Anarchist doctrinaires,

or even to collect the pamphlet literature for or against

Anarchism--productions which certainly cannot take a very high rank

from the point of view either of literature or of fact. The

consequence of this foresight on the part of our librarians is that,

to-day, anyone who inquires into the development of the social

question in these great libraries devoted to science and public study

has nothing to find, and therefore nothing to seek. I have thus been

compelled to procure the materials I wanted partly through the

kindness of friends and acquaintances, and partly by purchase of

books--often at considerable expense,--but always by roundabout means

and with great difficulty. And here I should like specially to

emphasise the fact that it was the literary representatives of

Anarchism themselves who, although I never concealed my hostility to

Anarchism, placed their writings at my disposal in the kindest and

most liberal manner; and for this I hereby beg to offer them my

heartiest thanks, and most of all Professor Elisee Reclus, of

Brussels.

But if I thus enter into details of the difficulties which met me in

writing the present book, it is not with the object of surrounding

myself with the halo of a pioneer. I only wish to lay my hand on a

sore which has no doubt troubled other authors also; and, at the same

time, to explain to my critics the reason why there are still so many

_lacunae_ in this work. I have, for instance, been quite unable to

procure any book or essay by Tucker, or a copy of his journal

_Liberty_, although several booksellers did their best to help me, and

although I applied personally to Mr. Tucker at Boston. It was all in

vain. _Ut aliquid fecisse videatur_, I ordered from Chicago M. J.

Schaack's book, _Anarchy and Anarchists, a History of the Red Terror

and the Social Revolution in America and Europe: Communism, Socialism,

and Nihilism, in Doctrine and in Deed_. After waiting four months, and

repeatedly urging things on, I at last received it, and soon perceived

that I had merely bought a pretty picture book for my library for my

five dollars. The book contains, in spite of its grandiloquent title,

its six hundred and ninety-eight large octavo pages, and its "numerous

illustrations from authentic photographs and from original drawings,"

not a single word about the doctrine of Anarchism in general, or

American Anarchism in particular. The author, a police official, takes

up a standpoint which is certainly quite explicable in one of his

position, but which is hardly suitable for a social historian. To him

"all Socialists are Anarchists as a first step, although all

Anarchists are not precisely Socialists" (see page 22),--which is

certainly praiseworthy moderation in a police officer. He calls

Ferdinand Lassalle "the father of German Anarchism as it exists

to-day" (page 23); on the other hand he has no knowledge of Tucker (of

Boston), the most prominent exponent of theoretical Anarchism in

America. This, then, was the literature which was at my disposal.

As regards the standpoint which I have taken in this book upon

questions of fact, it is strictly the coldly observant and critical

attitude of science and no other. I was not concerned to write either

for or against Anarchism, but only to tell the great mass of the

people that concerns itself with public occurrences for the first time

what Anarchism really is, and what it wishes to do, and whether

Anarchist views are capable of discussion like other opinions. The

condemnation of Anarchism, which becomes necessary in doing this,

proceeds exclusively from the exercise of scientific criticism, and

has nothing to do with any partisan judgment, be it what it may. It

would be a contradiction to adopt a partisan attitude at the very time

when one is trying to remind public opinion of a duty which has been

forgotten in the heat of party conflict.

But I do not for a moment allow myself to be deluded into thinking

that, with all my endeavours to be just to all, I have succeeded in

doing justice to all. Elisee Reclus wrote to me, when I informed him

of my intention to write the present book, and of my opinion of

Anarchism, that he wished me well, but doubted the success of my work,

for (he said) _on ne comprend rien que ce qu'on aime_. Of this remark

I have always had a keen recollection. If that great savant and gentle

being, the St. John of the Anarchists, thinks thus, what shall I have

to expect from his passionate fellow-disciples, or from the

terror-blinded opponents of Anarchism? "We cannot understand what we

do not love," and unfortunately we do not love unvarnished truth.

Anarchists will, therefore, simply deny my capacity to write about

their cause, and call my book terribly reactionary; Socialists will

think me too much of a "Manchester Economist"; Liberals will think me

far too tolerant towards the Socialistic disturbers of their peace;

and Reactionaries will roundly denounce me as an Anarchist in

disguise. But this will not dissuade me from my course, and I shall be

amply compensated for these criticisms which I have foreseen by the

knowledge of having advanced real and serious discussion on this

subject. For only when we have ceased to thrust aside the theory of

Anarchism as madness from the first, only when we have perceived that

one can and must understand many things that we certainly cannot like,

only then will Anarchists also place themselves on a closer human

footing with us, and learn to love us as men even though they often

perhaps cannot understand us, and of their own accord abandon their

worst argument, the bomb.

E. V. ZENKER.

CONTENTS.

PART I.--EARLY ANARCHISM.

PAGE

PREFACE v

CHAP.

I. PRECURSORS AND EARLY HISTORY 3

Forerunners and Early History -- Definitions -- Is Anarchism

a Pathological Phenomenon? -- Anarchism Considered

Sociologically --Anarchist Movements in the Middle Ages --

The Theory of the Social Contract with Reference to Anarchism

-- Anarchist Movements during the French Revolution -- The

Philosophic Premises of the Anarchist Theory -- The Political

and Economic Assumptions of Anarchism.

II. PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON 32

Biography -- His Philosophic Standpoint -- His Early Writings

-- The "Contradictions of Political Economy" -- Proudhon's

Federation -- His Economic Views -- His Theory of Property --

Collectivism and Mutualism -- Attempts to Put his Views into

Practice -- Proudhon's Last Writings -- Criticism.

III. MAX STIRNER AND THE GERMAN PROUDHONISTS 100

Germany in 1830-40 and France -- Stirner and Proudhon --

Biography of Stirner -- _The Individual and his Property_

(_Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_) -- The Union of Egoists --

The Philosophic Contradiction of the _Einziger_ -- Stirner's

Practical Error -- Julius Faucher -- Moses Hess -- Karl Gruen

-- Wilhelm Marr.

PART II.--MODERN ANARCHISM.

CHAP. PAGE

IV. RUSSIAN INFLUENCES 141

The Earliest Signs of Anarchist Views in Russia in 1848 --

The Political, Economic, Mental, and Social Circumstances

of Anarchism in Russia -- Michael Bakunin -- Biography --

Bakunin's Anarchism -- Its Philosophic Foundations --

Bakunin's Economic Programme -- His Views as to the

Practicability of his Plans -- Sergei Netschajew -- The

Revolutionary Catechism -- The Propaganda of Action -- Paul

Brousse.

V. PETER KROPOTKIN AND HIS SCHOOL 172

Biography -- Kropotkin's Main Views -- Anarchist Communism

and the "Economics of the Heap" (_Tas_) -- Kropotkin's

Relation to the Propaganda of Action -- Elisee Reclus: his

Character and Anarchist Writings -- Jean Grave -- Daniel

Saurin's _Order through Anarchy_ -- Louise Michel and G.

Elievant -- A. Hamon and the Psychology of Anarchism --

Charles Malato and other French Writers on Anarchist

Communism -- The Italians: Cafiero, Merlino, and Malatesta.

VI. GERMANY, ENGLAND, AND AMERICA 213

Individualist and Communist Anarchism -- Arthur Muelberger --

Theodor Hertzka's _Freeland_ -- Eugen Duehring's "Anticratism"

-- Moritz von Egidy's "United Christendom" -- John Henry

Mackay -- Nietzsche and Anarchism -- Johann Most -- Auberon

Herbert's Voluntary State -- R. B. Tucker.

PART III.--THE RELATION OF ANARCHISM TO SCIENCE AND POLITICS.

CHAP. PAGE

VII. ANARCHISM AND SOCIOLOGY: HERBERT SPENCER 245

Spencer's Views on the Organisation of Society -- Society

Conceived from the Nominalist and Realist Standpoint -- The

Idealism of Anarchists -- Spencer's Work: _From Freedom to

Restraint_.

VIII. THE SPREAD OF ANARCHISM IN EUROPE 260

First Period (1867-1880): The Peace and Freedom League -- The

Democratic Alliance and the Jurassic Bund -- Union with and

Separation from the "International" -- The Rising at Lyons --

Congress at Lausanne -- The Members of the Alliance in Italy,

Spain, and Belgium -- Second Period (from 1880): The German

Socialist Law -- Johann Most -- The London Congress -- French

Anarchism since 1880 -- Anarchism in Switzerland -- The

Geneva Congress -- Anarchism in Germany and Austria -- Joseph

Penkert -- Anarchism in Belgium and England -- Organisation

of the Spanish Anarchists -- Italy -- Character of Modern

Anarchism -- The Group -- Numerical Strength of the Anarchism

of Action.

IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS 304

Legislation against Anarchists -- Anarchism and Crime --

Tolerance towards Anarchist Theory -- Suppression of

Anarchist Crime -- Conclusion.

PART I

EARLY ANARCHISM

"A hundred fanatics are found to support a theological or

metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric theorem."

CESARE LOMBROSO.

CHAPTER I

PRECURSORS AND EARLY HISTORY

Forerunners and Early History Definitions -- Is Anarchism

a Pathological Phenomenon? -- Anarchism Considered

Sociologically --Anarchist Movements in the Middle Ages --

The Theory of the Social Contract with Reference to Anarchism

-- Anarchist Movements during the French Revolution -- The

Philosophic Premises of the Anarchist Theory -- The Political

and Economic Assumptions of Anarchism.

"Die Welt wird alt und wird wieder jung

Doch der Mensch hofft immer auf Besserung."

Anarchy means, in its ideal sense, the perfect, unfettered

self-government of the individual, and, consequently, the absence of

any kind of external government. This fundamental formula, which in

its essence is common to all actual and real Theoretical Anarchists,

contains all that is necessary as a guide to the distinguishing

features of this remarkable movement. It demands the unconditional

realisation of freedom, both subjectively and objectively, equally in

political and in economic life. In this, Anarchism is distinct from

Liberalism, which, even in its most radical representatives, only

allows unlimited freedom in economic affairs, but has never questioned

the necessity of some compulsory organisation in the social

relationships of individuals; whereas Anarchism would extend the

Liberal doctrine of _laisser faire_ to all human actions, and would

recognise nothing but a free convention or agreement as the only

permissible form of human society. But the formula stated above

distinguishes Anarchism much more strongly (because the distinction is

fundamental) from its antithesis, Socialism, which out of the

celebrated trinity of the French Revolution has placed another figure,

that of Equality, upon a pedestal as its only deity. Anarchism and

Socialism, in spite of the fact that they are so often confused, both

intentionally and unintentionally, have only one thing in common,

namely, that both are forms of idolatry, though they have different

idols, both are religions and not sciences, dogmas and not

speculations. Both of them are a kind of honestly meant social

mysticism, which, anticipating the partly possible and perhaps even

probable results of yet unborn centuries, urge upon mankind the

establishment of a terrestrial Eden, of a land of the absolute Ideal,

whether it be Freedom or Equality. It is only natural, in view of the

difficulty of creating new thoughts, that our modern seekers after the

millennium should look for their Eden by going backwards, and should

shape it on the lines of stages of social progress that have long

since been passed by; and in this is seen the irremediable internal

contradiction of both movements: they intend an advance, but only

cause retrogression.

* * * * *

Are we, then, to take Anarchism seriously, or shall we pass it by

merely with a smile of superiority and a deprecating wave of our hand?

Shall we declare war to the knife against Anarchists, or have they a

claim to have their opinions discussed and respected as much as those

of the Liberals or Social Democrats, or as those of religious or

ecclesiastical bodies? These questions we can only answer at the

conclusion of this book; but at this point I should like to do away

with one conception of Anarchism which is frequently urged against it.

Those who wish nowadays to seem particularly enlightened and tolerant

as regards this dangerous movement, describe it as a "pathological

phenomenon." We have done our best to make some sense of this

mischievous, though modern, analogy, but have never succeeded, in

spite of Lombroso, Kraft-Ebing, and others undeniably capable in their

own department. The former, in his clever book on this subject,[1] has

confused individual with social pathology. When Lombroso completely

identified the Anarchist theory and idea--with which he is by no means

familiar--with the persons engaged in Anarchist actions, and made an

attempt (which is certainly successful) to trace the political methods

of thought and action of a great many of them to pathological

premises, he reached the false conclusion that Anarchism itself was a

pathological phenomenon. But in reality the only conclusion from his

demonstration is that many unhealthy and criminal characters adopt

Anarchism, a conclusion which he himself admits in this remark, that

"Criminals take part specially in the beginnings of insurrections and

revolutions in large numbers, for, at a time when the weak and

undecided are still hesitating, the impulsive activity of abnormal and

unhealthy characters preponderates, and their example then produces

epidemics of excesses." This fact we fearlessly acknowledge; and it

gains a special significance for us in that the Anarchists themselves

base their system of "propaganda by action" upon this knowledge. But

if we are therefore to call this phenomenon a symptom that Anarchism

itself is a pathological phenomenon, to what revolutionary movement

might we not then apply this criterion, and what would it imply if we

did?

[1] Cesare Lombroso, _The Anarchists, a Study in Criminal

Psychology and Sociology_. (German translation by Dr. Hans

Kneller, after the 2d edition of the original. Hamburg,

1895.)

I have stated, and (I hope) have shown elsewhere[2] what may be

understood by "pathological" social phenomena, namely, an abnormal

unhealthy condition of the popular mind in the sense of a general

aberration of the intellect of the masses, as is possibly the case in

what is known as Anti-Semitism. But even in this limited sense it

appears quite inadmissible and incorrect to call Anarchism a

pathological phenomenon. Let us be fair and straightforward, if we

wish to learn; let us be just, even if we are to benefit our most

dangerous enemies; for in the end we shall benefit ourselves. With

Anarchism there is no question of transitory anomalies of the public

mind, but of a well defined condition which is visibly increasing and

which is necessarily connected with all previous and accompanying

conditions; it is a question of ideas and opinions which are the

logical, even if in practice inadmissible, development of views that

have long been well known and recognised by the majority of civilised

men. A further test of every unhealthy phenomenon, namely, its local

character, is entirely lacking in Anarchism; for we meet with it

to-day extending all over the world, wherever society has developed in

a manner similar to our own; we meet it not merely in one class, but

see members of all classes, and especially members of the upper

classes, attach themselves to it. The fathers, as we may call them, of

the Anarchist theory are almost entirely men of great natural gifts,

who rank high both intellectually and morally, whose influence has

been felt for half a century, who have been born in Russia, Germany,

France, Italy, England, and America, men who are as different one from

another as are the circumstances and environment of their respective

countries, but who are all of one mind as regards the theory which we

mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

[2] _Rupticism, Pietism, and Anti-Semitism at the Close of

the Nineteenth Century_, a study in social history. Vienna,

1894.

And that is what Anarchism undoubtedly is: a theory, an idea, with all

the failings and dangers, but also with all the advantages which a

theory always possesses, with just as much, and only as much,

validity as a theory can demand as its due, but at any rate a theory

which is as old as human civilisation, because it goes back to the

most powerful civilising factor in humanity.

* * * * *

The care for the bare necessities of life, the inexorable

struggle for existence, has aroused in mankind the desire for

fellow-strugglers, for companions. In the tribe his power of

resistance was increased, and his prospect of self-support grew in

proportion as he developed together with his fellows into a new

collective existence. But the fact that, notwithstanding this, he did

not grow up like a mere animal in a flock, but in such a way that he

always--even if often only after long and bitter experience--found his

proper development in the tribe--this has made him a man and his tribe

a society. Which is the more ancient and more sacred, the unfettered

rights of the individual or the welfare of the community? Can anyone

take this question seriously who is accustomed to look at the life and

development of society in the light of facts? Individualism and

Altruism are as inseparably connected as light and darkness, as day

and night. The individualistic and the social sense in human society

correspond to the centrifugal and centripetal forces in the universe,

or to the forces of attraction and repulsion that govern molecular

activity. Their movements must be regarded simply as manifestations of

forces in the direction of the resultants, whose components are

Individualism and Altruism. If, to use a metaphor from physics, one of

these forces was excluded, the body would either remain stock-still,

or would fly far away into infinity. But such a case is, in society as

in physics, only possible in imagination, because the distinction

between the two forces is itself only a purely mental separation of

one and the same thing.

This is all that can be said either for or against the exclusive

accentuation of any one single social force. All the endeavours to

create a realm of unlimited and absolute freedom have only as much

value as the assumption, in physics, of space absolutely void of air,

or of a direction of motion absolutely uninfluenced by the force of

gravity. The force which sets a bullet in motion is certainly

something actual and real; but the influence which would correspond to

this force, this direction in the sense in which the physicist

distinguishes it, exists only in theory, because the bullet will, as

far as all actual experience goes, only move in the direction of a

resultant, in which the impetus given to it and the force of gravity

are inseparably united and appear as one. If, therefore, it is also

clear that the endeavour to obtain a realm of unconditional freedom

contradicts _ipso facto_ the conception of life, yet all such

endeavours are by no means valueless for our knowledge of human

society, and consequently for society itself; and even if social life

is always only the resultant of different forces, yet these forces

themselves remain something real and actual, and are no mere fiction

or hypothesis; while the growing differentiation of society shows how

freedom, conceived as a force, is something actual, although as an

ideal it may never attain full realisation. The development of society

has proceeded hand in hand with a conscious or more often unconscious

assertion of the individual, and the philosopher Hegel could rightly

say that the history of the world is progress in the consciousness of

freedom. At all events, it might be added, the statement that the

history of the world is progress in the consciousness of the universal

interdependence of mankind would have quite as much justification, and

practically also just the same meaning.

The circumstance that, apart from the events of what is comparatively

a modern period, the great social upheavals of history have not taken

place expressly in the name of freedom, although they have

indisputably implied it, only proves that in this case we have to deal

not with a mere word or idea, but with an actual force which is active

and acting, without reference to our knowledge or consciousness of it.

The recognition of individual freedom, and much more the endeavour to

make it the only object of our life, are certainly of quite recent

date. But these presuppose a certain amount of progress in the actual

process of setting the individual free in his moral and political

relationships, which is not to be found in the whole of antiquity, and

still less in the middle ages.

* * * * *

It is not possible to point to clearer traces of Anarchist influences

in the numberless social religious revolutions of the close of the

middle ages, without doing violence to history, although, as in all

critical periods, even in that of the Reformation,--which certainly

implied a serious revolt against authority,--there was no lack of

isolated attempts to make the revolt against authority universal, and

to abolish authority of every kind. We find, for instance, in the

thirteenth century, a degenerate sect of the "Beghards," who called

themselves "Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit," or were also

called "Amalrikites," after the name of their founder.[3] They

preached not only community of goods but also of women, a perfect

equality, and rejected every form of authority. Their Anarchist

doctrines were, curiously enough, a consequence of their Pantheism.

Since God is everything and everywhere, even in mankind, it follows

that the will of man is also the will of God; therefore every

limitation of man is objectionable, and every person has the right,

indeed it is his duty, to obey his impulses. These views are said to

have spread fairly widely over the east of France and part of Germany,

and especially among the Beghards on the Rhine.[4] The "Brothers and

Sisters of the Free Spirit" also appear during the Hussite wars under

the name of "Adamites"; this name being given them because they

declared the condition of Adam to be that of sinless innocence. Their

enthusiasm for this happy state of nature went so far that they

appeared in their assemblies, called "Paradises," literally in Adamite

costume, that is, quite naked.

[3] Amalrich of Bena, near Chartres, was, about 1200 A.D., a

professor of theology at Paris. He had to defend himself

before Pope Innocent III. on a charge of pantheistic

teaching, and then recanted. His follower, David of Dinant,

however, continued his work after his master's death (in 1206

or 1207), and this caused a condemnation of Amalrich's

teaching by the Synod of Paris in 1210, and by the Lateran

Council in 1215, and also led to a severe persecution of the

Amalrikites.

[4] E. Bernstein and K. Kautsky, _Die Vorlaeufer des Neueren

Socialismus_, Stuttgart, 1895. Part i., pp. 169 and 216.

But that, in spite of all this, the real Communism of this sect went

no farther than a kind of patriarchal Republicanism, certainly not as

far as actual Anarchy, is proved by the information given by AEneas

Sylvius: that they certainly had community of women, but that it was

nevertheless forbidden to them to have knowledge of any woman without

the permission of their leader.

There is one other sect met with during the Hussite wars in Bohemia,

which bears some similarity to the Anarchical Communism of the present

day, that of the Chelcicians.[5] Peter of Chelcic, a peaceful

Taborite, preached equality and Communism; but this universal equality

should not (he said) be imposed upon society by the compulsion of the

State, but should be realised without its intervention. The State is

sinful, and an outcome of the Evil One, since it has created the

inequality of property, rank, and place. Therefore the State must

disappear; and the means of doing away with it consists not in making

war upon it, but in simply ignoring it. The true follower of this

theory is thus neither allowed to take any office under the State nor

call in its help; for the true Christian strives after good of his own

accord, and must not compel us to follow it, since God desires good to

be done voluntarily. All compulsion is from the Evil One; all

dignities or distinctions of classes offend against the law of

brotherly love and equality. This pious enthusiast easily found a

small body of followers in a time when men were weary of war after the

cruelties of the Hussite conflicts; but here, too, his theory

developed in practice into a kind of Quietism under priestly control,

an austere Puritanism, which is the very opposite of the personal

freedom of Anarchism.

[5] _Vorlaeufer des Neueren Socialismus_, Pt. i., p. 230.

Once more the Anarchist views of the Amalrikite appear at the

beginning of the sixteenth century among the Anabaptists in the sect

of the "Free Brothers," who considered themselves set free from all

laws by Christ, had wives and property in common, and refused to pay

either taxes or tithes, or to perform the duties of service or

serfdom.[6] The "Free Brothers" had a following in the Zuerich

highlands, but they were of no more importance than the other sect, we

have mentioned; utterly incomprehensible to those of their own time,

they formed the extreme wings of the widespread Communist movement

which, coming at the same time as the Reformation in the Church,

separates the (so-called) middle ages from modern times like a

boundary line. We observe in it nothing but the naively logical

development of a belief that is common to most religions: the

assumption of a happy age in the childhood of mankind (Golden Age,

Paradise, and so on), when men followed merely the laws of reason

(Morality, God, or Nature, or whatever else it is called), and needed

no laws or punishments to tell them to do right and avoid wrong; when

mankind, as every schoolboy knows from his Ovid,--

"Vindice nullo

Sponte sua sine lege fidem rectumque colebat;

Poena metusque aberant, nec verba minacia fixo

AEre legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat

Judicis ora sui, sed erant sine judice tuti."

[6] "_Der Wideraeufferen vosprung, fuergang, Secten v.s.w. ...

beschreiben durch Heinerrychen Bullingern...._" Zurich, 1561.

Fol. 32.

The transition from this primeval Anarchy to the present condition of

society has been presented by religion, both Graeco-Roman and

Judaic-Christian, as the consequence of a deterioration of mankind

("the Fall"), and as a condition of punishment, which is to be

followed, in a better world and after the work of life has been well

performed, by another life as Eden-like as the first state of man, and

eternal. But it must not be forgotten that Christianity was at first a

proletarian movement, and that a great part of its adherents certainly

did not join it merely with the hope of a return to the original state

of Paradise in a future world. Perhaps (thought they) this Paradise

might be attainable in this world. It can be seen that the Church had

originally nothing to lose by at least not opposing this hope of a

millennium[7]; and so we see not only heretics like Kerinthos, but

also pillars of orthodoxy, like Papios of Hieropolis, Irenaeus, Justin

Martyr, and others, preaching the doctrine of the millennium. In later

times, indeed, when the Church had long since ceased to be a mainly

proletarian movement, and when Christianity had risen from the

Catacombs to the palace and the throne, the hopes of the poor and

oppressed for an approaching millennial reign lost their harmless

character, and "Millennialism" became _ipso facto_ heresy. But this

heresy was, as may be understood, not so easy to eradicate; and when,

in the closing centuries of the middle ages, the material position of

large classes of people had again become, in spite of Christianity,

most serious and comfortless, Millennialism awoke again actively in

men's minds, and formed the prelude, as well as the Socialist

undercurrent, of the Reformation. Some Radical offshoots of this

medieval Millennialism we have already noticed in the "Brothers and

Sisters of the Free Spirit," the Adamites, Chelcicians, and "Free

Brothers."

[7] Or, from the Greek, chiliad; and hence the word

_chiliasm_, expressing the belief in a millennium.

* * * * *

The presuppositions of this flattering superstition are so deeply

founded in the optimism of mankind, that it remained the same even

when divested of its religious, or rather its confessional, garment;

and could be no more eradicated by the Rationalistic tendency that

arose after the Reformation than by the interdict of Rome or the

brutal cruelties of ecclesiastical justice.

If we look more closely into the doctrine of the so-called _contrat

social_, which was destined to form the programme of the French

Revolution, we again recognise without much difficulty the fundamental

ideas of the Millennialists, hardly altered at all. A Paradise

without laws, existing before civilisation, which is considered as a

curse, and another like unto it, when "this cursed civilisation" is

abolished, is what a modern Anarchist would say. The names only are

different, and are taken from the vocabulary of Rationalism, instead

of from that of religious mythology. Instead of divine rights men

spoke now of the everlasting and unalterable rights of man; instead of

Paradise, of a happy state of nature, in which there is, however, an

exact resemblance to Ovid's golden age, the transition into the

present form of society was represented to be due to a social contract

or agreement, occasioned, however, by a certain moral degeneracy in

mankind, only differing in name from the "Fall." In this case, also,

Anarchy is regarded as underlying society as the ideal state of

nature; every form of society is only the consequence of the

degeneration of mankind, a _pis aller_, or, at any rate, only a

voluntary renunciation of the original, inalienable, and unalterable

rights of man and nature, the chief of which is Freedom.

In the further development of this main idea the believers in the

_contrat social_ have been divided. While some, foremost among whom is

Hobbes, declared the contract thus formed once and for all as

permanent and unbreakable, and hence that the authority of the

sovereign was irrevocable and without appeal, and thus arrived at

Monarchism pure and simple; others, and these the great majority,

regarded the contract merely as provisional, and the powers of the

sovereign as therefore limited. In this case everyone is not only free

to annul the contract at any time and place himself outside the

limits of society,[8] but the contract is also regarded as broken if

the sovereign--whether a person or a body corporate--oversteps his

authority. Here the return to the primeval state of Anarchy not only

shines, as it were, afar off as a future ideal, but appears as the

permanently normal state of mankind, only occasionally disturbed by

some transitory form of social life. This idea cannot be more clearly

expressed than in the words which the poet Schiller--certainly not an

advocate of bombs--puts into the mouth of Stauffacher in _William

Tell_:

"When the oppressed . . .

. . . makes appeal to Heaven

And thence brings down his everlasting rights,

Which there abide, inalienably his,

And indestructible as are the stars,

Nature's primeval state returns again,

Where man stands hostile to his fellow-man."

How nearly the doctrine of the "social contract" corresponds to the

idea of Anarchy is shown by the circumstance that one of the first

(and what is more, one of the ecclesiastical) representatives of this

doctrine, Hooker, declared, that "it was in the nature of things not

absolutely impossible that men could live without any public form of

government." Elsewhere he says that for men it is foolish to let

themselves be guided, by authority, like animals; it would be a kind

of fettering of the judgment, though there were reasons to the

contrary, not to pay heed to them, but, like sheep, to follow the

leader of the flock, without knowing or caring whither. On the other

hand, it is no part of our belief that the authority of man over men

shall be recognised against or beyond reason. Assemblies of learned

men, however great or honourable they may be, must be subject to

reason. This refers, of course, only to spiritual and ecclesiastical

authority; but Locke, who followed Hooker most closely, discovered

only too clearly what the immediate consequences of such assumptions

would be, and tried to avoid them by affirming that the power of the

sovereign, being merely a power entrusted to him, could be taken away

as soon as it became forfeited by misuse, but that the break-up of a

government was not a break-up of society. In France, on the other

hand, Etienne de la Boetie had already written, when oppressed by the

tyranny of Henry II., a _Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, ou

Contr'un_ (in 1546), containing a glowing defence of Freedom, which

goes so far that the sense of the necessity of authority disappears

entirely. The opinion of La Boetie is that mankind does not need

government; it is only necessary that it should really wish it, and

it would find itself happy and free again, as if by magic.

[8] "Cette liberte commun est une consequence de la nature

de l'homme. Sa premiere loi est de veiller a sa propre

conservation, ses premiers soins sont ceux qu'il se doit a

lui-meme: et sitot qu'il est en age de raison, lui seul etant

juge des moyens propres a le conserver, devient par la son

propre maitre."--_Rousseau._

So we see how the upholders of the social contract are separated into

a Right, Central, and Left party. At the extreme right stands Hobbes,

whom the defenders of Absolutism follow; in the centre is Locke, with

the Republican Liberals; and on the extreme left stand the pioneers of

Anarchism, with Hooker the ecclesiastic at their head. But of all the

theoretical defenders of the "social contract," only one has really

worked out its ultimate consequences. William Godwin, in his _Inquiry

concerning Political Justice_,[9] demanded the abolition of every form

of government, community of goods, the abolition of marriage, and

self-government of mankind according to the laws of justice. Godwin's

book attracted remarkable attention, from the novelty and audacity of

his point of view. "Soon after his book on political justice

appeared," writes a young contemporary, "workmen were observed to be

collecting their savings together, in order to buy it, and to read it

under a tree or in a tavern. It had so much influence that Godwin said

it must contain something wrong, and therefore made important

alterations in it before he allowed a new edition to appear. There can

be no doubt that both Government and society in England have derived

great advantage from the keenness and audacity, the truth and error,

the depth and shallowness, the magnanimity and injustice of Godwin, as

revealed in his inquiry concerning political justice."

[9] London, 1795, 2 vols.

* * * * *

Our next business is to turn from theoretical considerations of the

=contrat social= to the practice based upon this catchword; and to

look for traces of Anarchist thought upon the blood-stained path of

the great French Revolution--that typical struggle of the modern

spirit of freedom against ancient society. We are the more desirous to

do this, because of the frequent and repeated application of the word

Anarchist to the most radical leaders of the democracy by the

contemporaries, supporters, and opponents of the Revolution. As far as

we in the present day are able to judge the various parties from the

history of that period,--and we certainly do not know too much about

it,--there were not apparently any real Anarchists[10] either in the

Convention or the Commune of Paris. If we want to find them, we must

begin with the Girondists and not with the Jacobins, for the

Anarchists of to-day recognise--and rightly so--no sharper contrast

to their doctrine than Jacobinism; while the Anarchism of Proudhon

is connected in two essential points with its Girondist

precursors--namely, in its protest against the sanction of property

and in its federal principle. But, nevertheless, neither Vergniaud nor

Brissot was an Anarchist, even though the latter, in his

_Philosophical Examination of Property and Theft_ (1780), uttered a

catchword, afterwards taken up by Proudhon. At the same time, they

have no cause and no right to reproach the "Mountain" with Anarchist

tendencies.

[10] Jean Grave says in his book, _La Societe Mourante_, p.

21: "In the year 1793 one talked of Anarchists. Only Jacques

Roux and the '_surages_' appear to have been those who saw

the Revolution most clearly, and wished to turn it to the

benefit of the people; and, therefore, the bourgeois

historian has left them in the background; their history has

still to be written; the documents buried in archives and

libraries are waiting for one who shall have time and courage

to exhume them, and bring to light the secrets of events that

are to us almost incomprehensible. Meanwhile, we can pass no

judgment on their programme." Of course _we_ can do so still

less.

Neither Danton nor Robespierre, the two great lights of the

"Mountain," dreamed of making a leap into the void of a society

without government. Their ideal was rather the omnipotence of society,

the all-powerful State, before which the interests of the individual

were scattered like the spray before the storm; and the great

Maximilian, the "Chief Rabbi" of this deification of the State,

accordingly called himself "a slave of freedom." Robespierre and

Danton, on their side, called the Hebertists Anarchists. If one can

speak of a principle at all among these people, who placed all power

in the hands of the masses who had no votes, and the whole art of

politics in majorities and force, it was certainly not directed

against the abolition of authority. The maxims of these people were

chaos and the right of the strongest. Marat, the party saint, had

certainly, on occasion, inveighed against the laws as such, and

desired to set them aside; but Marat all the time wanted the

dictatorship, and for a time actually held it. The Marat of after

Thermidor was the infamous Caius Gracchus Baboeuf, who is now

usually regarded as the characteristic representative of Anarchism

during the French Revolution--and regarded so just as rightly, or

rather as wrongly, as those mentioned above. Baboeuf was a more

thorough-going Socialist than Robespierre; indeed he was a Radical

Communist, but no more. In the proclamation issued by Baboeuf for

the 22d of Floreal, the day of the insurrection against the

Directoire, he says: "The revolutionary authority of the people will

announce the destruction of every other existing authority." But that

means nothing more than the dictatorship of the mob; which is rejected

in theory by Anarchists of all types, just as much as any other kind

of authority. That the followers of Baboeuf had nothing else in view

is shown by the two placards prepared for this day, one of which said,

"Those who usurp the sovereignty ought to be put to death by free

men," while the other, explaining and limiting the first, demanded the

"Constitution of 1793, liberty, equality, and universal happiness."

This constitution of 1793 was, however, Robespierre's work, and

certainly did not mean the introduction of Anarchy.

Echoes and traditions of Baboeuf's views, often passing through

intermediaries like Buonarotti, are found in the Carbonarists of the

first thirty years of our own century, and applied to this (as to so

many other popular movements) the epithet "Anarchical," so glibly

uttered by the lips of the people. But among the chiefs, at least, of

that secret society that was once so powerful, we find no trace of it;

on the contrary they declared absolute freedom to be a delusion which

could never be realised. Yet even here, though the fundamental dogma

of Anarchism is rejected, we notice a step forward in the extension of

the Anarchist idea. It was indeed rejected by the members of that

society, but it was known to them, and what is more, they take account

of it, and support every effort which, by encouraging individualism

to an unlimited extent, is hostile to the union of society as such.

Thus we even find individual Carbonarists with pronounced Anarchist

views and tendencies. Malegari, for instance, in 1835, described the

_raison d'etre_ of the organisation in these words[11]: "We form a

union of brothers in all parts of the earth; we all strive for the

freedom of mankind; we wish to break every kind of yoke."

[11] J. A. M. Bruehle: _Die Geheimbunde gegen Rom. Zur Genesis

der italien. Revolution._ Prague, 1860.

Between the time when these words were spoken and the appearance of

the famous _What is Property?_ and the _Individual and his Property_,

there elapsed only about ten years. How much since then has been

changed, whether for better or worse, how much has been cleared up

and confused, in the life and thought of the nations!

* * * * *

Feuerbach described the development which he had passed through as a

thinker in the words: "God was my first thought, Reason my second, Man

my third and last." Not only Feuerbach, but all modern philosophy, has

gone through these stages; and Feuerbach is only different from other

philosophers, in having himself assisted men to reach the third and

final stage. The epoch of philosophy that was made illustrious by the

brilliant trinity of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, however far it

may have departed or emancipated itself from the traditions of

religion, not only never deposed the idea of God, but actually for the

first time made the conception of the Deity the starting-point of all

Thought and Existence. The philosophy which abolished this, whether we

consider Locke and Hume the realists, or Kant and Hegel the idealists,

is philosophy of intellect; absolute reason has taken the place of an

absolute God, criticism and dialectics the place of ontology and

theocracy. But in philosophy we find the very opposite of the

mythological legend, for in it Chronos instead of devouring his

children is devoured by them. The critical school turned against its

masters, who were already sinking into speculative theology again,

quite forgetting that its great leader had introduced a new epoch with

a struggle against ontology; and losing themselves in the heights of

non-existence, just as if they had never taken their start from the

thesis, that no created mind can comprehend the nature of the Being

that is behind all phenomena. From such heights a descent had to be

made to our earth; instead of immortal individuals, as conceived by

Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, the school of Feuerbach, Strauss, and

Bauer postulated "human beings, sound in mind and body, for whom

health is of more importance than immortality." Concentration upon

this life took the place of vague trancendentalism, and anthropology

the place of theology, ontology, and cosmology. Idealism became

bankrupt; God was regarded no longer as the creator of man, but man as

the creator of God. Humanity now took the place of the Godhead.

The new principle was now a universal or absolute one; but, as with

Hegel, universal or absolute only in words, for to sense it is

extremely real, just as Art in a certain sense is more real than the

individual. It was the "generic conception of humanity, not something

impersonal and universal but forming persons, inasmuch as only in

persons have we reality." (D. F. Strauss.)

If philosophic criticism were to go still farther than this, there

remained nothing more for it than to destroy this generalisation, and

instead of Humanity to make the individual, the person, the centre of

thought. A strong individualistic and subjective feature, peculiar to

the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, favoured such a process.

Although in the case of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling this feature had

never outstepped the limits of the purely comprehensible, yet such a

trait makes philosophy infer a similarly strongly developed feature of

individualism in the people, especially as at that time it was so

closely connected with popular life. Moreover, at that period there

was a great desire (as we see in Fichte and his influence on the

nation) to translate philosophy at once into action; and so it was not

remarkable that a thinker regardless of consequences should introduce

the idea of individualism into the field of action, and regard this

also as suitable for "concentration of thought upon this present

life." Herewith began a new epoch; just as formerly human thought had

proceeded from the individual up to the universal, so now it descended

from the highest generalisation down again to the individual; to the

process of getting free from self followed the regaining of self.

Here was the point at which an Anarchist philosophy could intervene,

and, as a matter of fact did intervene, in Stirner.

* * * * *

In another direction also, and about the same time, the critical

philosophy had reached a point beyond which it could not go without

attacking not only the changing forms, but also the very foundations

of all organisations of society which were then possible. However far

the Aufklaerer, the Encyclopaedists, the heedless fighters in the

political revolution, and the leading personages in the spiritual

revolution, had gone in their unsparing criticism of all institutions

and relationships of life, they had not as yet, except in a few

isolated cases, attacked Religion, the State, and Property, as such in

the abstract.

However manifold and transitory their various forms might be, these

three things themselves still seemed to be the incontrovertible and

necessary conditions of spiritual, political, and social life, merely

the different concrete formulae for the one absolute idea which could

not be banished from the thought of that age.

But if we approach these three fundamental ideas with the probe of

scientific criticism, and resolutely tear away the halo of the

absolute, it does not on that account seem necessary for us to declare

that they are valueless or even harmful in life. We read Strauss's

_Life of Jesus_, and put it down perhaps with the conviction that the

usually recognised sources of inspired information as to revealed

religion and the divine mission of Christianity are an unskilful

compilation of purely apocryphal documents; but are we on that account

to deny the importance of Judaism and Christianity in social progress

and ethics? Or again, I may read E. B. Tyler's _Primitive Culture_ and

see the ideas of the soul and God arise from purely natural and (for

the most part) physiological origins, just as we can trace the

development of the skilful hand of Raphael or Liszt from the

fore-limbs of an ape; but am I from that to conclude that the idea of

religion is harmful to society? It is just the same with the ideas of

the State and Property. Modern science has shown us beyond dispute the

purely historical origin of both these forms of social life; and both

are, at least as we find them to-day, comparatively recent features of

human society. This, of course, settles the question as to the State

and Property being inviolable, or being necessary features of human

society from everlasting to everlasting; but the further question as

to how far these forms are advantages and _relatively_ necessary for

society in general, or for a certain society, has nothing to do with

the above, and cannot be answered by the help of a simple logical

formula. But though this fact seems so clear to us, it is even to-day

not by any means clear to a great portion of mankind. And how much

less clear it must have been to thinkers at the beginning of this

century when thought was still firmly moulded upon the conception of

the Absolute. To them there could only be either absolute Being or

absolute Not-Being; and as soon as ever critical philosophy destroyed

the idea of the "sacredness" of the institutions referred to

(Property and the State), it was almost unavoidable that it should

declare them to be "unholy," _i. e._, radically bad and harmful. The

logic which underlies this process of thought is similar to that which

concludes that if a thing is not white it must be black. But it cannot

be denied that just at this time--during the celebrated _dix ans_

after the Revolution of July--many circumstances seemed positively to

favour such an inference.

Not only were economic conditions unsatisfactory (though pauperism

alone will never produce Anarchism), but even hope and faith had gone.

Idealism was bankrupt, not only in the political but also in the

economic world. Full of the noblest animation, and with the most

joyous confidence, the French nation had entered upon the great

Revolution, and all Europe had looked full of hope towards France,

whence they expected to see the end of all tyranny and--since such

things at that time were not well understood--the end of all misery.

We may be spared the detailed description of the transition by which

this hope and these childish expectations, this Millennialism, were

bitterly disillusioned, and how the excitement of 1789 to 1791 ended

in a great wail of woe; and that too not only in France, where

absolute monarchy _post tot discrimina verum_ had merely changed into

an absolute empire, but also in Germany, whose princes hastened to

recall the concessions made under the pressure of the Revolution. The

monarchs of Europe then celebrated an orgie of promise-breaking, from

which even to-day the simple mind of the people revolts with deep

disgust. It need only be remembered how in the Napoleonic wars of

Germany noble princes exploited the flaming enthusiasm and the naive

confidence of their people for their own dynastic purposes, and then,

after the downfall of the Corsican, drove them back again through the

old Caudine yoke. If, after such unfortunate experiences, the people,

and especially the insatiate elements amongst them, had retained any

remains of confidence in help from above, it must have perished in the

sea of disgust and bitterness at the Revolution of July.

In a struggle for a free form of the State, which lasted almost half a

century, the proletariat and its misery had grown without cessation.

They had fought for constitutional monarchy, for the Republic, and for

the Empire; they had tried Bourbons and Bonapartes and Orleanists;

they had gone to the barricades and to the field of battle for

Robespierre, Napoleon, and finally for Thiers; but of course their

success was always the same: not only their economic position, but

also the social condition of the lower masses of the people had

remained unchanged. It was recognised more and more that between the

proletariate and the upper classes there was something more than a

separation of mere constitutional rights; in fact, that the privileges

of wealth had taken the place of the privileges of birth; and the more

the masses recognised this the more did their interest in purely

political questions, and, above all, the question as to the form of

the State, sink into the background, while it became more and more

clearly seen that the equality of constitutional rights was no longer

real equality, and that the attainment of equality necessitated the

abolition of all privileges, including also the privilege of free

possession or of property. Henceforth, therefore, every revolutionary

power attacks no longer political points but the question of property,

and even though all movements did not proceed so far as to open

Communism, yet they were animated by the main idea that the question

of human poverty was to be solved only by limitation of the right of

free acquisition, possession, and disposal of property.

The dogma of the sanctity of property was in any case gone for ever.

But still the last dogma, that of the inviolability of the State,

remained. The Franco-German Socialists of the third and fourth decades

of our century, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Weitling, Rodbertus, down to Louis

Blanc himself, did not think of denying the State as such, but had

thought of it as playing the principal part in the execution of their

new scheme of organisation of industry and society. But the very

character of the new reforming tendencies necessitated an unlimited

preponderance of State authority which would crush out the freedom of

decision in the individual. And a directly opposite tendency, opposed

to all authority, could appear, therefore,--though certainly from the

nature of the case necessary,--at first only as a very feeble

opposition.

The principle of equality was not disputed, but the use of brute force

through the power of the State was regarded with horror in the form in

which the followers of Baboeuf, the enthusiasts for Utopianism,

preached it. The necessity for an organisation of industry was not

denied, but men began to ask the question whether this organisation

could not proceed from below upwards till it reached freedom? Already

Fourier's phalanxes might be regarded as such an attempt to organise

industry through the formation of free groups from below upwards; an

attempt to which the Monarchists and Omniarchists are merely an

exterior addition. If we leave out of consideration the rapid failure

of the various Socialistic attempts at institutions based upon the

foundation of authority, yet the sad experiences of half a century

filled with continual constitutional changes would have sufficed to

undermine the respect for authority as such. Absolute monarchy as well

as constitutional, the Republic just as much as Imperialism, the

dictatorship of an individual just as much as that of the mob, had all

alike failed to remove pauperism, misery, and crime, or even to

alleviate them; was it not then natural for superficial minds to

conclude that the radical fault lay in the authoritative form of

society in the State as such? did not the thought at once suggest

itself that a further extension of Fourier's system of the formation

of groups on the basis of the free initiative of the individual might

be attempted without taking the State into account at all? But here

was a further point at which a system of social and political

Anarchism might begin with some hope of success, and here it actually

did begin with Proudhon.

CHAPTER II

PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON

Biography -- His Philosophic Standpoint -- His Early Writings

-- The "Contradictions of Political Economy" -- Proudhon's

Federation -- His Economic Views -- His Theory of Property --

Collectivism and Mutualism -- Attempts to Put his Views into

Practice -- Proudhon's Last Writings -- Criticism.

The man who had such a powerful, not to say fateful, influence upon

the progress of the proletarian movement of our century was himself

one of the proletariat class by birth and calling.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born 15th January, 1809, in a suburb of

Besancon. His father was a cooper, his mother a cook; and Pierre

Joseph, in spite of his thirst for knowledge, had to devote himself to

hard work, instead of completing his studies; he became a proofreader

in some printing works at Besancon, and as a journeyman printer

wandered all through France. Having returned to Besancon, he entered

the printing house again as a factor. In the year 1836 he founded,

with a fellow-workman in the same town, a little printing shop,

which, however, he wound up after his partner had died in 1838, being

determined to change the occupation he had followed so far, for

another for which he had already long been preparing by diligent study

both during his wanderings and in his leisure hours in past years.

Proudhon's activity as an author began in the year 1837. The Academy

at Besancon had to award a three years' scholarship, which had been

founded by Suard, the secretary of the French Academy, for poor young

men of Franche-Comte who wished to devote themselves to a literary or

scientific career. Proudhon entered as a competitor, and won the

scholarship. In the memoir of his life, which he drew up for the

Academy, he said: "Born and reared in the midst of the working

classes, to which I belong with my heart and in my affections, and

above all by the community of sufferings and aspirations, it will be

my greatest joy, if I receive the approval of the Academy, to work

unceasingly with the help of philosophy and science, and with the

whole energy of my will and all my mental powers, for the physical,

moral, and intellectual improvement of those whom I call brothers and

companions, in order to sow amongst them the seeds of a doctrine which

I consider as the law of the moral world, and hoping to succeed in my

endeavours, to appear before you, gentlemen, as their representative."

As to the studies to which he devoted himself in Paris for several

years after receiving the scholarship, Proudhon relates himself that

he received light, not from the socialistic schools which then existed

and were coming into fashion, not from partisans or from journalists,

but that he began with a study of the antiquities of Socialism, a

study which, according to his opinion, was absolutely necessary in

order to determine the theoretical and practical laws of the social

movement.

It gives us a somewhat strange sensation to learn that Proudhon, the

father of Anarchism, made these sociological studies in the Bible; and

this Book of books is even to-day the most important source of empiric

sociology. For no other book reflects so authentically and elaborately

the development of an important social Individualism, and in

Proudhon's time the Bible (in view of the complete lack of

ethnographic observations which then prevailed) was also almost the

only source of studies of this kind. And if also it must be admitted

that these studies could not fail to be one-sided, yet it cannot be

denied that Proudhon proceeded in a way incomparably more correct than

most social philosophers have done either before or since, for they

have built up their systems generally by deductive and dogmatic

methods.

An essay which Proudhon wrote upon the introduction of Sunday rest,

from the point of view of morality, health, and the relations of a

family estate, brought him a bronze medal from the Academy, and he was

able afterwards to say with truth: "My Socialism received its baptism

from a learned society, and I have an academy as sponsor"; certainly a

remarkable boast for one who denied all authority.

Proudhon appears to have travelled very quickly along the road which

led from the regions of faith to the metaphysics prevailing at that

time; and already he took for his criterion--as he tells us later in

his _Confessions_--the proposition (drawn up according to the Hegelian

theory, that everything when it is legalised at the same time brings

its opposite with it), "that every principle which is pursued to its

farthest consequence arrives at a contradiction when it must be

considered false and repudiated; and that, if this false principle has

given rise to an institution, this institution itself must be regarded

as an artificial product and as a Utopia." This proposition Proudhon

later on formulated as follows: "Every true thought is conceived in

time once, and breaks up in two directions. As each of these

directions is the negation of the other and both can only disappear in

a higher idea, it follows that the negation of law is itself the law

of life and progress, and the principle of continual movement." Here,

indeed, we have Proudhon's whole teaching; with this magic wand of

negation of law he thought he could open the magic world of social

problems, and heal up the wounds of the social organisation.

"My masters," said Proudhon to his friend Langlois in the year 1848,

"that is those who woke fruitful ideas in me, are three: first of all,

the Bible, then Adam Smith, and finally Hegel." Proudhon always

boasted of being Hegel's pupil, and Karl Marx maintained that it was

he who, during his stay in Paris in the year 1844, in debates which

often lasted all night long, inoculated Proudhon (to the latter's

great disadvantage) with Hegelianism, which he nevertheless could not

properly study owing to his ignorance of the German language. A

well-known anecdote attributes to Hegel the witty saying that only one

scholar understood him and he misunderstood him. We do not know who

this scholar was, but it might just as well have been Marx as

Proudhon, for that which both of them took from the great philosopher,

and applied as and how and when they did, is common to both: namely,

the dialectic method applied to the problems of social philosophy.

The similarity between them in this respect is so striking that one

might call both these embittered opponents the personal antitheses of

the great master, Hegel. As for the rest, Proudhon's inoculation with

Hegelianism, which was afterwards continued by K. Gruen and Bakunin,

must have been very marked and continuous, for we shall constantly be

meeting with traces of it as we go on. Powerful as was the influence

of Hegel upon Proudhon, the Anarchist was but little affected by the

fashionable philosophy of his contemporary and fellow-countryman, A.

Comte; which is all the more remarkable since it is Comte's Positivism

which, proceeding along the lines of Spencer's philosophy, has in no

small degree influenced modern Anarchism, while echoes of the Comtian

individualist doctrine are even to be found in the German contemporary

of Proudhon, Stirner; echoes which, although numerous, are perhaps

unconscious. Proudhon attached himself, as already mentioned,

specially to the Hegelian dialectic and to the doctrine of Antitheses.

Using this criterion, Proudhon proceeded to the consideration and

criticism of social phenomena; and just as beginners and pupils in the

difficult art of philosophy, instead of contenting themselves with

preliminary questions, attack the very kernel of problems, with all

the rashness of ignorance, so Proudhon also attacked, as his first

problem, the fundamental social question of property, taking it up for

the subject of his much-quoted though much less read work, _What is

Property?_ (_Qu'est-ce que la Propriete?_--First essay in _Recherches

sur le Principe du Droit et du Gouvernement_). Proudhon has been

judged and condemned, though, and wrongly, yet almost exclusively, by

this one essay, written at the beginning of his literary career.

Friends and foes alike have always contented themselves with regarding

the celebrated dictum there uttered, Property is Theft, as the Alpha

and the Omega of Proudhon's teaching, without reading the book itself.

And because it has been thought sufficient to catch up a phrase

dragged from all its context, so it has happened that Proudhon to-day,

although he is one of the most frequently mentioned authors, is hardly

either known or read. Although the question of property forms the

corner-stone of all Proudhon's teaching, yet it would be wrong to

identify it with his doctrine entirely. And it is no less wrong to

represent the first attempt which Proudhon made to solve so great a

problem as the whole of his views about property, as unfortunately

even serious authors have hitherto done almost without exception, and

especially those who make a special study of him, such as Diehl. As a

matter of fact, Proudhon has carefully and elaborately set forth his

theory of property in several other works which are mixed up for the

most part with his other numerous writings, and has left behind a

fragment of a book on the theory of property, in which he meant to

produce a comprehensive theory of property as the foundation of his

whole work. We must, therefore, in order not to anticipate, leave a

complete exposition of Proudhon's theory of property to a later

portion of this book, hence we will merely glance at the work, _What

is Property?_ and also at another study which appeared in 1843 called

_The Creation of Order in Humanity_, which shows the second, or I

might say, the political side of Proudhon's train of thought in its

first beginnings, and of which Proudhon himself said later, that it

satisfied neither him nor the public, and was worse than mediocre,

although he had very little to retract in its contents. "This book, a

veritable infernal machine, which contains all the implements of

creation and destruction," he said in his _Confessions_, "is badly

done, and is far below that which I could have produced if I had taken

time to choose and arrange properly my materials. But however full of

faults my work may now appear, it was then sufficient for my purpose.

Its object was to make me understand myself. Just as contradiction had

been useful to me to destroy, so now the processes of development

served me to build up. My intellectual education was completed, the

_Creation of Order_ had scarcely seen the light, when, with the

application of the creative method which followed immediately upon it,

I understood that in order to obtain an insight into the revolution

of society the first thing must be to construct the whole series of

its antitheses, or the system of opposites."

This was done in the book which appeared at Paris in two volumes in

1846, _The System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of

Misery_, which deserves to be called his masterpiece, both because it

contains the philosophic and economic foundations of his theory in a

perfectly comprehensive and clear exposition, and because it is

impossible to understand Proudhon without a knowledge of these

contradictions. In his first work upon property, Proudhon had

represented it as something equivalent to theft. But now we have

another doctrine proposed: that Property is Liberty. These two

propositions were thought by Proudhon to be proved in the same way.

"Property considered in the totality of social institutions has, so to

speak, two current accounts. One is the thought of the good which it

produces, and which flows directly from its nature; the other is the

disadvantages which it produces, and the sacrifices which it causes,

and which also result directly, just as much as the good, from its

nature. In property evil, or the abuse of it, is inseparable from the

good, just as in book-keeping by double entry the debtor is

inseparable from the creditor side. The one necessarily implies the

other. To suppress the abuse of property means to extinguish it, just

as much as to strike out an entry on the debtor side means also

striking it out on the creditor side of an account." He proceeded in

the same way with all "economic categories." Labour, he tells us in

the _Contradictions_ more explicitly, is the principle of wealth, the

power which creates or abolishes values, or puts them in proportion

one to another, and also distributes them. Labour thus in itself, at

the same time, is a force that makes for equilibrium and productivity,

which one might think should secure mankind against every want. But in

order to work, labour must define and determine itself--that is,

organise itself. What are, then, the organs of labour, that is, the

forms in which human labour produces and fixes values and keeps off

want? These forms or categories are: division of labour, machinery,

competition, monopoly, the State or centralisation, free exchange,

credit, property, and partnership.

However much labour in itself is the source of wealth, yet those means

which are invented for the purpose of increasing wealth, become,

through their antagonism and through that antithetical character,

which, according to Proudhon, lies in the very nature of all social

forms, just as many causes of want and pauperism. Labour gains by its

division a more than natural fertility, but, at the same time, this

divided labour, which debases the workman, sinks, owing to the manner

in which this division is carried out, with great rapidity below its

own level and only creates an insufficient value. After it has

increased consumption by the superfluity of products, it leaves them

in the lurch owing to the low rate of pay; instead of keeping off want

it actually produces it.

The deficiency caused by the division of labour is said to be filled

by machinery, which not only increases and multiplies the productivity

of labour, but also compensates for the moral deficiency caused by the

division of labour, and supplies a higher unity and synthesis in place

of the division of labour. But according to Proudhon this is not the

case; with machinery begins the distinction between masters and

wage-earners, between capitalists and workmen. Thus mankind, instead

of being raised up by machinery from degradation, sinks deeper and

deeper. Man loses both his character as a man, and freedom, and

becomes only a tool. Prosperity increases for the masters, poverty for

the men; the distinction of caste begins, and a terrible struggle

becomes manifest, which consists in increasing men in order to be able

to do without them. And so the general pressure becomes more and more

severe; poverty, already heralded by the division of labour, at last

makes its appearance in the world, and henceforth becomes the soul and

sinews of society.

As opposed to its aristocratic tendencies, society places freedom or

competition. Competition emancipates the workman and produces an

incalculable growth in wealth. By competition the productions of

labour continually sink in price, or (what comes to the same thing)

continually increase in quality: and since the sources of competition,

just like mechanical improvements and combinations of the division of

labour, are infinite, it may be said that the productive force of

competition is unlimited as regards intensity and scope. At last, by

competition, the production of wealth gets definitely ahead of the

production of men, by which statement Proudhon destroys the dogma of

Malthus, which, we may remark, was no more proved than his own. But

this competition is also a new source of pauperism, because the

lowering of prices which it brings with it only benefits, on the one

hand, those who succeed, and, on the other, leaves those who fail

without work and without means of subsistence. The necessary

consequence, and, at the same time, the natural antithesis of

competition is monopoly. It is that form of social possession without

which no labour, no production, no exchange, and no wealth would be

possible. It is most intimately connected with individualism and

freedom, so that without it we can hardly imagine society, and yet it

is, quite as much as competition, anti-social and harmful. For

monopoly attracts everything to itself--land, labour, and the

implements of labour, productions and the distribution thereof--and

annihilates them; or it annihilates the natural equilibrium of

production and consumption; it causes the labourer to be deceived in

the amount of his reward, and it causes progress in prosperity to be

changed into a continual progress in poverty. Finally, it inverts all

ideas of justice in commerce.

The State, in its economic relations, should, according to Proudhon,

eventuate in an equalisation between the patricians and the

proletariat; its regulations (such as taxation) should, in the first

place, be an antidote against the arrogance and excessive power of

monopoly; but even the institution of the State fails in its purpose,

since taxes, instead of being paid by those who have wealth, are

almost exclusively paid by those who have not; the army, justice,

peace, education, hospitals, workhouses, public offices, even

religion,--in short, everything which is intended for the advance,

emancipation, and the relief of the proletariat being first paid for

and supported by the proletariat, and then either turned against it or

lost to it altogether.

It would be useless to repeat what Proudhon says about the beneficial,

and at the same time fateful, consequences both of free-trade and its

opposite. Who does not know the arguments which even to-day are used

by politicians and savants in the still undecided controversy for and

against it?

In this system of contradiction, then, in this antithesis of society,

Proudhon believed he had discovered the law of social progress, while

as a matter of fact he had only given a very negative proof (though he

certainly would hardly have acknowledged it) that there is not in

economics any more than in ethics anything absolute, and that

"benefit" and "harm" are relative terms which have nothing in common

with the essence of things; and it is just as wrong in the one case to

regard the existing social order as the best of all possible worlds,

as it is in the other to regard any one economic institution as a

social panacea, or to blame one or the other for all the evils of an

evil world. Such a confession of faith might easily be considered

trivial, and it might even give rise to a supercilious smile if it

required nothing less than the doctrine of antithesis taught by Kant

and Hegel to be brought in to prove what are obviously matters of

fact. But perhaps it is just this superficial smile which is the

justification of Proudhon, who had to fight a severe and not always

victorious battle for an apparently trivial cause. We do not forget

how helplessly the age in which he lived was tossed to and fro in all

social questions, from casuistical Agnosticism to arbitrary Dogmatism;

from extreme Individualism to Communism, from the standpoint of

absolute _laisser faire_ to the uttermost reliance on authority. In

placing these two worlds in sharp contrast one to another,

_Contradictions_, with all its acknowledged faults and errors,

performed an undeniable service; and this book--against which Karl

Marx has written a severe attack--will retain for all time its value

as one of the most important and thorough works of social philosophy.

In any case, the net result of the lengthy discussion, in view of the

purpose which Proudhon had before him, was absolutely nil. Proudhon

certainly endeavoured in his dialectic method to find a solution of

antitheses, and to come to some positive result; but even this

solution, which was to have been the great social remedy, is, when

divested of its philosophical garments, such a general and indefinite

draft upon the bank of social happiness that it could never be

properly paid.

"I have shewn," said Proudhon, at the close of his _Contradictions_,

"how society seeks in formula after formula, institution after

institution, that equilibrium which always escapes it, and at every

attempt always causes its luxury and its poverty to grow in equal

proportion. Since equilibrium has never yet been reached, it only

remains to hope something from a complete solution which synthetically

unites theories, which gives back to labour its effectiveness and to

each of its organs its power. Hitherto pauperism has been so

inextricably connected with labour, and want with idleness, and all

our accusations against Providence only prove our weakness." This

solution of the great problem of our century by the synthetic union of

economic and social antithesis, or, as Proudhon calls it in another

place, by a scientific, legal, immortal, and inseparable combination,

is certainly a beautiful and noble philosophy. It cannot be denied

that herewith Proudhon, who, in all his works, raged furiously against

Utopians, has none the less created a Utopia of his own, not, indeed,

by forcibly urging mankind through an ideal change, but by attempting

to mould life into an ideal shape without, like others, appealing to

force, or venturing to organise the forces of terror, in order to

accomplish his ideal.

* * * * *

Just as Proudhon differed from the ready-made Socialism of his age by

a conception which he opposed to pauperism, so, too, he differed in

the method which he recommended should be adopted for the removal of

pauperism. He certainly accepted the proposition that poverty could

only be removed by the labourer receiving the entire result of his

labour, and that social reform must, accordingly, consist of an

organisation of labour. In this he was quite at one with Louis Blanc,

but only in this; for while Louis Blanc claimed for the organisation

of labour the full authority of the State, Proudhon desired it to

arise from the free initiative of the people, without the interference

of the State in any way. This is the parting of the roads between

Anarchism and authoritative Socialism; here they separate once for

all, never to meet again, except in the most violent opposition. This

was the starting-point of Proudhon's Anarchist views. The experiences

of the Revolution of 1848, which, from the social standpoint, failed

entirely, might well have fitted in with these views of his. Proudhon

had taken a very active part in the occurrences of this remarkable

year, as editor of the _People_, and as a representative of the

Department of the Seine, and in other capacities, and thought that the

cause of the fruitlessness of all attempts to solve the social problem

and to reap the fruits of the Revolution lay in the fact that the

Revolution had been initiated from above instead of from below, and

because the revolutionary principle had been installed in power, and

therefore had destroyed itself. But ultimately the opposition of

Proudhon to Blanc goes back to the fundamental difference alluded to

above.

Society, as Proudhon explains in his _Contradictions_, and as he

applies his doctrine of politics in his book called the _Confessions

of a Revolutionary_, written in prison in 1849, is essentially of a

dialectic nature and is founded upon opposites, which are all mingled

one with another, and the combinations of which are infinite. The

solution of the social problem he finds in placing the different

expressions of the problem no longer in contradiction but in their

"dialectic developments," so that for example the right to work, to

credit, and to assistance, rights whose realisation under an

antagonistic legislation is impossible or dangerous, gradually result

from an already established, realised, and undoubted right; and so

instead of being stumbling-blocks one to another they find in their

mutual connection their most lasting guarantee. But since such

guarantees should lie in the institutions themselves the authority of

the State becomes neither necessary nor justifiable for the carrying

out of this revolution.

But why should revolution from above be impossible? The doctrine of

antithesis, applied to politics, implies freedom and order. The first

is realised by revolution, the second by government. Thus there is

here a contradiction; for the government can never become

revolutionary for the very simple reason that it is a government. But

society alone--that is, the masses of the people when permeated by

intelligence--can revolutionise itself, because it alone can express

its free will in a rational manner, can analyse and develop and unfold

the secret of its destination and its origin, and alter its beliefs

and its philosophy.

"Governments are the scourge of God, introduced in order to keep the

world in discipline and order. And do you demand that they should

annihilate themselves, create freedom, and make revolutions? That is

impossible. All revolutions, from the anointing of the first king to

the declaration of the Rights of Man, have been freely accomplished by

the spirit of the people. Governments have always hindered, oppressed,

and crushed them to the ground. They have never made a revolution. It

is not their function to produce movements but to keep them back. And

even if they possessed revolutionary science--which is a contradiction

of terms--they would be justified in not making use of it. They must

first let their knowledge be absorbed by the people in order to

receive the support of the citizens, and that would mean to refuse to

acknowledge the existence of authority and power."

It follows through this that the organisation of work by the State--as

was attempted by Fourier, Louis Blanc, and their followers in a more

or less remote degree--is an illusion, and on this theory revolution

can only take place through the initiative of the people

itself--"through the unanimous agreement of the citizens, through the

experience of the workmen, and through the progress and growth of

enlightenment."

We here have laid bare the yawning gulf which lies between Proudhon

and the State Socialism of his time, and over this gulf there is no

bridge. We see how from these premises has been developed gradually

and logically that which Proudhon himself has called Anarchy

(_An-arche_, without government). The Socialists have made the

statement that the political revolution is the means of which the

social revolution is the end. Proudhon has inverted this statement

and regards the social revolution as the means and a political

revolution as the end. It is therefore a great mistake to consider

him, as is always done, as a political economist, for he was first and

foremost a social politician. The Socialists place as the ultimate

object of revolution, the welfare of all, enjoyment; but for Proudhon

the principle of revolution is freedom, that is:

(1) Political freedom by the organisation of universal suffrage, by

the independent centralisation of social functions, and by the

continual and unceasing revision of the constitution.

(2) Industrial freedom through the mutual guarantee of credit and

sale. In other words "no government by men by means of the

accumulation of power, no exploitation of men by means of the

accumulation of capital."

* * * * *

Proudhon thought that the fault of every political or social

constitution, whether it was the work of political or social

Radicalism, that which produces conflicts, and sets up antagonism in

society, lies in the fact that on the one hand the division of powers,

or rather of functions, is badly and incompletely performed, while on

the other hand centralisation is insufficient. The necessary

consequence of this is that the chief power is inactive and the

"thought of the people," or universal suffrage, is not exercised.

Division of functions then must be completed, and centralisation must

increase; universal suffrage must regain its prerogative and therewith

give back to the people the energy and activity which is lacking to

them.

The manner in which Proudhon proposed this constitution of society by

the initiative of the masses and the organisation of universal

suffrage cannot be better or more simply explained than in the words

and examples which he himself has used in the _Confessions_ in order

to interpret his views. He says:

"For many centuries the spiritual power, according to the traditional

conception of it, has been separated from the temporal power. I

remark, by the way, that the political principle of the division of

powers, or functions, is the same as the principle of the division of

the departments of industry or of labour. Here already we see a

glimpse of the identity of the political and social constitution. But

now I say that the division of the two powers, the spiritual and

temporal, has never been complete; and that their centralisation,

which was a great disadvantage both for ecclesiastical administration

and for the followers of religion, was never sufficient. A complete

division would take place if the temporal power never mingled in

religious solemnities, in the administration of the sacraments, in the

government of parishes, and especially in the nomination of bishops.

There would then be a much greater centralisation, and consequently

still more regular government, if in every parish the people had the

right to choose their clergymen and chaplains themselves, or even not

to have any at all; if the priests in every diocese chose their

bishops; if the assembly of bishops alone regulated religious affairs

in theological education and in divine worship. By this division the

clergy would cease to be a tool of tyranny in the hands of the

political power against the people; and by this application of

universal suffrage the Church Government, centralised in itself, would

receive its inspiration from the people, and not from the Government

or from the Pope: it would continually find itself in harmony with the

needs of society and with the spiritual condition of the citizens. In

order thus to return to organic, economic, and social truth, it is

necessary (1) To do away with the constitutional accumulation of

power, by taking away the nomination of bishops from the State, and

separating once for all spiritual from temporal affairs; (2) To

centralise the Church in itself by a system of elective grades; (3) To

give to the ecclesiastical power, as to all other powers of the State,

the right of voting as its foundation. By this system, that which

to-day is 'government' becomes nothing more than administration. And

it will be understood if it is possible to organise the whole country

in all its temporal affairs, according to the rules which we have just

laid down for its spiritual organisation, the most perfect order and

the most powerful centralisation would exist without there being

anything of what we now call the constituted authority of a

government.

"One other example: formerly there existed besides the legislative and

executive powers a third, the judicial power. This was an abolition of

the dividing dualism, a first step towards the complete separation of

political functions as of the departments of industry. The judicial

functions--with their different specialties, their hierarchy, their

irremovability, their union in a single ministry--testify undoubtedly

to their privileged position and their efforts towards centralisation.

But these functions do not arise from the people upon whom they are

exercised; their purpose is the administration of executive power;

they are not subordinated to the country by election, but to the

Government, president, or princes, by nomination. The consequence is

that the liberties of the people who are judged are given into the

hands of those who are supposed to be their natural judges, like

parishioners into the hands of their pastor, so that the people belong

to the magistrates as an inheritance, while the litigants exist for

the sake of the judge, and not the judge for the sake of the

litigants. Apply universal suffrage and the system of elective grades

to judicial functions in the same way as to ecclesiastic; take away

their irremovability which is the denial of the right of election;

take away from the State all action and influence upon the judges; let

this order, centralised in and for itself, arise solely from the

people, and you have taken away from the State its most powerful

implement of tyranny. You have made out of justice a principle of

freedom and order, and unless you suppose that the people from whom,

by means of universal suffrage, all power must proceed is in

contradiction with itself, and that it does not wish in the case of

justice what it wishes in the case of religion, or _vice versa_, you

may rest assured that the division of power can produce no conflict.

You can confidently establish the principle that division and

equilibrium will in future be synonymous.

"I pass over to another case, to the military power. It belongs to the

citizens to nominate their military commanders in due order, by

advancing simple privates and national guards to the lower grades and

officers to the higher grades in the army. Thus organised the army

maintains its citizen-like sentiment. There is no longer a nation in a

nation, a country in a country, a kind of wandering colony where the

citizen is a citizen amongst soldiers, and learns to fight against his

own country. The nation itself, centralised in its strength and youth,

can, independently of the power of the State, appeal to the public

power in the name of the law, just like a judge or police official,

but cannot command it or exercise authority over it. In the case of a

war the army owes obedience only to the representative assembly of the

nation, and to the leaders appointed by it.

"It is clear that in this, no judgment is passed upon the necessity of

these great manifestations of the social mind, and that if we wish to

abide by the judgment of the people, which alone is competent to

decide as to the importance and duration of its institutions, we can

do nothing better (as has just been said) than to constitute them in a

democratic manner.

"Societies have at all times experienced the need of protecting their

trade and industry against foreign imports; the power or function

which protects native labour in each country and guarantees it a

national market, is taxation in the shape of Customs. I will not here

say anything at all about the morality, or want of it, the usefulness

or the harm of Customs duties. I take it as I see it in society, and

confine myself to examining it from the point of view of the

constitution of powers. Taxation, by the very fact that it exists, is

a centralised function. Its origin like its action, excludes every

idea of division or dismemberment. But how does it happen that this

function, which belongs specially to the province of merchants and

those concerned with industry, and proceeds exclusively from the

authority of the Chambers of Commerce, yet belongs to the State? Who

can know better than industry itself wherein and to what extent it

requires protection, where the compensation for the taxation which has

to be raised must come from, and what products require bounties and

encouragement? And as for the Customs service itself, is it not

obvious that it is the business of those interested to reckon up the

expenses of it, while it is not at all suitable for the Government to

make of it a source of emolument for its favourites by procuring an

income for its extravagances by differential taxes?

"Besides the ministries of justice, religion, war, and international

trade, the Government appoints yet others; the ministry for

agriculture, public works, public instruction, and finally to pay for

all these, the ministry of finance. Our so-called division of powers

is only an accumulation of all kinds of powers, our centralisation is

an absorption. Do you not think that the agriculturists, who are

already all organised in their communities and committees, would

perform their own centralisation very well, and could guide their

common interests without this being done by the State? Do you not

think that the merchants, manufacturers, agriculturists, the

industrial population of every kind, who have their books open before

them in the Chambers of Commerce, could in the same way, without the

help of the State, without expecting their salvation from its

good-will, or their ruin from its inexperience, organise at their own

cost a central administration for themselves; could debate their own

affairs in general assemblies; could correspond with other

administrations; could pass all their useful decisions without waiting

for the sanction of the President of the Republic; and could entrust

the execution of their will to one amongst themselves, who would be

chosen by his fellows to be the Minister? It is clear that the public

works which concern agricultural industry and trade, or the

departments and the communes, might in future be assigned to the local

and central administrations which have an interest in them; and should

no more be a special corporation in the hands of the State than is the

army, the customs, or monopolies. Or should the State have its

hierarchy, its privileges, its ministry, so that it may carry on a

trade in mining, canals, or railways, may speculate on the Stock

Exchange, grant leases for ninety-nine years, and leave the building

of streets, bridges, dams, water-ways, excavations, sluices, etc., to

a legion of contractors, speculators, usurers, destroyers of morality,

and extortioners, who live upon the public wealth by the exploitation

of workmen and wage-earners, and upon the folly of the State?

"Can it not be believed that public instruction could be just as well

made universal, be administered, directed, and that the teachers,

professors, and inspectors could be just as well elected, and the

system of studies would be just as much in harmony with the habits and

interests of the nation if it was the business of municipal and

general councils to appoint teachers, while the universities only had

to grant them their diplomas; if in public instruction, as in the

military career, merit in the lower grades was necessary for promotion

to the higher, if our dignitaries of the university must first have

gone through the duties of an elementary teacher and supervisor of

studies?

"Does one imagine that this perfectly democratic system would do harm

to the discipline of schools, to morality, education, the dignity of

instruction, or the peace of the family?

"And as the sinews of every administration are money, as the budget

is made for the country and not the country for the budget, as the

taxes must every year be granted freely by the representatives of the

people, as this is the original and inalienable right of the people

both under a monarchy and a republic, since the country must first

sanction the income and expenditure before it can be applied by the

Government,--does it not follow that the consequence of this financial

initiative, which is formally recognised as belonging to the citizens

in all our constitutions, will consist in the fact that the finance

minister, or, in a word, the whole fiscal organisation, belongs to the

country and not to its ruler; that it depends directly upon those who

pay the budget and not upon those who spend it; that there would be

infinitely fewer abuses in the administration of public money, fewer

extravagances and deficits, if the State had just as little power over

public finances as over religion, justice, the army, taxes, public

works, and public instruction?

"Supposing the heads of the different branches of administration were

grouped together, we should have then a council of ministry or an

executive power which would serve just as well as a State Council.

Place over this a great 'jury,' legislative body, or national

assembly, elected and commissioned directly by the whole of the

country, whose duty it is not to nominate the ministers, for these

receive their office from the members of their special departments,

but to look through accounts, to make laws, to draw up the budget, and

to decide the differences between the different administrations after

having received the report of the Public Minister or the Minister of

the Interior, to which in the future the whole Government will be

reduced,--and there you would have a centralisation which would be all

the stronger the more its different centres were multiplied. You would

have responsibility, which is all the more real because the separation

between various powers is more sharply defined; you would have a

constitution which at the same time is political and social."

Here we have the picture of the society of the future, as Proudhon

imagined it when the principles of democracy and, above all, of

universal suffrage have become a reality--the celebrated federative

principle of Proudhon, the inheritance of the most talented party of

any age, the Girondists, locally developed, and to some extent not

without a profound knowledge of politics. It cannot be denied that the

federal principle, as Proudhon here explains it, means the integration

of social force, which in its differentiation meets us sometimes as a

special and sometimes as the common interest, sometimes as

Individualism or again as Altruism. According to this, federation is

nothing more than the translation into politics of the metaphor (which

we formerly used from physics) of the resultants of several component

forces; a metaphor which not only suits the genius of Proudhon, but

also is frequently found in his language. Proudhon was deeply

permeated by the reality of Collectivism, but saw it in the light both

of Physics and Physiology, so that the word "resultants" is with him

more than a metaphor. In this respect Proudhon far surpassed in

insight all the social philosophers of his age, and anticipated the

pioneers of modern sociology. But he contradicted himself, and lost

his special merits by wishing to make out of a social law an absolute

formula; by abandoning the scientific standpoint which he once

attained, and falling back again into dogmatism. If we conceive all

society in the mechanical manner in which Proudhon did; or if we think

(as he did) that we have at least partially discovered the laws of

its movement, then all further politics exhaust themselves in an

experimental verification of the laws in question. But to anticipate

any point of the development which one expects, and to regard it as

something absolute, is a process irreconcilable with an exact

scientific method. In brief, Proudhon's federalism is a political

principle; his Anarchism is a dogma, or at best an hypothesis which

cannot even be logically proved from the first-named, for it is not

true, as Proudhon maintains, that the idea of agreement excludes that

of lordship.

* * * * *

But if Proudhon conceives all society in a mechanical manner, it is to

be expected that he would again seek--and find--the same laws that he

saw operating in the political constitution also in economic life.

This is, as a matter of fact, the case. "Agreement solves every

problem"; only agreement in economic life means with him exchange.

"Social agreement," he says, "is in its essence like the agreement of

exchange." Therefore the corner-stone in his economic system is

exchange. But Proudhon transposed into this purely empiric idea a

moral element, by presupposing equality and justice as necessary to

exchange. Economic freedom, he reasons, is free exchange; but an

exchange can only be called free which presupposes the equality of

values, or, in other words, equality and justice. This again

presupposes a just balance and constitution of values--a mutual

balance of all economic and social forces. What, then, is economic

freedom? It is equality and justice. And what is the opposite--the

hindrance of these principles? It is inequality, injustice, slavery,

which means property. This is the reason why Proudhon's doctrine of

property stands at the centre of his system, which it by no means

exhausts; it is the reason why he always proceeded from this point,

and always returned to it again. Here we have clearly the reason for

all his numberless and endless mistakes in the province of economics,

the weak point of this otherwise great and noble mind. As we already

have remarked about the _Contradictions_, Proudhon did not attack

property in itself; he tried to ennoble it and bring it into harmony

with the claims of justice and equality by taking away from it what

to-day is a _jus utendi et abutendi_, that is, its rights over the

substance of a thing, and the right of devolving it for ever. The

ominous statement "Property is Theft" was directed only against this.

This kind of property (_propriete_, _dominium_) was to be replaced by

individual possession (_possession individuelle_): as to which one

must take care to understand the distinction between "property" and

"possession" in the legal sense.

Proudhon sought in his first and larger work, which is mainly of a

critical nature, to put forward the negative proof that property is

impossible, by inverting all the proofs hitherto brought forward in

its favour, so that instead of justifying the possession of property

they seemed rather to make for freedom. It is, however, quite wrong to

regard this dialectic jugglery as the essence of Proudhon's system. A

proof, such as that here proposed by Proudhon, is not only quite

inadmissible as logic, but it cannot even be said that Proudhon

himself (usually so accurate in this respect) turned out here a really

good piece of work. On the one hand he attacks the defenders of

property, who, after all, are not very difficult to controvert; while,

at the same time, his attempt itself does not always succeed. Of

course it does not mean very much when he cleverly riddles the old

argument for property drawn from divine right or the right of nature;

for in any case he was only attacking dead theories. In the attack on

really living arguments, as in the case of his theory of labour, he

does not succeed.

Property cannot be explained by labour because

(1) The land cannot be appropriated,

(2) Labour leads to equality, and in the sight of justice labour, on

the contrary, abolishes property.

The proposition that property, _i. e._, the right to the substance of

the thing appropriated, cannot be created by labour, because the land

cannot be appropriated, is at least a _petitio principii_ or

tautology. But, leaving that, let us suppose that the land really

cannot be appropriated; yet there is always some kind of property

which has nothing to do with the land. It will not do always to speak

of landed property only, as Proudhon invariably does. Movable property

(in weapons, utensils, ornaments, animals, etc.) precedes immovable

property, owing to its origin, which was only created in imitation of

the other much later, and is entirely property due to work; thus not

only property, but not even the origin of the idea of property in

men, can be explained from the point of view of social history

otherwise than by work.

If it is right, as one of our most acute thinkers says, to declare

that mankind has placed his tools between himself and the animal

world, then another proposition follows directly from this, namely,

that man has placed property between himself and animals. It is true

that the animal develops as far as the family, for if this also is

founded merely upon thought, it cannot be a conscious one. Property

presupposes a definite mental equipment, which even in the case of

primitive men must be important, implying subjectively an already

clear consciousness of self; objectively a certain capacity for

measuring even the remoter consequences of an action; for the desire

for special possession could only exist with reference to a pronounced

consciousness of the self, and to the recognised purpose and further

utility of an object. Neither of these mental presuppositions are

anywhere fulfilled in the animal world. It need hardly be mentioned

that labour in the technical sense has developed naturally and

gradually from physiological labour and the bodily functions; that is,

that even between the natural implement and the artificial there is no

hiatus.

Espinas says (_Animal Communities_, by A. Espinas, p. 338): "Every

living being, however lonely its life may be, can in case of need

build itself some protective covering, and that is the beginning of

the artistic impulse (_Kunst-trieb_), unless, perhaps, this is to be

found in the formation of the organism itself. Leaving out of

consideration the tubicolous annelidae, the mussels and stone-boring

molluscs, the weaving caterpillars, and finally spiders, even the

non-social hymenoptera present, among many insects, examples of a very

skilful adaptation of materials. But it is equally undeniable that,

since the appearance of communities whose purpose is the rearing of

their offspring, the artistic tendency receives a considerable impulse

and produces unexpected marvels. Here it decidedly abandons its usual

procedure in order to take up a new one. Hitherto the lower animals

have, to a great extent, taken the materials for their places of

refuge and their implements from their own bodies: the former an

extension of the organism that produces it; the latter, as in the case

of the spider, only an enlargement of the animal itself which forms

the centre. The productions of the social artistic impulse, on the

other hand, are made out of materials which are more and more foreign

to the substance of the artificer, and are worked up externally by

means which become more and more exclusively mechanical. Hence it

follows that the living body is no longer so directly interested in

the preservation of its work; it can alter and again build up this

structure to an almost infinite extent--in short, the structure

becomes more and more an implement instead of an organ. That was the

inevitable result of animal life, which, being essentially capable of

transference, and presupposing an intercourse of several separate

existences, must necessarily raise itself above external substances,

or else organise them according to the purposes of its life. But must

we now conceive its operations as altogether distinct from those of

physiological life?

"If one reflects that unnoticed steps connect the unconscious work

which produces the organ with the conscious work which produces the

implement, then it does not appear so. Speaking exactly, the waxen

cell in which the larvae of the bee wait for their daily food is

external for every individual of the race, but internal for the whole

of the community; since this forms one single consciousness, or a

collective individuality. The mind of the race is to some extent a

common function, its body a common apparatus; the one is only the

material translation of the other, and the implement performs its

function as faithfully as does the organ. One might even go farther

and maintain that the implement in the full sense of the word is an

organ; for it serves a function that is vital for the community, and

this is exposed to every change, and derives benefit from every growth

which circumstances bring to it."

The work of animals, therefore, only differs in its highest

developments from purely physiological functions, in that the animal

becomes more independent of its implements and of the product of its

labour. Notice, for instance, the progress which is shown in the

series of the mussel's shell, the spider's web, the bee's cell, the

bird's nest, and the mole's burrow. The progressive differentiation

of the products of labour keeps step with the progressive

individualisation of the labourer and with the growing material

independence of the body from its products. Mussel shell, cobweb, and

bee's cell are still produced from the secretions of the body; but

while the mussel is inseparable from its shell, the spider, at least

without immediate harm, can be detached from its web; while the bee is

still further emancipated from its structure of cells. The bird's nest

and the mole's burrow have been formed already by a manipulation of

materials foreign to the body, though in the case of the first still

by the help of secretions from the body. In both cases the animal is

almost completely independent of its product. Still the most

complicated product of animal labour is, after all, connected

inseparably with the body of the worker; and to a much less extent can

the animal be separated from its implements; therefore complete

emancipation never takes place in the animal world.

Even in the case of the anthropoid apes the transition to the

instrument and to a product of labour entirely artificial and

perfectly independent of the animal's own body, is only very slowly

completed. This is clear from a consideration of the slow process by

which man has progressed in perfecting the implements which he has

invented. From the action of the bird which beats open a nut with its

beak, or the squirrel which cracks it with its teeth, up to that of

man who, in order to open the nut, makes use of a stone lying near

him, is only a step, and yet by that step the destiny of the _genus

homo_ is settled. The application of natural objects, such as sticks

and stones, to the purposes of daily life, to defence against animals

and men, to hunting, to cutting down fruits, and so on, does not

certainly become a habit all at once. Indeed, a very long time

elapsed before this adaptation became a general and even a conscious

one, and it was only possible when the advantages of such objects had

been perceived through many experiences.

It needed a still longer time before man learned to choose between the

various objects offered to him by nature, and understood how to

distinguish a more pointed and sharper or a harder stone from one of

those less useful for his purpose. Perhaps it required the experience

and disappointments of uncounted ages to bring the consciousness of

purpose even up to this point. But when this was once done, when man

could judge as to the usefulness of the implement which nature offered

him, then a further step of progress, and certainly the most important

in this series of developments, was taken. To natural selection

follows immediately artificial. The need for suitable and useful

implements became more general and greater, and at the same time it

became more difficult to satisfy, since nature is not so generous with

objects of this kind, and (as was soon seen) only very few substances

united all these qualities which hitherto had been recognised as

necessary or useful. But by this time individuals who were already

better provided for had made other discoveries; they had, for example,

in cracking a nut, broken a stone with which they cracked it, and

noticed that the broken pieces had greater sharpness and pointedness

on their edges than those which nature afforded; or they had found the

pieces of some tree split by lightning, and discovered their greater

hardness and capacity for resistance. What was more natural under the

pressure of the necessity, than to produce intentionally those

processes by which the objects afforded by nature became more

usable--to break the stone in pieces or to burn the wood?

And now at last the artificial implement was produced, and all future

progress was but a trifle compared to the development which had gone

before. The wonders of modern technical art are child's-play compared

to the difficulties with which the anthropoid ape succeeded in making

the first stone celt. The most urgent need of primitive life, the

bitterest competition for the necessities of existence, and the

concentration of the highest mental gifts then possessed, were

necessary to guide the sight of primitive man to the remoter

consequences of an action or of a quality. That his sight became

sharper and sharper in proportion as the implement once invented

showed itself to be insufficient, and became more and more

differentiated in its adaptation to the different kinds of labour,

follows as a matter of course. But the decisive action occurred when

the anthropoid ape for the first time mechanically worked up natural

objects, for by doing so he was enabled to exploit nature rationally,

according to his desires and requirements, to emancipate himself from

the limitations of existence as regards place and climate, to break

those chains of partial action which weigh upon everything belonging

to the animal world.

One must take fully into consideration the difficulties under which

primitive man made his first tools; but one must, however, realise

still more the immeasurable advantages which proceed from the

possession, and the disadvantages which arise from the want, of a

tool, in order to perceive that man had a vital interest in preserving

permanently by him the objects which he had produced. If in his

inexperience he at first threw away his laboriously acquired treasure

after using it, yet soon the oft-recurring need for it, and the

trouble of remaking it, must have taught him better. And by not

leaving the tool behind him for someone else, he made not only a

tremendous step in advance in the satisfaction of his needs, but also

took a step higher in the social scale of his tribe. The others had

need of him, admired him, feared or flattered him; they perhaps sought

to take his treasured tool away from him; he had therefore to defend

himself against others, and all these facts formed still more strongly

the desire to keep it for himself permanently and exclusively. The

conception of property flashed upon the human mind. It sprang from the

sweat of labour; and human culture begins not with equality but with

property.

This rather lengthy digression has been necessary in order that we may

be able to oppose actual facts to the logical subtlety of Proudhon,

which appears to-day to have a greater power than ever of leading men

astray. The question whether the producer of a stone celt was merely

the user of its advantages (Latin, _possessor_) or its actual owner

and master; whether he also had the right to the substances of which

it was composed, appears, after what we have said above, to be simply

childish. The property, which was absolutely labour-property, was at

once perceived to be such, to be _dominium_ and not merely

_possessio_; it never occurred to anybody either to doubt it or to

believe it. Now, Proudhon declares that general consent cannot justify

property, because general consent to an injustice cannot form the

basis of justice. But apart from the fact that the innate sense of

justice in society is merely a fiction of Proudhon's, as of all

earlier or later Utopians, this proposition may perhaps belong to

metaphysics or ethics, but certainly not to the empirical science of

sociology. For he who puts on the crown, and whom all agree to obey,

is really king, even if he has waded to the throne through seas of

blood. The question, in so far as it is neither political nor a

justification of his mode of action, is not a legal one but purely

ethical. The answer to this question prejudges nothing either as to

life or society, and history knows cases enough of actions which

cannot be approved from the moral standpoint, and yet have turned out

to the advantage of the community.

The opinion that agrarian communism, or the village community, is the

most primitive form of property and the natural form of society, is

also quite untenable. In the first place, because the word _naturally_

cannot be taken in the sense that it implies an unalterable normal

condition, or something fixed; for, in reality, _naturally_ means that

which develops itself, and therefore something in the highest degree

changeable. In the second place, because tribal communism is by no

means such a primitive condition as the Socialists, from Rousseau's

time downwards, seem to believe, and wish to make others believe.

Rather, a state preceded it, in which only movable property, the _jus

utendi atque abutendi re_, was known to man. Races have been found

which possess very scanty conceptions of religion, which have not

recognised the family in the widest implication of the idea; whereas,

on the other hand, no race has been found to whom the idea of property

was not known. Certainly in this case it was only a question of the

possession of weapons and ornaments, and so forth; possession of land,

especially as a communal possession, has only been found among a

comparatively small number of primitive peoples, and implies a very

advanced state of social culture. But, however little this condition

is the natural one, [Greek: kat' exochen], still less is it

particularly moral or just.

We know to-day for certain that the rise of communal possession in

land was always inseparably connected with the introduction of

slavery, and that one cannot be thought of without the other. But to

wish to imagine equality in addition to the collective possession of

primitive society is to a great extent a distortion of the facts of

history. Whatever facts we may produce from the actual and not merely

imaginary primitive history of property would be so many arguments

against Proudhon's contention. His economic argument is just as

untenable, that labour should lead to equality. All work, according

to Proudhon, is the effective of a collective force, which is equal to

the resultants of the forces of the single individuals who form the

labour group. Consequently, the product of labour is the property of

the whole community, and every worker has an equal claim to it. This

is, briefly, the argument which, from premises that are possibly

correct, draws conclusions that are entirely false. Proudhon gives the

following example: "Two hundred grenadiers placed the obelisk of Luxor

on its pedestal in a few hours, and yet we do not believe that one man

could have performed the same work in two hundred days. The collective

force is greater than the sum of individual forces and individual

efforts. Therefore the capitalist has not rewarded the labourer fairly

when he pays wages for one day multiplied by the number of

day-labourers employed by him."

It will be seen that Proudhon here proceeds from the assumption that

the value of a product of a labour is a firmly established and easily

fixed amount, as John Grey and Rodbertus had taught before him; for

only in this case could it be exactly stated how great the claim is

which belongs to a labourer. In fact, the characteristic feature of

Proudhon's theory of value lies in his endeavour to determine and fix

values; that is, to use his own dialectic jargon, according to the

synthetic solution of the antithesis of value in use and value in

exchange, in which our economic life fluctuates. Supply and demand,

considered by others as the factors which regulate and determine

value, are to him only forms which serve to contrast with one another

the value in use and value in exchange, and to cause these values to

combine. From justice, which ought to be the foundation of society, he

concludes the necessity, and from general obedience of life to law the

possibility, of a determination of values. Even this value, thus

determined, will be a variable amount, a proportionate figure, similar

to the index which in the case of chemical elements gives their

combining weights. "But this value will none the less be strictly

fixed. Value may alter, but the law of values is unalterable; indeed,

the fact that value is capable of alteration only results from its

being subject to a law whose principle is essentially fluctuating, for

it is labour measured by time." (_Contradictions_, i., "On the Theory

of Value.") Value is thus brought into consideration within the

community which producers form among themselves by means of the

division of labour and exchange, the relation of the proportion of the

products which compose riches, and that which is specially termed the

value of a product is a formula which assigns a proportion of this

product in coins in the general wealth.

Leaving out of the question the moral arrangement of the world, which

even here has contributed to this definition of double meaning, we may

ask, how is this formula, which assigns in coins the proportion of the

product in the general wealth, reckoned? Proudhon has always appealed

only to the realisation of the idea through the actual circulation of

values on the one hand, and to the law-abiding character of nature on

the other. Upon the point of "realisation" we shall have something to

say later. But the law-abiding character of life is, however, just as

much an algebraical expression as the "proportion of the product."

Supposing both are not disputed, what follows, then? If I know the

exact formula for the direction and velocity of a projectile, shall I

now be able to protect myself from every bullet by merely getting out

of its way? The introduction of statistical methods into the general

formula for special values Proudhon has himself excluded as incorrect.

The question settles itself. Society goes on of its own

accord--_laissez aller, laissez faire_--everything remains in the old

way. In addition to this mistake, we find that there is in Proudhon's

mind great confusion with regard to the two ideas of time of labour

and value of labour.

"Adam Smith takes as a measure of value sometimes the time necessary

to produce a commodity and sometimes the value of labour," says Marx

in his celebrated polemic against Proudhon.[1] "Ricardo discovered

this error by clearly proving the difference between these two modes

of measurement. Proudhon, however, goes even farther than the error of

Adam Smith, by identifying two things which Smith has only brought

into juxtaposition. To find the right proportion according to which

the labourers should have their share in the products of their labour,

or, in other words, to determine the relative value of labour,

Proudhon seeks some measure for the relative value of commodities. To

determine the measure for the relative value of commodities he cannot

invent anything better than to give us as an equivalent for a certain

quantity of work, the total of the products made by it; which leaves

us to suppose that the whole of society consists of nothing but

labourers, who receive as wages what they themselves produce. In the

second place, he maintains the equal value of the working days of

different labourers as an actual fact; in a word, he seeks the measure

for the relative value of commodities in order to discover the equal

payment of labourers, and assumes the equality of payment as a settled

fact, in order to proceed to search for the relative value of

commodities."

[1] _Das Elend der Philosophie: An Answer to Proudhon's

Philosophie des Elends._ Stuttgart, 1892 (German ed.).

If we turn back to the question, What is property? we find this

confusion of ideas is answerable for his unsuccessful attempt to prove

that labour must create equality and annihilate property. Here, too,

the equality of the working days is assumed, and therefore the

equality of wages is demanded. But, then, immediately this working day

is changed into his work done in a day (_tache sociale journaliere_).

"Let us assume," says he, "that this social day's work amounts to the

cultivation or weeding or harvesting of two square decametres, and the

mean average of all the time necessary for these amounts to seven

hours. One labourer will finish it in six hours; another in eight

hours; the majority will work seven hours; but so long as each

performs the amount of work required of him, he deserves the same

wages as all the others, however long he may have worked at it." Here

time of work has imperceptibly changed into quantity of work, and

wages are given, not according to the measure of equal working times

but according to the measure of equal performances. Proudhon here

seeks for a solution by saying that the more capable workman, who

performs his day's work in six hours, should never have the right to

usurp the day's work of a less capable labourer, under the pretext of

greater strength and activity, and thus rob him of work and bread; it

is advantage enough derived from his greater capacities that, by this

shortening of his time of labour, he has greater opportunity to work

for his own personal education and culture, or to enjoy himself, and

so on. But Proudhon must be driven even from this last corner of

refuge by the question, What will take place if anyone will perform

only the half of his day's work? Proudhon says: "That is all right;

obviously half of his wages are sufficient for that man. What has he

to complain of if he is rewarded according to the work which he has

performed? and what does it matter to others? In this sense it is

right and proper to apply the text, 'to each according to his work';

that is the law of equality."[2]

[2] _Qu'est-ce que la Propriete?_ p. 102.

But this is to retract all along the line. Proudhon, who assumes the

equality of all working days, and has made it the basis of his theory

of value, must now admit the dependence of wages upon the performance

of work, and admit also, although reluctantly, the statement of St.

Simon, "to each according to his work," which he had set out to

refute. He ought to have gone still farther and said: "If anyone will

not do any work, what happens then? Obviously the man needs no wages;

why should the others then trouble about it?--it is the law of

equality." But what becomes then of the equality to which work was

said to lead? Further, what about the impossibility of proving the

right of property through work? All Proudhon's arguments in proof of

the impossibility of property are mere dialectic sword-play which

hardly anyone takes seriously. Proudhon does not even criticise actual

circumstances, but proves that, following his ideal assumptions (which

in any case exclude property), property is impossible.

The supposed result of his book he sums up in the Hegelian formula:

"Communism, the first form and the final destiny of society, is the

first terminus of social development, the thesis; property, the

contradictory opposite to communism, forms the second terminus, the

antithesis; it remains for us to determine the third terminus, the

synthesis, and then we have the required solution. The synthesis

results necessarily from the correction of the thesis by the

antithesis. It is therefore necessary to examine closely its

peculiarities, and to exclude that which there is in them hostile to

society. The two that remain will, when united, form the true formula

of human social life."[3]

[3] _Qu'est-ce que la Propriete?_ p. 202.

Karl Marx, who made very merry over Proudhon's dialectic, thought he

had played his trump card against the capitalistic method of

production in almost the same way, namely, with the Hegelian

proposition of the negation of negation. If they both explained

themselves by bringing forward, besides the dialectic proof, also an

historical and economic one for their contentions, the answer is that

historic proof cannot be brought forward for Proudhon's synthetic

conception of property or for Marx's method of production, since

history only concerns itself with the past or the present; whereas

such conditions as they imagine exist only in the future, and can only

be derived from the past or present conditions by the dialectic

method, and only can be assumed as hypotheses.

This standpoint unites Proudhon and Karl Marx, the Anarchists and the

Social Democrats; they both call each other Utopians, and both are

right.

* * * * *

Proudhon in his book upon property did not answer the question put in

its title, _What is Property?_ as he had promised in the introduction.

From his statement "property is theft," which was uttered with so much

_eclat_, and of which, according to his own account at least, he was

prouder than if he had possessed all the millions of Rothschild--from

this paradox one might conclude, and certainly the great majority of

his readers do conclude usually that Proudhon was an enemy of property

in general. That is not at all the case. "What I have been seeking

since 1840 in defining property," said he much later (in _Justice_,

i., p. 302), "and what I wish to-day, as I have repeated over and over

again, is certainly not abolition of property. For this would be to

fall into Communism with Plato, Rousseau, Louis Blanc, and other

opponents of property, against whom I protest with all my strength.

What I demand from property is _a balance_." But all his life Proudhon

was unable to dispel the misunderstanding which he carelessly brought

upon his doctrine in his first writing by a talented paradox. We say

carelessly, for the concluding answer which Proudhon gives to the

question, "What is property?" was, even in his first work, not

"property is theft" but "property is liberty;" only the use of all his

great scientific apparatus was quite superfluous, because it was in no

way connected with the chief purpose of his book. Proudhon might just

as well have placed the supposed conclusion, the Ten Commandments of

his economic doctrine, at the beginning of his book, for they were

arrived at not by the method of science but of speculation. These Ten

Commandments run:

(1) Individual possession is the fundamental condition of social life;

five thousand years of the history of property prove it; property is

the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against all

right; suppress property and maintain possession, and you would by

this one main alteration transform everything--laws, government,

economy, statesmanship; you would make evil disappear from the earth.

(2) Since the right of occupation is the same for all, possession

changes according to the number of possessors; thus property can no

longer be created.

(3) Since the result of labour remains the same for the whole of the

community, property, which arising from the exploitation of others and

from rent, disappears.

(4) Since every human work necessarily arises from a collective force,

every piece of property becomes both collective and indivisible--to be

exact, labour annihilates property.

(5) Since every capacity for any occupation, including all the

instruments of labour and capital, is collective property, the

inequality of treatment and of goods, which rests upon the inequality

of capabilities, is injustice and theft.

(6) Trade necessarily presupposes the freedom of the contracting

parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged; but since value

is determined by the amount of time and expense which each product

costs, and since freedom is inviolable, the workers remain necessarily

equal in reward as also in rights and duties.

(7) Products are only exchanged again for products; but since every

bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and

unjust. Take heed to this, the first and the most elementary principle

of economics, and pauperism, luxury, servitude, vice, crime, and

hunger will disappear from our midst.

(8) Men are already, before they fully agreed to do so, associated

from the physical and mathematical law of production; the equality of

external conditions of existence is thus a demand of the justice of

social right, of strict right; friendship, respect, admiration, and

recognition alone enter into the province of equity or proportion.

(9) Free association, or freedom which limits itself to expressing

equality in the means of production and equivalence in articles of

exchange, is the only possible, the only right, and the only true form

of society.

(10) Politics is the science of freedom; the government of men by men,

under whatever name it may be concealed, is servitude; the highest

consummation of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.

We will only select from this Decalogue of Collectivist Anarchism one

dogma, the seventh; because it contains a fundamental error of

Proudhon's, which must continually produce other errors. "Products,"

he says, "are only exchanged for products; but since every bargain

presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and not

right." By this proposition the question of pauperism and everything

evil is to be solved, and, in fact, Proudhon even made some attempts

to realise the theory contained therein. But that every bargain

presupposes the equality of products in any other than the sense

determined by supply and demand, is untrue; yet even this equality is

not regarded by Proudhon as such. He understands thereby equivalence

or the equality of values, which again is determined by the time of

labour, and accordingly he makes it a presupposition of a free bargain

that only products which represent equal times of labour can be

exchanged. Thus a hat which took six hours to make, should be

exchanged for a poem which was written in the same time. And if we are

startled by the incorrectness of this assumption, what can be said for

the converse of this statement, namely, that products of equal value,

_i. e._, such as represent equal times of labour, must be accepted at

any time in place of payment, just as money is accepted to-day?

Proudhon ascribed the utility of money as a universal medium of

exchange to the supposed circumstance that its value was fixed or

established, and concluded therefrom that whenever the value of other

commodities was determined, they would have the same utility as money;

thus, that it would be possible to exchange at any time a watch which

represented three days' work for a pair of boots which had been made

in the same time. And to complete this economic and logical confusion,

Proudhon once again inverts history, and makes the just and free

exchange of products and the circulation of values the starting-point

for the determination of values, and thereby also the foundation of

his realm of justice, freedom, and equality, in which economic forces

have free play.

If values circulate themselves, then too they determine themselves,

and thus only is there a just bargain; profit is impossible, so too is

the accumulation of capital and property. Since all have equal share

in production as in consumption, commodities will always be where they

are needed, and they will always be needed where they exist; supply

and demand will equal one another, value in use and value in exchange

will be the same, value is determined, and the circle (which is in

any case a vicious circle) is completed. Land, like all the means of

labour, is a collective possession. Every one will enjoy the full

results of his labour, but no one will be able to heap up riches

because profit in any form is impossible. Men will collect through

their own free choice in productive groups, which again will be in

direct intercourse one with another, and will exchange their products

as may be required, without profit. Common interests will be

determined by Boards of Experts, who will be chosen by the members of

these groups by means of universal suffrage. The total of all these

boards, which are completely autonomous, forms the only existing and

only possible administration. Governments become superfluous, since

the economic life must entirely absorb political life. And since there

will be no property and no distinction of rich and poor, there will

also be no rule of one man over another, there will be no criminals,

judicial and civil power, militarism and bureaucracy become

superfluous and disappear of themselves. In spite of anarchy (_i. e._,

no government), or rather because of it, the greatest, the only order

will prevail.

In fact, if anything ever deserved the name ideal it is this reform of

society sketched by Proudhon, to which he himself has given the name

"Mutualism." He did not suspect or notice that he had done nothing

more than express the abstract formula of existing relationships, the

most general conception of the liberal scheme of economics. Things

happen in our own world just as Proudhon wished in his kingdom of the

future, only there are a few insignificant factors of friction,

extensions of co-efficients, and so on, which he, if he had been

familiar with scientific methods, would have added as "corrections" to

his universal formula. The present world is related to his as any one

triangle is to the triangle absolute. The triangle which is neither

obtuse-angled, nor acute-angled, nor right-angled, neither equilateral

nor isosceles, nor of unequal sides, whose sides and angles are not

confined to any particular measurement, may certainly be a real

triangle and contain no contradiction in itself (which is by no means

the case in Proudhon's realm of justice), but this triangle cannot be

drawn or even imagined. This is the old dispute of nominalists and

realists, a piece of scholasticism long since obsolete applied to the

problems of modern society, and not even worth refutation, least of

all worthy of any man who has once correctly recognised the reality of

human society, and made it the guiding motive of his thought.

On two occasions Proudhon seemed to have the alluring opportunity of

being able to realise his Utopian visions. The first was in the time

of the Revolution. In February, 1849, he founded the People's Bank

(_Banque du Peuple_),[4] which was to take the initiative in free

economic organisation, and, according to Proudhon's expectations,

would have introduced "free society" if, at the decisive moment, he

had not been sent for three years to the prison of Saint Pelagie for a

political offence, and the Bank was therefore compelled to liquidate.

The second opportunity occurred in the year 1855. Napoleon had asked

for opinions as to how the _Palais de l'Industrie_, in which the Paris

Exhibition had been held, could be used after its close as an

institution of public utility. Among those to whom this question was

addressed we find Proudhon, who answered it with the project of a

permanent exhibition,[5] which was to be conducted by a society

proceeding from very much the same point of view as the People's Bank.

This project was, of course, left unnoticed, and Proudhon became

deeply disgusted and discouraged at this new disappointment.

[4] After Proudhon's paper, _Le Representant du Peuple_, had

published the statutes of the Exchange Bank, he tried in

numerous articles to explain the mechanism and necessity of

it. These articles have been collected in a book, and

appeared under the title, _Resume de la Question Sociale,

Banque d'Echange_.

[5] The scheme appeared in Proudhon's posthumous works.

The People's Bank, like its subsequent second edition, the Permanent

Exhibition Company, was to be founded (in Proudhon's Hegelian method

of expression) upon the identity of the shareholders and their

clients. The producers who had a share in the People's Bank were to

deliver their products to the bank, which would control and determine

the prices of those commodities by assessors, the prices being

determined only with reference to the time of labour spent upon them

and the necessary expenses of production; profit was forbidden since

the bank was not to operate upon its own account. The producer

received upon delivery of his goods "exchange bonds," in return for

which he then could take from the bank other commodities. As the bank

also granted its customers loans without charging interest, money and

interest would become unnecessary, trade would gradually be carried on

only by means of the bonds of the bank, and thus would be brought

about the harmony of social intercourse of which Proudhon dreamed.

The Permanent Exhibition Company was to be a new edition of the

People's Bank, perfected and enlarged in every direction. Since the

shareholders of this company consisted of producers, and their purpose

was above all the sale and interchange of products, so therefore the

subscription for the formation of the capital was not to be, as in the

case of other companies, merely in money, but was to be nine-tenths in

products, which were to be sold by the company, and the receipts of

the sale were then to be credited to the shareholders. As the State

was to become surety for the interest on these shares, Proudhon

thought that these must become actual money, representing rights to

dividend, which could only lose their value by the destruction of the

company's depot for goods. Against the goods which were deposited with

it or the sale of which it undertook, as well as against the bills

which were given to it to discount, the company was to issue, together

with the cash which it had at disposal, general bonds of exchange (_la

bons generaux d'echange_) which would represent the goods stored in it

and realised by it, and should give the claim to an equal value in

goods which the holder of the bond could take from the storehouses as

he wished. These bonds were to be the circulating money of the

company, and were to be accepted by it instead of cash payments in all

transactions with goods or with bills. The circulating paper of the

company, held by it at par, owing to the fact that it could be

exchanged into money or the goods of the company upon presentation,

would become the great lever of its operations and the irresistible

instrument of its power. The company was to undertake banking and

commission business of all kinds, grant credit in money and goods, and

support industry, trade, and agriculture.

All objects deposited with this society, including gold and silver,

and especially all articles composing its balance, were to be arranged

in an exchange tariff, which would be continually changeable, and the

object of which was to secure the equivalence of values. "Certainly

every rise in the exchange of an article would be balanced by an

equivalent fall of exchange in one or more articles, if one regards

the existing total sum, one-tenth being allowed in fluctuations either

up or down. The differences in time in the balance would be entered in

a special balance book which would finally equalise itself from time

to time."

That is the project; and its author gives the following example: Since

the company carries on no business on its own account, and neither

acquires nor possesses products itself, and thus does not lose money

on the rise or fall, it is only guided in directing the course of

prices by one object, viz., to moderate one by the other, and to

create a permanent and a daily compensation; thus, if demand arises

for one product while it falls off for one or several others, the

company raises the price of the first 4 per cent., and at the same

time lowers, according to the quantity of the first, the price of the

other in such a way that the compensation is as exact as possible.

Because it is difficult to reach this mathematical exactitude, a

certain margin is allowed, which again, compensating itself from time

to time, never can amount to the assets of the society. If we assume,

for the sake of example, that the price of gold has fallen--that is,

that gold is freely offered, while silver has risen, that is, is more

in demand--the company, since its bills are discounted with its own

notes, will give 100 francs of its money for 105 francs of gold, equal

to 100 francs in silver; or, to express myself more exactly, for a

weight of gold which is only one-twentieth higher than five

twenty-five franc pieces, and the weight of silver which is only

one-twentieth lower than twenty-five franc pieces. From this

compensation no profit accrues to the company; it has only intervened

with its own money in order again to re-establish equilibrium.

From this process of compensation carried on by the company, which was

to be applied in like manner to all products, raw materials and food

stuffs, and so on, Proudhon hoped for that much talked of and much

promising fixity of values, since all products would (so to speak) be

monetised and made into money, and would maintain the highest degree

of circulating power. Branches of the company over all France and a

complete public administration were to complete the system, which

should have as its object the organisation and centralisation of

exchange of products in return for products, according to the formulae

of J. B. Say, with as little money as possible, as few intermediaries

as possible, with the least possible expense, and for the exclusive

benefit of producers and consumers.

It hardly need be observed that the rise and prosperity of these

institutions must stand or fall by the correctness of the assumption

of fixed values and of the monetisation of all products. Proudhon's

opponents wished to make out, that in view of this knowledge his

sudden arrest and imprisonment in Saint Pelagie, by which he was

divested of all responsibility for the liquidation of the company, was

not altogether unwished for by him. But this is contradicted by the

attempt which was renewed later on to realise the project of the

People's Bank. We have, indeed, no cause to suspect Proudhon's good

faith in the matter; on the other hand, the supposed originality of

this idea of his is all the more open to suspicion, because in all

essential particulars it reminds us too closely of the "labour paper

money" of Rodbertus that was to be issued by the State after the

determination of values, an idea with which Proudhon's economics had

many points in common. There is a still greater similarity between

Proudhon's projects and the Boards of Trade thought of by Bray ten

years before the beginning of the People's Bank; and it is also like

John Gray's Central Bank.

* * * * *

In later years Proudhon not only outwardly, owing either to compulsion

or prudence, renounced all immediate realisation of his intentions,

but even became convinced and expressed his conviction in his work

upon the federative principle (_Du Principe Federatif_, 1852), that

ordered anarchy was an ideal, and as such could never be realised, but

that nevertheless human society should strive to attain it by means of

federative organisations, as he had sketched it in his earlier

writings. Even in this period of mental maturity, when removed from

political agitation, he remained the sworn enemy and direct opponent

of the Communists, and wished to see the great problem of the best

arrangement of society solved, not by universal levelling down, but by

the general perfection and development of society; not by revolution

from which he had gained nothing but disgust and disillusionment, but

by evolution. "If ideas will rise up," he used to say, "then even the

paving stones would rise up themselves if the Government were so

imprudent as to wait for this."

With true prophetic insight Proudhon perceived the fact that even in

human society revolution is everything; with a clearness of vision

such as none before him, and only very few after him, have possessed,

he always insisted upon the organic character of human society and the

natural continuity between animal and human social life; and in this

lies his greatness, which will never be diminished by any of his

numerous errors. But while he thus with one foot for the first time

trod upon the ground of a new discovery, with the other he stood on

the standpoint of social philosophy of previous centuries. He could

neither externally nor internally disassociate himself from its

baseless assumptions of a social contract, the absolute rights of man,

a moral order of the universe, and similar ethical views of politics;

and herein lies the contradiction upon which his great mental talents

were shipwrecked. If we once regard human society as Proudhon did, as

something real, the product of nature which is moved and develops

itself according to the laws of the rest of nature, then we have once

for all given up the right to mark out for it a line of development

determined merely by speculation, or to demand from it that it should

move towards any particular goal, however well-intentioned it may be.

A breeder may produce in his pigeons or fowls a certain kind of

feather or a certain form of pouting, but he cannot change the pigeon

into a hen. The artificial selection of breeding is all that man can

do (_pour corriger la nature_) against the free progress of natural

development. This is not so insignificant as one may be inclined to

believe at the first glance. The latter belongs to the category of

Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and of that Utopian social philosophy which

began with Plato, and in all human probability will not end for a long

time. Proudhon wished to unite both, one with another,--to unite water

with fire. Like all Utopians, he desired--he who all his life, in his

numerous writings, so frequently confuted and sneered at them--that

the human race might be metamorphosed in order to accept unanimously

his ideas about society. For that the men of his day were not fit for

a true democracy--that is, for anarchy--he was honest enough to admit.

"Nothing is in reality less democratic than the people," said he,

occasionally, and he did not allow himself the least delusion as

regards their slavish love for authority. For that very reason, he

thought democracy must be changed into "demopaedy," and a complete

revolution of a popular spirit must be caused by education. But to

prove that, even with the help of democracy, people would not be ripe

for pure democracy, or, rightly speaking, for anarchy, we can quote an

authority which he never doubted, namely, himself. In an access of

pessimism, he said once, "I have thought I have noticed (may

philosophy pardon me for it!) that the more reason develops in us the

more brutal becomes passion when once it is let loose. It appears then

that the angel and the biped brute which together compose our human

nature in their intimate union, instead of mingling their attributes,

only live side by side with one another. If progress leads us to that,

of what use is it?" This is a bad look-out for the great moral

revolution upon which Proudhon more and more based all his hopes.

Proudhon has had the most varied judgment passed upon him. Some have

treated him as an obscure pamphlet writer. Louis Blanc calls him a

prizefighter; Laveleye, in a history of Socialism, only considers him

worth mentioning in order to call his ideas "the dreams of a raving

idiot"; Karl Marx denies him either talent or knowledge; many have

considered him as a Jesuitical hypocrite; others, again, his

followers and representatives, have called him the greatest man of the

century. Ludwig Pfau called him the clearest thinker that France had

produced since Descartes. But the spectacle is by no means new. In

reality, but little courage and wit are to-day needed to acquire the

applause of an ignorant multitude which has no idea of Proudhon's

train of thought by the condemnation of the father of Anarchism.

"Justice must be done to all, even to Louis Napoleon," exclaimed

Proudhon, to the great astonishment _orbis et urbis_ after the _coup

d'etat_; and not to take a lower standard than the father of

Anarchism, we exclaim also, "Justice must be done to all, even to

Proudhon."

The most usual reproach which is cast against Proudhon is that he is

contradictory and confused. This reproof is generally made by people

who know no more about Proudhon than the paradox "Property is Theft,"

and from this one expression call him confused and contradictory.

Proudhon saw very clearly the end before his eyes, strove to attain it

unfalteringly and steadily, and amid all the variety of the

developments in which he preached his ideas to the world for a quarter

of a century, never betrayed one iota of its contents. The

contradiction from which his work suffered lay deeper. It lay in the

form of his thought, and partly in the period to which he belonged.

Placed on the boundary line between two epochs of social science and

of social forms, one of which is marked by dogma and the other by

induction, he had not the strength to break completely with one or

give himself up completely to the other. His whole life and thought

was a constant fight against dogma in every form. He fought against

social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against

the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to

transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and

to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as

Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is

born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a

moral order of society--two propositions which can never be proved by

experience, but rather contradict all experience.

In the same way this internal contradiction is shown in the principal

work of his last period, the _Justice dans le Revolution et dans

l'Eglise_, in which Proudhon endeavours to show these two separate

worlds in their marked difference one from another without suspecting

that he himself fluctuated between both.

After he, as a logical idealist, had denied all external force and all

authority, and nevertheless as a realist had supported society as the

unalterable condition of human life and civilisation, he seeks at the

same time to save anarchy and society by a new bond between

individuals who have been set free and find this in some internal

necessity and internal authority, in a principle which acts upon the

will like a force, and determines it in the direction of the general

interest independently of all consideration of self-interest.

And so the man, who had put away from himself everything of an

absolute and _a priori_ nature because he declared a purely empirical

foundation of social science to be the source of all immorality,

arrived at the assumption of an innate, immanent justice as the first

principle of society which he, with the arbitrariness of a catechism

writer, declared to be "the first and most essential of our faculties;

a sovereign faculty which, by that very fact, is the most difficult to

know, the faculty of feeling and affirming our dignity, and

consequently of wishing it and defending it as well in the person of

others as in our own person."

As Proudhon, in spite of the fact that he was always opposing

Utopianism, nevertheless fell into the chief error of the Utopians,

so, too, finally he shared the destiny of Auguste Comte, upon whom

during his life he had rather looked down. Both had started with a

sworn antagonism to every speculative foundation of social philosophy,

and both finally adopted a _deus ex machina_ in order to preserve the

world that was falling into individual pieces before them from a

complete atomisation. With Comte it is called "love," with Proudhon

"justice." The distinction between the two is somewhat childish. Both

perceived the standpoint of evolution, the mechanical conception which

overcomes all deviations, without assigning to it the part which it

deserves. One may safely say that if Proudhon had been brought into

connection with the doctrine of evolution, he would have been one of

the leading sociologists. He had an infinitely keen sense of the most

secret motions of the social soul, but he believed that he might not

approach it lovingly in its nudity of nature, and therefore degraded

it to a Platonic idea, after having affirmed its utmost reality. This

was an action like that of Kronos, the curse of which never departed

from his thought.

To this was added a very scanty and transitory acquaintance with

political economy which allowed the practicability of his ideas to

appear to him in the easiest light, but which, when he was opposed to

one so thoroughly acquainted with it as Karl Marx, placed him in the

most piteous position.

One of the commonest reproaches which is made against Proudhon, and

which is partly a personal one, refers to his attitude towards

Napoleon III. In the little political catechism which is found in his

_Justice_, Proudhon answered the question "Whether Anarchy can be

united with the dynastic principle," in the following way: "It is

clear that France till now was not of opinion that freedom and dynasty

were incompatible ideas. When the old monarchy called together the

States General it kindled the Revolution. The constitution of 1791 and

those of 1814 and 1830, proved the desire of the country to reconcile

a monarchical principle with the democracy. The popularity of the

First Empire was one argument more for the possibility of this

supposition; the people believed they found in it all their

preconceived ideas, and apparently surrender was reconciled with

progress. Thus men satisfied their habits of subjection under a

lordship, and their need for unity; they exercised the danger of a

president dictator or an oligarchy. When in 1830 Lafayette defined the

new order of affairs as 'a monarchy surrounded by republican

arrangements,' he perceived the identity of the political and economic

order. While the true republic consists in the equilibrium of forces

and efforts, people pleased themselves by seeing a new dynasty hold

the balance and guaranteeing justice. And finally, this theory is

confirmed by the example of England (although equality is unknown

there), and by the new constitutional states. No doubt the union of

the dynastic principle with that of freedom and equality in France has

not produced the fruits that were expected from it, but that was the

fault of Governmental fatalism; the mistake was made just as much by

the princes as by the people. Although dynastic parties since 1848

have shown themselves by no means friendly to revolution, the force of

circumstances will again bring them to it, and as France at all stages

of her fortunes has always liked to give herself a ruler and to

manifest her unity by a symbol, so it would be exaggeration to deny

even now the possibility of a restoration of the dynasty. We have

heard Republicans say, 'He will be my master who shall wear the purple

robe of equality,' and those who speak thus form neither the smallest

nor the least intelligent portion; but it is also true that they did

not wish for a dictatorship. At any rate, one must admit that there

are no symptoms of a restoration in the near future. And what makes us

suppose that the dynastic principle is, at least, under a cloud, is

the fact that the pretenders and their advisers have no heart for the

affair. 'After you, gentlemen,' they appear to say to the Democrats.

But after the democracy there will not remain much for a dynasty to

pick up, or the economic equilibrium would be false. _Non datur regnum

aut imperium in oeconomiae._"

This certainly reasonable and moderate point of view, which proceeds

from the perception that in an organic society the caprice of one

individual cannot possibly stop or disturb the course of the social

function, and that king or emperor accordingly could at most be a

symbol, is also at the bottom of the book on social revolution. In the

_coup d'etat_ of the 2d of December, Proudhon only saw a stage of the

great social revolution, the manifestation of the will of the people,

striving in the direction of social equalisation; although perhaps

mistakenly, and challenged Louis Napoleon, whose _coup d'etat_ he had

prophesied, condemned, and sought to prevent, to show himself worthy

of public opinion, and to use the mandate given him by destiny and by

the French people in the sense that it was entrusted to him.[6]

Proudhon probably did not believe, when he was writing the _Sociale

Revolution_, by any means too much in the willingness of Napoleon to

take upon himself such a mission as he assigned to him. The language

of the book is in any case very reserved, and there is no trace of the

apotheosis of the author of the _coup d'etat_.

[6] It must not be forgotten that the people expected in

Louis Napoleon "the social emperor," and that he had in

earlier times played upon this expectation. Compare his work

on _The Abolition of Pauperism_, German translation by R. V.

Richard. Leipsic, 1857. Volume ii.

Nevertheless some have wished to represent this as Proudhon's

intention; his early release from the prison in which the little book

was written as the immediate effect, and as being the thanks of the

Emperor, thus representing Proudhon as a mercenary time-server. But

this is not in accordance with the facts. Proudhon remained in his

imprisonment almost till the very last day of his sentence, and the

attitude of the authorities towards his writings afterwards does not

seem to show that any relationship, even a secret one, existed between

Proudhon and Napoleon. Proudhon might write what he liked, it was

confiscated; in vain he applied for permission to be allowed to issue

his paper, _Justice_; a book which no longer showed the violence of

his youth brought him three more years' imprisonment again, which he

only escaped by a rapid flight to Belgium, and in the general amnesty

of the year 1859 he was specially excepted from its conditions. When

the Emperor in 1861, as a special favour, granted him permission to

return home before the proper time, Proudhon proudly refused this

favour, much as he wished to be in Paris, and only returned there at

the expiration of the three years' period, at the end of 1863. These,

at least, are no proofs that the author of _What is Property?_ allowed

himself to be brought over by the man on the 2d December. But Proudhon

was not to breathe the air of his native land much longer. Broken by

the troubles of persecution, he died, after a long illness, on the

19th June, 1865, in the arms of his wife, who, like himself, belonged

to the working classes, and with whom he had led a life full of

harmony and love.

CHAPTER III

MAX STIRNER AND THE GERMAN FOLLOWERS OF PROUDHON

Germany in 1830-40 and France -- Stirner and Proudhon --

Biography of Stirner -- _The Individual and his Property_

(_Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_) -- The Union of Egoists --

The Philosophic Contradiction of the _Einziger_ -- Stirner's

Practical Error -- Julius Faucher -- Moses Hess -- Karl Gruen

-- Wilhelm Marr.

In the first half of the forties, almost about the same time, but

completely independent one from another, there appeared, on each side

of the Rhine, two men who preached a new revolution in a manner

totally different from the ordinary revolutionist, and one from which

at that time even the most courageous hearts and firmest minds shrank

back. Both were followers of the "royal Prussian Court philosopher"

Hegel, and yet took an entirely different direction one from the

other: but both met again at the end of their journey in their

unanimous renunciation of all political and economic doctrines

hitherto held; in their thorough opposition to every existing and

imagined organisation of society upon whatever compulsion of right it

might be founded; and in their desire for free organisation upon the

simple foundation of rules made by convention or agreement--in their

common desire for Anarchy.

The contemporaneous appearance of Proudhon and Stirner is of as much

importance as their, in many ways, fundamental difference. The first

circumstance shows their appearance was symptomatic, and raises it

above any supposed or probable outcome of chance; Stirner and Proudhon

support each other mutually with all their independence, and with all

their difference one from another. As to this, it cannot be denied

that it is to be traced, first and foremost, to the totally different

environment in which the two authors grew up.

Ludwig Pfau, in a talented essay, has sought to derive the literary

peculiarities of Proudhon from the Gallic character and from his

French _milieu_. But even besides the purely literary aspect, Proudhon

shows all the gifts and all the weaknesses of his people and of his

time; he shares with all Frenchmen their small inclination to real

criticism, but also their faculty of never separating themselves from

the stream of practical life; and thus, before everything, we perceive

in Proudhon's earlier works a strong tendency towards the part of an

agitator. L. Pfau asserts that it is a specific peculiarity of the

French nation, with all their notorious sentiment for freedom, "to

discipline their own reluctant personality, and subject it to the

common interest"; and therein lies, perhaps, the reason why Proudhon,

although an enthusiastic advocate of personal freedom, never wished

this to be driven to the point of the disintegration of collective

unity and to the sacrifice of the idea of society.

Stirner is the German thinker who is carried away by the unchecked

flow of his thoughts far from the path of the actual life into a misty

region of "Cloud-cuckoo-land," where he actually remains as the "only

individual," because no one can follow him. There is no trace in

Stirner's book of any intention of being an agitator. As far as

political parties are mentioned in it, they do appear as such, but

merely as corollaries of certain tendencies of philosophic thought.

Stirner keeps himself even anxiously apart from politics, and a

certain dislike to them is unmistakable in him. All parties have in

his eyes only this in common, that they all strive to actualise

conceptions and ideas which lie beyond them, whether these be called

God, State, or humanity. Stirner stands in the same relation to the

philosophic tendencies of his own and earlier times. He sees them all

run into the great ocean of generality the absolute, nothingness. The

distinction between Saint Augustine and L. Feuerbach is for him purely

a superficial and not an essential one; for the "man" of the latter is

as foreign to him as the "God" of the former. And so Stirner carries

his disinclination to politics, as being inimical to the philosophy of

his time, almost to disgust, being herein a genuine son of his country

and of his period.

Upon the philosophic exaltation and the speculative "foundation

period" of the beginning of the century there had followed a severe

depression; to the over-eager expectations which had been placed in

philosophy there followed just as severe a disappointment; to the

metaphysical orgy there followed a moral headache, which might be

designated not inaptly by the motto which Schopenhauer gave in mockery

to Feuerbach's philosophy, so well suited to his time--

"Edite, bibite, collegiales!

Post multa saecula

Pocula nulla."

The political attitude of the forties was very much the same. The

national enthusiasm, the wars of freedom, and the sanguine hopes which

had attended the downfall of the Corsican, had, like the expectations

aroused by the Revolutionists of the days of July, ended in miserable

disaster. The touching confidence which a nation, all too naive in

politics, had placed in its princes had been shamefully deceived and

abused. All dreams of union and freedom seemed to be extinguished for

a long time, and the flunkeyism which was unfortunately only too

rampant in the nation, ran riot, while frank souls stood aside in

disgust. The more eager the spiritual enthusiasm had been on the

threshold of two centuries, the deeper now did apathy weigh upon men's

spirits in the period of the forties. The fuller men's souls had been

of surging and stormy ideals, and wishings and vague longings of all

kinds, the emptier did they now become, and not only Stirner could

with justice give to his "only individual" the motto, "I have placed

my all on nothing," but it was the motto of all Germany at that time.

And yet in one thing Stirner is the type of his people as contrasted

with Proudhon. He is the most complete example of the German who lacks

that proud self-sacrificing view of the life of the community, that

feeling of the inseparability of the individual from the mass of his

people--which is the token of the French,--but who at all times has

suffered from a separatism that destroys everything. He is the typical

representative of that nation to whom its best sons have denied the

capacity of being a nation, but which has therefore been able to

produce more striking individualities than all other civilised nations

of the time.

* * * * *

Caspar Schmidt--for this is Stirner's real name[1]--was born at

Baireuth on the 25th October, 1806, and, like Strauss, Feuerbach,

Bruno Bauer, and other thinkers of the same kind, devoted his time to

theological and philosophic studies. After completing these, he took

the modest position of a teacher in a high school, and in a girls'

school in Berlin. In 1844 there appeared, under the pseudonym "Max

Stirner," a book called _The Individual_ _and his Property_, with the

dedication which, under these circumstances, is touching: "To my

Darling, Marie Doehnhardt." The book appeared like a meteor; it caused

for a short time a great deal of talk, and then sank into oblivion for

ten years, till the growing stream of Anarchist thought again came

back to it in more recent times. A _History of the Reaction_, written

after the year 1848, is esteemed as a good piece of historical work;

and, besides this, Caspar Schmidt also produced translations of Say,

Adam Smith, and other English economists. On the 26th of June, 1856,

he ended his life, poor in external circumstances, rich in want and

bitterness. That is all that we know of the personality of the man who

has raised the idea of personality to a Titanic growth that has

oppressed the world.

[1] Stirner's chief work, _The Individual and his Property_

(_Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum_, Leipsic, 1845), has been

reprinted by P. Reclam, at Leipsic, with a good introduction

by Paul Lauterbach. The literature about Stirner is almost

exclusively confined to a few scattered remarks in larger

works, which are not always very appropriate. J. H. Mackay is

said to be working at a biography of Stirner. The monograph

by Robert Schellwien, _Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche_

(Leipsic, 1892), is quite worthless for our purpose.

Stirner proceeds from the fact, the validity of which we have placed

in the right light at the beginning of this book, that the development

of mankind and of human society has hitherto proceeded in a decidedly

individualistic direction, and has consisted predominantly in the

gradual emancipation of the individual from his subjection to general

ideas and their corresponding correlatives in actual life, in the

return of the Ego to itself. Starting from the school of Fichte and

Hegel, he pursued this special individualistic tendency till close

upon the limits of caricature; he formally founded a cultus of the

Ego, all the while being anxious that it should not return again to

the region of metaphysical soap-bubbles, and leave its psychological

and practical sphere. On the contrary, Stirner appears to be rather

inclined to Positivism, and to consider the details of life and of

perception as real, and as the only ones whose existence is justified.

All that is comprehensible and general is secondary, a product of the

individual, the subject turned into an object, a creation that is

looked upon and honoured by the creator as the only actual reality,

the highest end--indeed, as something sacred. In the origin of this

generalisation, as well as in emancipation from it, Stirner perceives

the course of progressive culture.

The ancients only got so far as generalisations of the lower order;

they lived in the feeling that the world and worldly relationships

(for example, the natural bond of blood) were the only true things

before which their powerless self must bow down. Man, in the view

of life taken by the ancient world, lived entirely in the region of

perception, and therefore all his general ideas, even the highest type

of them, not excluding Plato's, retained a strongly sensuous

character.

Christianity only went a step higher with its generalisations out

of the region of the senses; ideas became more spiritual and less

corporeal in proportion as they became more general. Antiquity sought

the true pleasure of life, enjoyment of life; Christianity sought the

true life; antiquity sought complete sensuousness, Christianity

complete morality and spirituality; the first a happy life here,

the latter a happy life hereafter; antiquity postulated as the

highest moral basis, the State, the laws of the world; Christianity

postulated God, imperishable, everlasting Law. The ancient world

did not get beyond the rule of formal reason, the Sophists;

Christianity put the heart in the place of reason, and cultivation

of sentiment in that of one-sided cultivation of the intellect.

Nevertheless, this is, according to Stirner (as has already been

mentioned), the same process, the objectivisation of the Self, which

comes out of itself, and considers itself as some foreign body

striving upwards--unconscious self-deification.

Even in the Reformation Stirner recognises nothing more than the

continuation of the same process. Up to the time of the period

preceding the Reformation, reason, that was condemned as heathenish,

lay under the dominion of dogma; shortly before the Reformation,

however, it was said, "If only the heart remains Christianly minded,

reason may after all have its way." But the Reformation at last places

the heart in a more serious position, and since then hearts have

become visibly less Christian. When men began with Luther "to take the

matter to heart," this step of the Reformation led to the heart being

lightened from the heavy burden of Christianity. The heart becomes

from day to day less Christian; it loses the contents with which it

occupies itself, until at last nothing remains to it but empty

"heartiness," general love of man, the love of humanity, the

consciousness of freedom. It need hardly be mentioned that this view

of history is quite arbitrary and distorted. Who requires to be told

that the Reformation was, perhaps, the greatest historical act in

favour of the individual, because it freed him from the most powerful

of all authorities, from the omnipotence of the Roman dogma? With the

Reformation the conscious movement for freedom received its first

great impulse.

But Stirner places the reverence of the ancients for the State, the

reverence of the Christian for God, and of modern times for humanity

and freedom, all upon the same level,--they all seem to him ghosts,

spectres, possession by spirits and hauntings,--and he seeks to

establish the same conclusion as regards the ideas of truth, right,

morality, property, and love,--the so-called sacred foundations of

human society. They are all ghost-imaginations of our own mind,

creations of our own Ego, before which the creator of them bows in the

impotence of ignorance, considering them as something unalterable,

eternal, and sacred, to which every activity of the creative idea is

placed in contrast as Egoism.

"Men have got something into their heads which they think ought to be

actualised. They have ideas of love, goodness, and so on, which they

would like to see realised; and therefore they wish for a kingdom of

love upon earth in which no one acts out of self-interest, but

everyone from love. Love shall rule. But what they have placed in

their heads, how can it be called other than 'a fixed idea' (_idee

fixe_)? Their heads are haunted by spectres. The most persistently

haunting spectre is Man himself. Remember the proverb, 'The way to

ruin is paved with good intentions.' The proposal to actualise

humanity in itself, to become wholly human, is of just the same

disastrous character, and to it belong the intentions of becoming

good, noble, loving, and so forth."

The dominion of the idea, whether it is religious or humanitarian or

moral, is for Stirner mere priest-craft; philanthropy is merely a

heavenly, spiritual, but priest-imagined love. Man must be restored,

and in doing so we poor wretches have ruined ourselves. It is the same

ecclesiastic principle as that celebrated motto, _Fiat justitia,

pereat mundus_; humanity and justice are ideas and ghosts to which

everything is sacrificed. The enthusiast for humanity leaves out of

consideration persons as far as his enthusiasm extends, and walks in a

vague ideal of sacred interest. Humanity is not a person but an

ideal--an imagination.

All progress of public opinion or emancipation of the human mind, as

hitherto proceeding, is accordingly for Stirner worthless labour, a

mere scene-shifting. As Christianity not only did not free mankind

from the power of ancient spectres, but rather strengthened and

increased them, so too the Reformation did not remove the chains of

mankind a hair's-breadth. "Because Protestantism broke down the

medieval hierarchy, the opinion gained ground that hierarchy in

general had been broken down by it, while it was quite overlooked that

the Reformation was even a restoration of a worn-out hierarchy. The

hierarchy of the middle ages had been only a feeble one, since it had

to allow all possible barbarity to persons to go on unchecked with it,

and the Reformation first steeled the strength of the hierarchy. When

Bruno Bauer said: 'As the Reformation was principally the abstract

separation of the religious principle from art, government, and

science, and thus was its liberation from those powers with which it

had been connected in the antiquity of the Church and in the hierarchy

of the middle ages, so also the theological and ecclesiastical

movements that proceeded from the Reformation were only the logical

carrying out of this abstraction or separation of the religious

principle from other powers of humanity';--and so I see on the

contrary that which is right, and think that rule of the mind or

mental freedom (which comes to the same thing) has never been before

so comprehensive and powerful as at the present time, because now,

instead of separating the religious principle from art, government,

and science, it is rather raised entirely from the kingdom of this

world into the realm of the spirit and made religious."

From the same point of view he considers the whole of the mental

attitude introduced by the Reformation.

"How can one," he says, "maintain of modern philosophy and of the

modern period that they have accomplished freedom when it has not

freed us from the power of objectivity? Or am I free from despots when

I no longer fear a personal tyrant, but am afraid of every outrage

upon the loyalty which I owe to him?"

This is just the case in the modern period. It only changes existing

objects, the actual ruler and so on, to an imagined one, that is, into

ideas for which the old respect not only has not been lost but has

increased in intensity. If a piece was taken off the idea of God and

the devil in their former gross realism, nevertheless only so much the

more attention has been devoted to our conceptions of them. "They are

free from devils, but evil has remained." To revolutionise the

existing State, to upset the existing laws, was once thought little

of, when it had once been determined to allow oneself to be no longer

imposed upon by what was tangible and existing; but to sin against the

conception of the State and not to submit to the conception of

law--who has ventured to do that? So men remained "citizens" and

"law-abiding, loyal men"; indeed, men thought themselves all the more

law-abiding in proportion as they more rationalistically did away with

the previous faulty law in order to do homage to the spirit of law. In

all this it is only the objects that have changed but which have

remained in their supremacy and authority; in short, men still

followed obedience, lived in reflection, and had an object upon which

they reflected, which they respected, and for which they felt awe and

fear. Men have done nothing else but changed things into ideas of

things, into thoughts and conceptions, and thus their dependence

became all the more innate and irrevocable. It is, for example, not

difficult to emancipate oneself from the commands of one's parents, or

to pay no heed to the warnings of an uncle or an aunt, or to refuse

the request of a brother or a sister; but the obedience thus given up

lies easily upon one's conscience, and the less one gives way to

individual sentiments, because one recognises them from a rational

point of view, and from our own reason to be unreasonable, the more

firmly does one cleave conscientiously to piety and family love, and

with greater difficulty does one forgive an offence against the idea

which one has conceived of family love and the duty of piety. Released

from our dependence upon the existing family life, we fall into the

more binding submission to the idea of the family; we are governed by

family spirit. And the family, thus raised up to an idea or

conception, is now regarded as something "sacred," and its despotism

is ten times worse, because its power lies in my conscience. This

despotism is only broken when even the ideal conception of the family

becomes nothing to me. And as it is with the family, so it is with

morality. Many people free themselves from customs, but with

difficulty do they get free from the idea of morality. Morality is the

"idea" of custom, its spiritual power, its power over the conscience;

on the other hand, custom is something too material to have power over

the spirit, and does not fetter a man who is independent, a "free

spirit."

Humanity strives for independence, and strives to overcome everything

which is not a self, says Stirner; but how does this agree with the

above-mentioned spread of the power of the mental conception and of

the idea? To-day mankind is less free than before; so-called

Liberalism only brings other conceptions forward; that is, instead of

the divine, the human; instead of ecclesiastical ideas, those of the

State; instead of those of faith, those of science; or general

statements, instead of the rough phrases and dogmas, actual ideas and

everlasting laws.

In the movement for emancipation in modern times Stirner distinguishes

three different varieties, the political, social, and humanitarian

Liberalism.

Political Liberalism, according to Stirner, culminates in the thought

that the State is all in all, and is the true conception of humanity;

and that the rights of man for the individual consist in being the

citizen of the State. Political Liberalism did away with the

inequality of rights of feudal times, and broke the chains of

servitude which at that period one man had forced upon another, the

privilege upon him who was less privileged. It did away with all

special interests and privileges, but it by no means created freedom;

it only made one independent of the other, but yet made all the most

absolute slaves to the State. It gave all power of right to the State,

the individual only becomes something as a citizen, and only has those

rights which the State gives him. Political Liberalism, says Stirner,

created a few people, but not one free individual. Absolute monarchy

only changed its name, being known formerly as "king," now as

"people," "State," or "nation."

"Political freedom says that the _polis_, the State, is free; and

religious freedom says that religion is free, just as freedom of

conscience means that the conscience is free; but not that I am free

from the State, from religion, or from conscience. It does not mean my

freedom, but the freedom of some power which governs and compels me;

it means that one of my masters, such as State, religion, or

conscience, is free. State, religion, and conscience, these despots

make me a slave, and their freedom is my slavery." "If the principle

is that only facts shall rule mankind, namely, the fact of morality or

of legality, and so on, then no personal limitations of one individual

by the other can be authorised--that is, there must be free

competition. Only by actual fact can one person injure another, as the

rich may injure the poor by money--that is, by a fact, but not as a

person. There is henceforth only one authority, the authority of the

State; personally no one is any longer lord over another. But to the

State, all its children stand exactly in the same position; they

possess 'civic or political equality,' and how they get on one with

another is their own affair; they must compete. Free competition means

nothing else than that everyone may stand up against someone else,

make himself felt, and fight against him."

At this point (wherein Stirner by no means recognises immediate or

economic individualism) social Liberalism--that which we to-day call

social Democracy or communal Socialism--separates from the political.

With a cleverness which we cannot sufficiently admire, Stirner

proceeds to show that these directions which are so totally opposed

are essentially the same, and regards the latter merely as the logical

outcome from the former.

"The freedom of man is, in political Liberalism, the freedom from

persons, from personal rule, from masters; security of any individual

person, as regards other persons, is personal freedom. No one can

give any commands; the law alone commands. But if persons have become

equal, their positions certainly have not. And yet the poor man needs

the rich, and the rich man needs the poor; the former needs the money

of the rich, the latter the work of the poor. Thus no one needs anyone

else as a person; but he needs him as a giver, or as one who has

something to give, as a proprietor or possessor. Thus what he has,

that makes a man. And in having or in possession people are unequal.

Consequently, so social Liberalism concludes, no one must possess,

just as, according to political Liberalism, no one must command--that

is, as here the State alone has the power of command, so now society

alone has the power of possessing." As in political Liberalism, the

State is the source of all right; the individual only enjoys so much

of it as the State gives him, so the social State, now called society,

is also the only master of all possessions, and the individual must

only have so much as society lets him share in. "Before the highest

Ruler," says Stirner in his rough language, "before the only

Commander, we all become equal--equal persons, that is, nonentities.

Before the highest owner of property we all become vagabonds alike.

And now one person is, in the estimation of another, a vagabond, a

'havenought,' but then this estimate of each other stops, we are all

at once vagabonds, and we can only call the totality of communist

society 'a conglomeration of vagabonds.'"

That which Stirner, finally, under the name of humanitarian

Liberalism, places side by side with the two tendencies just mentioned

has nothing to do, generally speaking, with the political and material

relations of mankind, and is the philosophical Liberalism of

Feuerbach, who places freedom of thought in the same position as his

predecessors put freedom of the person. "In the human society which

humanitarianism promises," says Stirner, "nothing can be recognised

which any person has as something 'special,' nothing shall have any

value which bears the mark of a 'private' individual. In this way the

circle of Liberalism completes itself, having in humanity its good

principle, in the egotist and every 'private' person its evil one; in

the former its God, in the latter its devil. If the special or private

person lost his value in the State, and if special or private property

ceased to be recognised in the community of workers or vagabonds, then

in human society everything special or private is left out of

consideration, and when pure criticism shall have performed its

difficult work, then we shall know what is private, and what one must

leave alone in _seines Nichts durchbohrendem Gefuehle_." Political

Liberalism regulated the relations of might and right, social

Liberalism wishes to regulate those of property and labour,

humanitarian Liberalism lays down the ethical principles of modern

society.

* * * * *

As may be seen, Stirner does not recognise the efforts and endeavours

of all these tendencies to which we ascribe the complete

transformation of Europe in the last century, but, on the contrary,

is prepared to perceive in them rather an intensification of the

servitude in which the free Ego is held. The more spiritual, the more

interesting, the more sublime and the more sacred ideas become for

men, the greater becomes their respect for them, and the less becomes

the freedom of the Ego as regards them. But as these ideas are merely

creations of man's own spirit,--fiction and unreal forms,--all the

so-called progress made by Liberalism is regarded by Stirner as

nothing else than increasing self-delusion and constant retrogression.

True progress evidently lies for him only in the complete emancipation

of the Ego from this dominion of ideas that is in the triumph of

egotism. "For Individualism (egotism) is the creator of everything,

just as already genius [a definite egotism] which is always

originality, is regarded as the creator of new historical productions.

Freedom teaches us: set yourselves free, get rid of everything

burdensome; but it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Free!

free! so sounds its cry, and you eagerly follow it; become free from

yourselves, and renounce yourselves. But Individualism calls you back

to yourselves, and says: 'Come to yourself!' Under the aegis of freedom

you become free from many things, but become subject again to some new

thing; you are free from the Evil One, but abstract evil still

remains. As individuals you are really free from everything, and what

clings to you you have accepted. That is your choice and your wish.

The individual is the one who is born free, the man who is free by

birth. The 'free man,' on the other hand, is he who only looks for

freedom, the dreamer, the enthusiast." Freedom is only possible

together with the power to acquire it and to maintain it; but this

power only resides in the individual. "My power is my property; my

power gives me property; I am myself my own power, and am thereby my

own property." This is, in a nutshell, Stirner's positive doctrine.

Right is power or might. "What you have the power to be, that you have

the right to be. I derive all right and justification from myself

alone; for I am entitled to everything which I have power to take or

to do. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah or God, if I can; if I

can _not_, these gods will always retain their rights and power over

me; but I shall stand in awe of their rights and their power in

impotent reverence, and shall keep their commands and believe I am

doing right in everything that I do, according to their ideas of

right, just as a Russian frontier sentry considers himself justified

in shooting dead a suspicious person who runs away, because he relies

upon a 'higher authority,' in other words, commits murder legally. But

I am justified in committing a murder by myself, if I do not forbid it

to myself, if I am not afraid of murder in the abstract as of

'something wrong.' I am only not justified in what I do not do of my

own free will, that is, that which I do not give myself the right to

do. I decide whether the right resides in me; for there is some right

external to myself. If it is right to me, then it is right. It is

possible that others may not regard it as right, but that is their

affair, not mine, and they must take their own measures against it.

And if something was in the eyes of the whole world not right, and yet

seemed right to me, that is, if I wished it, even then I should ask

nothing from the world: thus does everyone who knows how to value

himself, and each does it to the extent that he is an egotist, for

might goes before right, and quite rightly too."

All existing right is external to the Ego; no one can give me my

right, neither God, nor reason, nor Nature, nor the State; as to

whether I am right or not there is only one judge and that is myself;

others at most can pass a judgment and decide whether they support my

right and whether it also exists as a right for them. Law is the will

of the dominating power in a community. Every State is a despotism,

whether the dominant power belongs to one, to many, or to all. A

despotism would remain then, if, for example, in the national assembly

the national will, that is to say, the individual wills of each

person, really had overwhelmingly expressed itself, including also my

own will; if then this wish becomes law I am bound to-morrow by what I

wished yesterday, and then I thus become a servant, even though it be

only the servant of myself. How can this be changed? "Only by my

recognising no duty, neither letting myself bind nor be bound. If I

have no duty then I also know no law." Wrong goes side by side with

right, crime with legality. The unfettered Ego of Stirner is the

never-ceasing criminal in the State; for only he who denies his

"self," and who practises self-denial is acceptable to the State. And

thus with the disappearance of right comes also the disappearance of

crime.

"The dispute about the right of property is violently waged. The

Communists maintain that the earth belongs properly to him who

cultivates it; and the products of the same to those who produce them.

I maintain it belongs to him who knows how to take it, or who does not

let it be taken from him or let himself be deprived of it; if he

appropriates it, not merely the earth but also the right to it belongs

to him. This is the egotistical right, that is, it is right for me,

and therefore it is right." How far Stirner is separated from Proudhon

is shown most clearly in the question of property. Proudhon denied

property because it was incompatible with justice. Stirner denies

justice, and maintains property upon the grounds of the right of

occupation. Proudhon declared that property was theft, but Stirner

entirely reverses the phrase, and answers to the question, What is my

property?--"Nothing but what is in my power." To what property am I

entitled?--"To that which I entitle myself." "I give myself the right

to property by taking property or by giving myself the power of the

proprietor, a full power or title."

The theory of occupation or seizure here appears to us in all its

brutality. Nevertheless, even here Stirner is not frightened at the

most extreme consequences of this theory, nor at the thought that one

would have to defend one's property daily and hourly with a weapon in

one's hand; and he is therefore inclined to make some concession to a

voluntary form of organisation. "If men reach the point of losing

respect for property, each will have property; just as all slaves

become freemen as soon as they regard their master no longer as

master. Union will then multiply the means of the individual, and

secure for him the property he has acquired by fighting. In the

opinion of the Communists the community should be the only proprietor.

The converse of this is, I am the proprietor, and merely come to some

agreement with others about my property. If the community does not do

right by me, I revolt against it, and defend my property. I am an

owner of property, but property is not sacred." The regulation of

society by itself is accepted by Stirner just as little as in the

question of property, when it comes to the question of obtaining for

the labourers a full reward of their labour. "They must rely upon

themselves and ask nothing from the State," he answers. Only to a

third very difficult question does this thoroughgoing theorist fail in

an answer. He declares pauperism to be "lack of value of myself, when

I cannot make my value felt; and, therefore, I can only get free from

pauperism if I make my value felt as an individual, if I give myself

value, and put my own price upon myself. All attempts at making the

masses happy, and philanthropic associations arising from the

principle of love, must come to grief, for help can only come to the

masses through egotism, and this help they must and will procure for

themselves. The question of property cannot be solved in such a legal

way as the Socialists, and even the Communists, imagine. It can only

be solved by the war of all against all. The poor will only become

free and be owners of property by revolting, rising, and raising

themselves. However much is given them, they will always wish to have

more; for they wish nothing less than that, at last, there shall

remain nothing more to give. It will be asked: But what will happen

then, when those who have nothing take courage and rise? What kind of

equalisation will be made? One might just as well ask me to determine

a child's nativity; what a slave will do when he has broken his chains

one can only wait and see."

Step by step Stirner departs from Proudhon; the latter demands, in

order to create his paradise, a balance, the former lays down the

principle of natural selection as the highest and only law in social

matters. The fight, the struggle for existence, which Proudhon strove

to recognise in economic life, here enters upon its rights in all its

brutality. The realisation of the self is, for Stirner, the key to the

solution of the problems of work, property, and pauperism. He will

have no division of goods, no organisation of labour. For Proudhon

every piece of work is the result of a collective force, for Stirner

the most valuable works are those of "individual" artists, savants,

and so on, and their value is always to be determined only from the

egoist standpoint.

To the question whether money should be maintained or done away with

among egoists, he answers: "If you know a better medium of exchange,

all right; but it will always be 'money.' It is not money that does

you harm, but your lack of power to take it. Let your power be felt,

nerve yourselves, and you will not lack money--_your_ money, the money

of your own coining. But working I do not call letting your power be

felt. Those who only 'seek for work, and are willing to work hard,'

prepare for themselves inextinguishable lack of work." What we

now-a-days call free competition, Stirner refuses to regard as free,

since everyone has not the means for competing. "To abolish

competition only means to favour members of some craft. The

distinction is this: in a craft, such as baking, baking is the

business of the members of the craft; under a system of competition it

is the business of anyone who likes to compete; but in societies it is

the business of those who use what is baked; thus, my or your

business, not the business of the members of the craft, nor of the

baker who has a concession given him, but of those in the union or

society." Here for the second time we meet with the idea of a union,

without Stirner expressing himself exactly about its character. Only

in one other place does he happen to speak about the ideas of this

union. He says the end of society is agreement or union. A society

also certainly arises through union, but only in the same way as a

fixed idea arises from a thought, namely, by the fact that the energy

of the thought, thinking itself the restless absorption of all rising

thoughts, disappears from thought. When a union has crystallised

itself into a society, it has ceased to be an active union; for the

act of union is a ceaseless uniting of individuals, it has become a

united existence, has come to a standstill, has degenerated into a

fixity; it is dead as a union; it is the corpse of union, and of the

act of union; that is, it is a society or community. What is known as

"party" is a striking example of this.

Stirner admits that union cannot exist without freedom, being limited

in all manner of ways. But absolute freedom is merely an ideal, a

spectre, and the object of the union is not freedom, which it, on the

contrary, sacrifices to individualism, but its object is only

individualism. "Union is my creation, my implement, sacred to me, but

has no spiritual power over my mind, and does not make me bow down to

it; but I make it bow down to me, and use it for my own purposes. As I

may not be a slave of my maxims, but without any guarantee expose them

to my own continual criticism, and give no guarantee of their

continuance, so, still less, do I pledge myself to the union for my

future, or bind my soul to it; but I am and remain to myself more than

State or Church, and consequently infinitely more than the union."

Just as we again recognise in this loose and always breakable union

(although Stirner does not say so) that union whose mission he had

declared it to be "to render secure property gained by force," to

arrange the relations of production and consumption, and at the same

time to create a certain unity of the means of payment; so, too, we

have in this "union of egoists," as its author called it, all the

constructive thought that Stirner's book either can or does contain.

For a man who only acknowledges one dimension, and only operates with

one, considering everything not contained therein as non-existing,

cannot form any of the combinations of which life consists, without

coming into hopeless conflict with his principles. This Stirner has

done, in spite of the vague and imaginary nature of his "union of

egoists."

As Stirner had to acknowledge that this union or society cannot exist

without freedom being limited in every way, he declared--since after

all he requires union for some things--"absolute freedom" a creature

of the imagination, as the opposite to "individuality," which is the

main thing. But can it be believed that Stirner has set up an

"absolute freedom" all of his own making, to place it in contrast with

individuality. In other words, freedom is merely the possibility of

living one's individuality, of being an "individual" in Stirner's

sense. Freedom is the absence of every outside influence; it may be

understood in an exoteric or esoteric sense; and throughout his whole

book Stirner has done nothing but strip the "Ego" from every sign of

outside compulsion; he has made it the "only one" by freeing it with

relentless logic from everything external. He has depicted this act of

liberation as the goal of all culture; and it finally emerges that all

this story of the "only Ego" is a delusion, for "union" excludes

"absolute individuality" as well as "absolute freedom"--because the

two are identical.

Stirner, indeed, only spoke of an "absolute freedom" to represent it

as a fiction of the imagination, and on the other hand only of an

individuality. Now his union does not exclude individuality and

freedom, but only absolute individuality. But this last Stirner cannot

admit, because it also he regards merely as a "spectre," an

"obsession," a "fixed idea." But whether he admits it or not, what is

Stirner's "individual" but an idea, something absolute? Stirner had

begun with the intention of slaying Feuerbach's idea of "man" as a

retrograde idealist fallacy, and of creating, like Prometheus, a new

man, the _Unmensch_, in the Ego completed into a microcosm, and, as

such, complete in itself, separate and independent. But that is, as a

matter of fact, not the "no-man" but the superhuman Prometheus

himself, the idea of Man which he attacked in Feuerbach. "Might," he

says in one part of his book, "goes before right, and rightly too."

This is exactly the logical scheme of the whole book. Away with

everything absolute! Individuality goes before every idea, just

because it is itself the absolute idea of the much-despised Hegel.

But suppose we do not take into consideration this fundamental

contradiction. Let us suppose there is none, and that all Stirner's

other assumptions are indisputable, that God, Humanity, Society,

Right, the State, the Family are all classed in one category, as were

abstractions and creations of my own "Ego," what follows? That these

ideas, now that they have lost their absolute character, are no longer

to be reckoned as factors in the organisation of life? It is so, if

one regards only that which is absolute as entitled to exist; but

Stirner would drive everything absolute from its very last positions.

And does it follow further from the circumstance that one of these

factors has lost its controlling influence over mankind that all the

others, because they too are not absolute, should be denied all

practical significance? Put in concrete form, the question stands

thus: (1) Has the idea of Deity lost its practical significance,

because it has been divested of its absolute character, and its purely

empiric origin has been recognised? and (2) If the idea of Right is no

more an absolute one than the idea of Deity, does it follow that the

influence of Right must be placed upon the same plane as the influence

of conscience?

As to the first point, I am relieved from any answer in view of the

thorough treatment of these questions by the light of modern

investigation. The second question I prefer to leave to some

professional jurist, who knows the nature of law, and at the same time

has every intention of doing justice to Stirner.

Dr. Rudolf Stammler says,[2] after showing that the necessity of the

influence of Law for human society cannot be proved _a priori_: "It is

the theory of Anarchism which must lead us with special force to a

train of thought that has never yet appeared in the literature of

legal philosophy, although it makes clear, in a manner universally

valid, the necessity of legal compulsion in itself and justifies legal

organisation. For the antithesis of our present mode of social life,

based on law and right, is, as conceived by Anarchism as its ideal and

goal, the union and ordering of men in freely formed communities, and

entirely under rules framed by convention. Though the individual

Anarchist may regard a union of egoists as a postulate, or may desire

fraternal Communism, yet each must determine for himself his

connection with such a community. Let him enter freely into the

supposed agreement and break it again as seems good to him, it is

still the stipulations of the agreement that bind him as long as the

agreement exists; an agreement which he must first enter into and can

at any time break regardless of conditions by a new expression of his

will. From this it is that this kind of organisation, which forms the

core of the theory of Anarchism, is only possible for such of mankind

as are actually qualified and capable of uniting with others in some

form of agreement. Those who are not capable of acting for themselves,

as we jurists say, such as the little child, those who are of unsound

mind, incapacitated by illness and old age, all these would be

entirely excluded from such an organisation and from all social life.

For as soon as, for example, an infant has been taken into this

society and subjected to its rules, the compulsion of law would have

been again introduced, and authority would have been exercised over a

human being without the proper rules for his assent being observed.

The Anarchist organisation of man's social life therefore fails,

inasmuch as it is possible only for certain special persons, qualified

empirically, and excludes others who lack these qualifications. I

therefore conclude the necessity of legal compulsion, not from the

fact that without it the small and weak would fare but badly; for I

cannot know this for certain beforehand and as a general rule. Nor do

I deduce the recognised and justified existence of legal arrangements

from the fact that only by these can the 'true' freedom of each

individual be attained without the interference of any third person;

for that would not be justified by the facts of history, and would

certainly not follow from formal legal compulsion in itself. Rather, I

base the lawfulness of law and the rightness of right, in its formal

state, upon the consideration that a legal organisation is the only

one open to all human beings without distinction of special fortuitous

qualifications. To organise means to unite under rules. Such a

regulation of human relationships is a means to an end, an instrument

serving the pursuit of the final end of the highest possible

perfection of man. Hence only that regulation of human society can be

universally justified which can embrace universally all human beings

without reference to their subjective or different peculiarities. Law

alone can do this. So even under a bad law legal compulsion in itself

retains its sound foundation. Its existence does not cease to be

justified, nor is it even touched, by any chance worthlessness of the

concrete law in question: it is firmly founded, because it alone

offers the possibility of a universally valid, because universally

human, organisation. Therefore social progress can only be made by

perfecting law as handed down by history, according to its content,

and not by abolishing legal compulsion as such."

[2] Stammler, _Die Theorie des Anarchismus_, Berlin, 1894, p.

42.

These conclusions block the way for the mischievous misapplications of

distorted expressions of an exact thinker such as Ihering. Ihering

certainly took away ruthlessly the ideological basis of law, but he

never denied or attacked necessity of legal compulsion as Stirner did.

We might just as well ascribe to Darwin the intention of disowning man

because he set forth man's natural descent.

It is of just as little use to claim that past master of sociology,

Herbert Spencer, in support of Stirner's views, because Spencer too

recognises the purely egoistical origin of law and of social

organisation. Egoism and Anarchism are not so mutually interchangeable

as Stirner thinks. The question is, first of all, whether egoism after

all really finds its account in the "union of egoists." It has been

already more than once remarked that here too, as in the case of

Proudhon, we only have to do, at bottom, with the logical extension of

the present order of society that rests on free competition. "Make

your value felt" is still to-day the highest economic principle; and

he whose value, whose individuality consists in knowledge alone

without an adequate admixture of worldly wisdom, would probably fare

no better in the more perfect Anarchist world than the poor

schoolmaster Caspar Schmidt in our _bourgeois_ society, who suffered

all the pangs of hunger and greeted Death as his redeemer.

* * * * *

Stirner did not form any school of followers in Germany in his own

time, but Julius Faucher (1820-78) who was known as a publicist and a

rabid Freetrader, represented his ideas in his newspaper _Die

Abendpost_ (_The Evening Post_), published in Berlin in 1850. This

paper was, of course, soon suppressed, and the only apostle of

Stirner's gospel thereupon left the Continent and went to England, to

turn to something more practical than Anarchism, or (to use Stirner's

own jargon) to realise his "Ego" more advantageously. How strange and

anomalous Stirner's individualism appeared even to the most advanced

Radicals of Germany in that period appears very clearly from a

conversation recorded by Max Wirth,[3] which Faucher had with the

stalwart Republican Schloeffel, in an inn frequented by the Left party

in the Parliament of Frankfort. "Schloeffel loved to boast of his

Radical opinions, just as at that time many men took a pride in being

as extreme as possible among the members of the Left. He expressed his

astonishment that Faucher held aloof from the current of politics. 'It

is because you are too near the Right party for me,' answered Faucher,

who delighted in astonishing people with paradoxes. Schloeffel stroked

his long beard proudly, and replied, 'Do you say that to _me_?' 'Yes,'

continued Faucher, 'for you are a Republican incarnate; you still want

a State. Now _I_ do not want a State at all, and, consequently, I am a

more extreme member of the Left than you.' It was the first time

Schloeffel had heard these paradoxes, and he replied: 'Nonsense; who

can emancipate us from the State?' 'Crime,' was Faucher's reply,

uttered with an expression of pathos. Schloeffel turned away, and left

the drinking party without saying a word more. The others broke out

laughing at the proud demagogue being thus outdone: but no one seems

to have suspected in the words of Faucher more than a joke in

dialectics." This anecdote is a good example of the way in which

Stirner's ideas were understood, and shows that Faucher was the only

individual "individual" among the most Radical politicians of that

time.[4] On the other hand, Proudhon's doctrines, which in their

native France could not find acceptance, gained a few proselytes among

the Radical Democrats, and especially among the Communists of

Switzerland and the Rhine.

[3] "Zur Geschicte des Anarchismus," _Neue Freie Press_, 26th

July 1894 (No. 10,748).

[4] It is characteristic that even the German followers of

Proudhon, as, _e. g._, Marr, Gruen, and others, had a very

poor opinion of Stirner, and never dreamed of any connection

between his views and those of Proudhon.

Moses Hess was, among Germans, the first to seize hold upon the word

"Anarchy" fearlessly and spread it abroad. This was in 1843, thus

shortly after the appearance of Proudhon's sensational book on

property, where the word was first definitely adopted as the badge of

a party. Hess was born at Bonn in 1812, and was meant for a merchant's

life, but turned his attention to studies picked up later, more

especially to Hegelian philosophy, and entered upon the career of

literature. In the beginning of the forties he propounded in his works

on _The Philosophy of Action_ and _Socialism_ a confused programme,

in which the Communism of Weitling was curiously intermingled with the

views of Proudhon. In 1845 he expressed his views in a paper called

_The Mirror of Society_ (_Gesellschaftspiegel_), that appeared later

in 1846, under the title of _The Social Conditions of the Civilised

World_, and represented the extreme views of Rhenish Socialism. Moses

Hess died in obscurity in 1872.

Hess went farther than Proudhon, in that he differed from Proudhon's

carefully thought-out and measured organisation of society by

demanding, under Anarchy, the abolition of the influence, in social,

mental, and moral life, not only of the State and the Church, but also

in like manner of any or all external dominion. All action, he

declared, must proceed exclusively from the internal decision of the

individual acting upon the external world, and not _vice versa_.

Action which did not proceed from internal impulse, but from

external--whether from external compulsion, necessity, desire for

gain, or enjoyment--was "not free," and thus merely "a burden or a

vice." This cannot be the case under Anarchy, for there every work

will bring its own reward in itself. The manner and duration of a

man's work will depend entirely on his inclination, thus introducing

an individual arbitrary will unknown as yet to Proudhon. Society will

offer to each just as much as he "reasonably" needs for

self-development and the satisfaction of his wants. As the means of

introducing "Anarchism" Hess mentions the improvement of the system of

education, the introduction of universal suffrage, and--a thing which

Proudhon always opposed--the erection of national workshops.

Karl Gruen, however, was not only in friendly personal relationship

with Proudhon, but also perfectly imbued with his ideas. Born on

September 30, 1817, at Ludenscheid, in Westphalia, he studied at Bonn

and Berlin, and later became a teacher of German at the college of

Colmar. Later he founded in Mannheim the radical newspaper, the

_Mannheimer Zeitung_, and when expelled from Baden and Bavaria went to

Cologne, where for some time he continued active as a lecturer and

journalist. During the winter of 1844 and 1845 he had made the

acquaintance of Proudhon personally in Paris, and had inoculated him

with Hegelian philosophy, and in return brought back Proudhon's views

with him to Germany. The result of this first visit to Paris was the

work entitled, _The Social Movement in France and Belgium_,[5] one of

the most important works on advanced Socialism in Germany, which made

known the Socialist views of Frenchmen, and especially of Proudhon, to

the German public in an attractive form. In 1849 Gruen made another

stay in Paris. Returning thence to Germany, he was elected a member of

the Prussian National Assembly; then, being arrested for alleged

complicity in the Palatinate rising, was at length acquitted after

eight months' imprisonment. He then lived in Belgium and Italy,

engaged actively in literary work; later on became a teacher at the

School of Commerce in Frankfort, visited the Rhine towns on a

lecturing tour from 1865 to '68, and migrated in 1868 to Vienna, where

he resided till his death in 1887.

[5] Gruen wrote many works on literature and the history of

art, and also _Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the Sphinx on the

French Throne_ (3d ed., 1866); _France before the Judgment

Seat of Europe_ (1860); Italy (1861), etc.

Gruen goes farther than his master Proudhon, and, like Hess, sowed the

seed of the Communist Anarchy which has only attained its full growth

as a doctrine in quite recent years. In this he totally rejected the

principle of reward or wages maintained by Proudhon. "Proudhon never

got beyond this obstacle," he says; "he anticipates it, seeks it, he

would like it, he introduces it: the farther association extends, the

greater the number of workmen, the less becomes the work of each, the

more distinction between them disappears. That is a mathematical

proceeding, not social or human. What distinction is to disappear? The

distinction among producers is to become progressively smaller. The

natural distinction of capacity which society abolishes by the social

equality of wages. Preach the social freedom of consumption, and then

you have at once the true freedom of production. Reverse the case: are

you so anxious about lack of production? Recent progress in science

may assure you. Perhaps children up to fifteen years of age would be

able to perform all necessary household duties as mere guides of

machineryeven in holiday attire, as a game of play! Everyone is paid

according to what he produces, and the production of each is limited

by the right of all. But no! no limitation! Let us have no right of

all against the right of the individual. On the contrary, the

consumption of each is guaranteed by the consumption of all. The

production of one is not paid for by the product of another, but each

pays out of the common product."[6] We shall meet with the same ideas

in Kropotkin, only more definite.

[6] Die sociale Bewegung, p. 433. Darmstadt, 1845.

Proudhon found an ardent disciple in Wilhelm Marr, who at that time

stood at the head of the German Democratic Union of manual workmen of

"young Germany" in Switzerland. Born on May 6, 1819, at Magdeburg,

Marr was originally intended for a merchant's calling, but after his

stay in Switzerland (1841) gave it up entirely, and turned his

attention to a political and literary career. At first, attracted by

Weitling's Communism, he later on came into decided opposition to it

from his accentuation of the individualist standpoint, which he, as an

ardent follower of Feuerbach, pursued according to Proudhon's rather

than Stirner's views. In conjunction with a certain Hermann Doeleke,

Marr endeavoured to instil these views into the above-mentioned Swiss

workmen's unions. His programme was quite of a negative character; as

he himself describes it: "The abolition of all prevailing ideas of

Religion, State, and Society was the aim, which we followed with a

full knowledge of its logical consequences." Doeleke called it the

"theory of no consolation"[7] (_Trostlosigkeits-theorie_). In

December, 1844, Marr published a journal in Lausanne called _Pages of

the Present for Social Life (Blaetter der Gegenwart fuer sociales

Leben)_, to promote the literary acceptance of this theory. "With

remorseless logic," says Marr himself (_Das junge Deutschland_, p.

271) "we attacked not only existing institutions in State and Church,

but State and Church themselves in general; and as a first attempt,

which we in the second number made in the shape of an article upon the

Tschech outrage, produced no ill consequences for us, our audacity

grew to such a pitch that Doeleke often preached Atheism, and the word

'Atheism' was to be seen at the head of his articles. I did the same

in the department of social criticism, while, following the example of

Proudhon, I put before my readers at the very beginning the final

consequences of my argument." For a time the Government did not

interfere with Marr's propaganda, but in July, 1845, it stopped the

publication of his journal, and Marr was soon after expelled from the

country. This was the end of the results of his propaganda in

Switzerland; for in the popular reflex of Marr's doctrines we can

hardly find more than the Radicalism of German Democrats, as preached

by Boerne, coloured by a few traces of Proudhon's teaching. This shade

of opinion was then quite modern; we recognise it in Alfred Meisener,

Ludwig Pfau, and the Vienna group, even in Boerne, who died in the

forties; the doctrine was part of the spirit of the age, and did not

need to be derived from Proudhon.

[7] Wilhem Marr, _Das junge Deutschland in der Schweiz_, p.

135. Leipsic, 1846.

Wilhelm Marr, after many and various political metamorphoses, took

sides with the Anti-Semites, and acquired the unenviable reputation

of being one of the literary fathers of this questionable movement.

Recently he has again abandoned this movement, and living embittered

in retirement in Hamburg, has once more devoted the flabby sympathies

of his old age to the Anarchist ideals of his youth.

Marr forms the link between the pure theory of Anarchism and active

Anarchist agitation, between the older generation who laid down the

principles and the modern Anarchists. The acute reaction following

upon the years 1848 and '49 extinguished the scanty growth that had

sprung from the seed sown by Proudhon and Stirner. Only when in the

sixties, with the reviving Social-Democratic movement there naturally

arose also its opposite, the "Anti-Authoritative Socialism," did men

proceed to complete the work begun by Proudhon and Stirner. Recent

proceedings in this direction have, however, not only not added any

essential feature to the theory of Anarchism, but rather have obscured

the former sharp outlines of its ideas, and introduced into its theory

elements which are really quite foreign and contradictory to it, and

have prevented that peaceful discussion of it which might be

advantageous to all parties. This distinction between the older and

the more modern theorists of Anarchism is most clearly marked in

Bakunin with his introduction of "Russian influence"; with Bakunin

begins the theory of active agitation.

PART II

MODERN ANARCHISM