Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ Hear Bossuet, hear all that faith humbles under its salutary yoke: they will tell you that the views of Providence are inaccessible to human prudence, and that everything happens for the greater glory of God, ad majorem Dei gloriam! ”

“ Only seeing the kings and priests as exploiters and tyrants, the men of the golden mean as hoaxers and ambitionists, demagogy dreams less of peacefully transforming than of brusquely suppressing previous institutions; it takes the past, not as a theme, but as an adversary. Addressing the people's passions more than their reason, when it imagines to do the talking, it succeeds only in inciting.
The golden mean is the hypocrisy of progress ”

“ Catholicism is the allegory of society, or it is nothing. Now the time has come when the allegory must give way to reality, where theology is impiety, and faith sacrilege. A God who governs and who cannot be explained is a God who I deny, who I hate above all things. ”

“ Socialism, or social democracy, the last form of Catholicism, is also the last form of monarchy and property. Socialism is the product of Catholicism and at the same time its opponent, at once Christ and Anti-Christ. Faith will not suit it, no doubt: we need only philosophy, which history sets down.
Catholicism, monarchy, property, in a word absolutism, thus express for us the historical and social past; socialist democracy expresses the future. ”

“ Absolutism, benefiting from its precedence, I would almost say from its birthright, but fooled by its principle, whose whole efficiency is to abrogate itself, forever implementing restoration, only serves to fuel revolutions; — the golden mean endeavors to stop the revolutionary chariot, and only manages to precipitate it; — demagogy wants to accelerate the movement and causes it to react; — socialism, always waging war against the traditions, often ends up being itself excommunicated from society.
Furthermore, it is of political parties as of systems of philosophy. ”

“ Under many diverse names, Greek and barbarian, citizen and slave, Spartan and Helot, patrician and proletarian, Guelph and Ghibelline, noble and serf, bourgeois and journeyman, capitalist and worker, you find them in all ages and among all peoples. All of them had their crimes and follies, as they had their share of truth and utility in humanitarian evolution. Instigators of opinion, agents and moderators of progress, they personify the faculties of the collective being, the conditions of social life. ”

“ Society, living and perfectible, which develops over time, to the opposite of God, who immovably exists for eternity, necessarily has two poles, one that looks to the past, the other looking to the future. In society, where ideas and opinions are divided and classed according to temperaments and interests, so there are also two principal parties: the absolutist party, which strives to conserve and reconstruct the past; and the socialist party, which incessantly tends to bring out and produce the future. ”

“ Radicalism is better for the people. Indeed, the more man feels disinherited, the more inclined he is to violently overthrow and reconstitute the society that disinherited him.
Thus demagogy and the golden mean are opposite one another, like absolutism and socialism are between them: these four parties form, if I may say so, the four cardinal points of history. Necessary results of our perfectibility, they are contemporary in society and reason, and indestructible. ”

“ That is the privilege of reason, that is its misery, if you will, to reduce to simple and lucid ideas the most gigantic phenomena, the most entangled of civilization and nature. Just as the largest rivers are only streams at their source; similarly, for the reason of the philosopher, the most terrible revolutions depend upon naively simple causes. ”

“ Every man who reasons and seeks to realize his opinions, whether in politics, in philosophy, immediately classes himself, by the mere fact of the judgment he expresses, in a party or some system: only he who does not think is of no party, no philosophy, no religion. ”

“ Catholicism, in order to get out of a chaotic state and elevate itself in unity, strives to rationalize itself ever more. Through this rationalism it corrupts itself, it loses its mystical character, and becomes a philosophy of nature and humanity. ”

“ However, since humanity is progressive, and it acts only on memories and forecasts, it is naturally divided into two great classes: the one which, most affected by the experience of the ancients, is reluctant to go forward into the uncertainty of the unknown; the other which, impatient with present evils, is more inclined to reform. To keep an equal account of either of the traditions or hypotheses, and to advance upon an uncertain route of progress, is something impossible for our too exclusive reason. ”

“ But society, by virtue of the analytical reason with which man is gifted, oscillates and deviates continually to the right, to the left of progress, according to the diversity of passions which serve as motors. It has therefore also, among the two extreme parties, two middle parties, in parliamentary terms, a center-right and a center-left, a Gironde and a Mountain, which incessantly push or hold the Revolution off its track. ”

“ Thus, while the direct movement of society gives rise to two opposing parties, absolutism and socialism; the oscillatory movement produces two other parties hostile to each other and to the other two, which I call, by their historical names, the first, golden mean or doctrine, the second, demagogy, Jacobinism, or radicalism.
The golden mean, known to philosophers by the name of eclecticism, comes from this egotistical and lazy state of mind, which prefers to frank solutions impossible compromises; which accepts religion, but made to its convenience; which wants philosophy, but with reservation ”

“ God is the universal force, imbued with intelligence, which produces, by an infinite information itself the beings of all realms, from imponderable fluid to man, and within man alone comes to know and speak to Me! ”

“ But, as we have said: the revolutions of humanity are not accomplished with this philosophical placidity; peoples do not accept science when reluctant; and then, is humanity not free? It thus arises, for every attempt at progress, a storm of contradictions, of oppositions and of struggles that, with the impression of a divine furor, in lieu of being resolved amicably by dealings, lead to catastrophes. ”

“ Everything we can, everything we want, everything we are, whatever point of view in which we place ourselves, derives, either by filiation or opposition, from the past, that is to say from the feudal or patrimonial, from royalty, from Catholicism.
We are no longer what we were yesterday, precisely because we were; we will cease one day to be what we are, precisely because we are. ”

“ What Destiny, what Satan wanted, for the order of cities and the perfectionment of individuals, that they could not think, act freely from one next to the other, love as needed, and in any case be left alone? ”

“ It follows from these agitations and pangs that society does not pass through the series of its destiny according to a regular plan, and on a straight path; it deviates sometimes right, sometimes left, as attracted and repelled by contradictory forces: and it is these oscillations, combined with the attacks of socialism and the resistances of absolutism, which produce the peripeteias of social drama. ”

“ Far from being our master, God is the object of our study: how have the thaumaturges made a personal being, sometimes absolute king, as the god of the Jews and Christians, sometimes constitutional sovereign as that of the deists, whose incomprehensible Providence is not occupied, in precept as in his actions, confuse our reason? ”

“ It is the people who, in the long run, without theories, by their spontaneous creations, modify, reform, absorb the policy projects and philosophical doctrines, and who, incessantly creating a new reality, incessantly change the basis of politics and philosophy. ”

“ Considered philosophically, the monarchy of divine right is an emanation of Catholicism, formed from the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal; property is an emanation of monarchy, through the feudal institution. ”

“ Thus the social system, in its truth and entirety, cannot exist on a particular day or in a particular part of the globe: it cannot be revealed to us until the end of time, it will only be known by the last mortal. ”

“ Socialism conceives the social order as the result of a positive and objective science; but, like any scientific undertaking, it is subject to applying its hypotheses to realities, its utopian views to institutions. ”

“ There are no more, at the time I write this, parties in France; nothing remains, under the banner of the Republic, only a coalition of ruined bourgeois against a coalition of proletarians dying of hunger. Common misery will have produced that which could only have been general reason: in destroying the rich, it will have destroyed the antagonism. ”

“ The demagogic or so-called radical party results from the impatience which equally causes people to feel the spirit of good faith and the absolutist reaction and the circumspection of the golden mean. ”

“ For us, who hold the middle generations, we can only represent it with increasingly approximate conjectures; the only thing having been devolved to us, in this philosophy of progressive humanity, is, based upon a sound understanding of our past, to incessantly prepare our future. Our fathers have transmitted to us Society of a particular form ”

“ Man, do you not see that your race is fallen, and your soul comes from the inception of the infernal powers? Justice and peace are not wherein thou art. The Sovereign Arbitrator, in expiation of the original sin, gave humans their own quarrels. ”

“ On the other hand monarchy, absolute in its origin as the paternal power of which it is the increment, has need, in proportion to the extent of its domain, to organize, and this organization, which is nothing other than an application of the policy of the principle of the division of labor, inevitably leads the monarchy to democracy. ”

“ The judgments of God are mysterious, says the believer. A sacrilegious philosophy, applicable to events its flickering logic can only undertake in his indomitable pride, make them intelligible. Why, you ask, these revolutions, with their deviations and their returns, their catastrophes and their crimes? Why these terrible crises that seem to announce to societies their final hour ”

“ So argue; and it would please the Being with no bottom and no end that we never would have done anything else! Man would have been long ago the master of the earth, and we, socialist-democrats, would not have, from 24 February 1848 to 13 June 1849, incessantly abandoned the prey for the shadow. ”