Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“ The proprietors wish me death for having said that property, alone and by itself, is theft; as if property did not derive all its value (the rent) from the circulation of products, and consequently, did not belong to a fact superior to it, collective force, the solidarity of labor. The politiques finally, whatever their banner, are invincibly repugnant to anarchy, which they take for disorder; as if democracy could be realized otherwise than by the distribution of authority, and the true meaning of the word democracy was not the dismissal of the government. ”

“ The democrats, seduced by the memories of our glorious revolution, decided to begin again in 1848 the drama of 1789: while they perform the comedy, let us try to make history. The Republic is no more than the guard of God. While a blind force trains power in one sense, can we not advance society in another? The direction of the spirits being changed, it would result that the government, continuing to make reaction, would then, without expecting it, make revolution... ”

“ Perhaps the history of my meditations, inseparable from that of my actions, will not be without profit for those who, whatever their opinions, would like to seek in experience the justification of their ideas: for the freethinkers, who recognize no other authority than that of pure reason; for the believers, who like to rest their conscience upon the soft pillow of faith; for the men of action who, before engaging in the political career, would be curious to know where a rigorous mind can be led by the impartial demonstrations and disinterested principles of science. ”

“ It is in human society that instinct and reason, manifesting themselves in parallel, rise at the same time to the highest degree. The manifestations of instinct constitute the government of Providence; the manifestations of philosophy, the reign of liberty. Ancient religions, empires, poetry, and monuments are creations of social spontaneity, which reason revises and rejuvenates indefinitely.
But, in society and in the individual, reason always wins over instinct, reflection over spontaneity: this is the characteristic of our species, and which constitutes in us progress. ”

“ It was necessary to establish oneself in the opposition, to reject power on the defensive, to enlarge the field of battle, to simplify the social question by generalizing it; to astonish the enemy by the audacity of propositions, to act henceforth on the people rather than on their representatives, and to oppose, without care or attention to the blind passions of the reaction, the philosophical idea and revolution of February. ”

“ Society alone, the collective being, can, without fear of an absolute and immediate error, follow its instinct and abandon itself to its free will; the superior reason which is in it, and which is drawn out more and more by the manifestations of the multitude and the reflection of individuals, always brings it back to the right path. But the philosopher is incapable of discovering by intuition the truth ”

“ Respect for persons, tolerance for opinions; but disdain for the sects that crawl at your feet and advise you only in order to better compromise you. The sects are the vipers of the Revolution, the people are not of any sect. ”

“ The categories are forms of reason, no doubt: but it seems to me very difficult not to admit, like Kant himself, that these forms are given, and not merely revealed by nature. In the first place, they all assume a subject and an object, the first to receive them, the second to bring them into being. They are not the product of a reflection, like the image in the mirror, nor of an impression, like that of the seal on wax; nor are they innate, since before being connected with the world, man does not think. ”

“ Born and raised in the working class, still belonging to it by heart and affections, especially by the community of sufferings and vows, my greatest joy, if I obtained the suffrages of the Academy, would be to work, by philosophy and science, with all the energy of my will and all the powers of my mind, for the physical, moral and intellectual improvement of those whom I am pleased to call my brothers and companions ”

“ Property is liberty. Property is theft; property is liberty: these two propositions are equally demonstrated and subsist side by side in the System of Contradictions. I also did the same on each of the economic categories, the Division of Labor, Competition, the State, Credit, the Community, etc.; showing in turn how each of these ideas, and consequently how these institutions they generate, have a positive and a negative side; how they give rise to a double series of diametrically opposed results: and always I conclude to the necessity of an agreement, conciliation, or synthesis. ”

“ Property, considered in all social institutions, has, so to speak, two open accounts: one is that of the goods it procures, and which flow directly from its essence; the other is that of the inconveniences it produces, of the costs it incurs, and which result, like goods, directly from its very nature.
The same applies to competition, monopoly, taxation, etc.
In property, as in all economic elements, evil or abuse is inseparable from good, just as, in double-entry accounting, the obligation is inseparable from the asset. The one necessarily engenders the other. ”

“ Believe me, citizen dictators, if this is all your science, make haste to reconcile yourselves with the Jews; renounce those demonstrations of terrorism that make capital run after the revolution like dogs after policemen. ”

“ Elsewhere, taking stock of power, I proved that a governmental democracy is only a reversed monarchy; I demonstrated that it would cost more than a monarchy, according to this principle of elementary economy, that the condition in which the product, with regard to expense is as great as possible, is that in which the producer acts alone and without the assistance of any worker or employee, and reciprocally; and that in any enterprise likely to expand, overhead costs grow faster than production and profit. ”

“ It was here that I proposed, for the first time, and in an affirmative manner, to carry out the Revolution from below, by making an appeal to the reason and to the interest of each citizen, and by demanding of power only the notoriety and the impulse which it alone, today, is capable of giving to an idea. ”

“ Wherever there are men grouped by labor; wherever the idea of market value has taken root, or where by the separation of industries there is a circulation of values and products: there, on the pain of perturbation, deficit, bankruptcy of society towards itself, on pain of poverty and proletariat, the antinomic forces of society, inherent in every deployment of collective activity, as well as to any individual reason, must be kept in a constant equilibrium ”

“ Utopia was allowed to grow when it should have been nipped in the bud; they disdained the schools which were destined one day to set the country aflame, and, by their aspirations for power, made the Republic retrograde. It was none the less necessary for the February experience to convince our statesmen that a revolution neither halts nor improvises: I would not say, however, that they are yet to accuse, with Mr. Lamartine, socialism of their ruin. ”

“ Demagogy was in power, socialism itself was represented. Was it possible that with all the forces of the Republic, with the support of the workers and the humble submission of the bourgeois, the Provisional Government, citizens so devoted, patriots so pure, would just lead to nothing? ”

“ Democracy is the idea of the State extended to infinity: it is the union of all agricultural holdings into a single agricultural holding, of all industrial enterprises into a single industrial enterprise, of all trading houses into a single trading house, of all partnerships into a single partnership. ”

“ Humanity first worshiped itself as God or Nature; it began in Jesus Christ to adore itself as Humanity. The religious movement has gone from heaven to earth: but liberty must abolish all idolatry, and man finally be reconciled with God, by knowledge of nature and of himself. ”

“ The favorite error of socialism has hitherto been to suppose that the sum of outlays, comparative to production, diminishes as operations increase, and a greater number of trades and individuals are brought into the workshop. It is on this basis that all plans of community, of association, of organization of labor by the State have been constructed. I maintained that if, on the one hand, all trades, manufactures, etc., could be exploited by independent workers, the total sum of general overlays, in the country, would be zero ”

“ The solution of the problem of poverty consists thus in elevating accounting science to a higher expression, in setting up the records of society, in establishing the assets and the liabilities of each institution, taking as general accounts or divisions of the social ledger, no longer terms of ordinary accounting, Capital, Funds, General Merchandise, Bills and discounts, etc.; but those of philosophy, legislation and politics: Competition and Monopoly, Property and Community, Citizen and State, Man and God, etc. ”

“ Like in an industrial enterprise, new relations give rise every day to new accounts, and incessantly modify the internal organization of labor, the distribution of workers and employees, the employment of machines, etc.; thus, in society, new knowledge, great discoveries, incessantly produce new mores and modify the general economy. But just as in any commercial or industrial company, the principles of accounting, the general system of records is invariable ”

“ The sole vanity I ever had in my heart was to believe that no man had acted in all his life with more premeditation, more reflection, more discernment than I did. But I learned at my own expense, that at the very moments when I though myself the freest, I was still, in the torrent of political passions to which I intended to give direction, only an instrument of that immoral Providence which I deny, which I impugn. ”

“ Nature, from the point of view of the mind, manifests itself in a double impulse, instinct and reason. What characterizes instinct is promptitude, intuition, spontaneity, infallibility; what distinguishes reason, is memory, reflection, imagination, reasoning, error or vagabondage, progress. ”

“ The System of Economic Contradictions or Ledger of mores and institutions, regardless of the number of cadres, general accounts or categories, is the true system of society, not as it develops historically and in the order of generations, but in what is necessary and eternal. ”

“ I did what I could to explain to the jury how, in the present state of mercantile circulation, use value and exchange value being two quantities incommensurable and in perpetual opposition, property is both illogical and unstable, and that this is the reason why the workers are increasingly poorer, and the proprietors less and less rich. ”

“ What is Catholicism? the mystical system of the relations between God and Humanity. The theory of contradictions abolishes this mysticism: it makes theology the positive science of the relations between the Creator, or nature, the mother of all beings, alma parens rerum natura, and man, its highest expression, consequently its antithesis. ”

“ Property, therefore, appeared here, along with the other economic categories, with its reason for being and its reason for not being, that is, as a double-faced element of the economic and social system. ”

“ All the same, the ideas of time and of space, of substance and of cause are conceived by the mind, in the presence of nature, and become essential to reason, to such an extent that there is no longer a mistress who ignores it, even though, by hypothesis, it destroys nature. ”

“ Thiers, Barrot, Falloux, Changarnier, etc. do not want any more from the revolution for the government of 23 December, than the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission had wanted for themselves, than Louis Philippe and Charles X had wanted. It is that the bourgeois, no more than the peasant and the worker, understands that he is revolutionized. ”

“ Property, whichever way one turns it, to whatever principle it is related, is.... a contradictory idea! And the negation of property taking with it that of authority, I immediately deduced from my definition this no less paradoxical corollary: The true form of government is anarchy. Finally, finding by a mathematical demonstration that no amelioration in the economy of society could happen by the sole puissance of its primitive constitution, and without the concurrence and the deliberate volition of all ”

“ Hence, since he does not seek what general reason wants, but only what seems the most probable and the best as an initiative of power, and the data of the problem constantly changes, it happens, in spite of the prudence and subtlety of the writer, that he always falls into some contradiction, either with the facts, with the opinion of the day, or with himself. ”

“ The mores and the institutions can vary from people to people, as the job and the mechanics vary from century to century, from city to city: the laws governing their evolution are inflexible like algebra. ”

“ If he makes much of government, he is skeptical of the form: little does he care for the sovereignty of the people or divine right, provided that as a result the government undertakes the affairs of the nation. ”

“ To want to suppress the abuse of property is to want to destroy property; the same as to suppress an item from the debit of an account is to destroy the credit. All that can be done against the abuses or inconveniences of property is to merge, synthesize or balance it with a contrary element, which is vis-à-vis it what the creditor is vis-à-vis the debtor, the shareholder is vis-à-vis the general partner, etc.: such as, for example, the Community ”