In the History of early American anarchism, prior to Tucker's espousal of the cause, there are several figures who stand out: A Frenchman, Proudhon, and three native Americans, Josiah Warren, William Greene, and Ezra Heywood.
Of the utmost significance in the development of American anarchism was the social philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Born in Besançon, France, on January 15, 1809, he died in exile in Paris on January 19, 1865. In his lifetime, Proudhon was directly involved with many of the leading personalities of the 1840–1860 period in Europe, those turbulent two decades that witnessed the growth and systemization of radical thought. A close friend of Karl Grun and Mikhail Bakunin, he ranged himself in opposition to Kark Marx. As a matter of fact, when Marx requested him to join in editing a newspaper, in 1844, Proudhon, already sensing what he believed to be an authoritarian element in Marx, rejected the request. Marx seems never to have forgotten this rejection, and when Proudhon published his System of Economical Contradictions; or the Philosophy of Poverty,1 Marx attacked Proudhon with a vituperative volume, The Poverty of Philosophy. In this attack, Marx accused Proudhon of lacking understanding of Hegelian dialectics, but perhaps what particularly aroused Marx's animosity was not so much this supposed academic failing, but rather the absence of his own influence on any of Proudhon's works. It was perhaps because of this attitude toward morality, pervading as it does his whole system, that Proudhon was on such friendly terms with a man like Grun, the "True Socialist." These same True Socialists were to be the victims of another Marxist assault, for the same reason, in Marx's German Ideology. In any event, Bakunin's observation that Proudhon oscillated between the Bible and Roman law,2 made when he visited Prudhon, undoubtedly was very perceptive, for it is the attempted amalgamation of these two sources that provides the tension in Proudhon's works. The epigrammatic moralism side by side with legislative terminology is, at first, very confusing to a reader.
One should also note that it was Proudhon who was the first to use the word "anarchist" in a complementary sense; even Godwin, his predecessor, had not used this term (it had been used, as Nettlau observed, as early as 1750, but negatively).3 To Proudhon, the anarchist society was a "synthesis of communism and property," in that communism "seeks equality and law" while property seeks "independence and proportionality."
To Proudhon, communism becomes "tyrannical and unjust" because it mistakes uniformity for law and "levelism" for equality; property becomes anti-social "because of its despotism and encroachments." In tis sense, the "synthesis is the third form of society . . . (which) we call liberty . . . liberty is anarchy, because it does not admit the government of the will but only the authority of the law; i.e., of necessity."
Undoubtedly, the statement most associated with Proudhon is, "Property is theft." Although he accepted the authorship of this statement, even when he was attacked for its lack of originality, it is important to understand what Proudon meant by this statement, for to Proudhon that aspect of property which was "theft" was actually that "property" that came through exploitation, usury, rent, interest, and profit. He had no objection to property acquired through labor, but rather the abuse of such property through "unearned profit," independent of the laws of supply and demand.
he was not opposed to property as such ("private property is freedom") but to usurpations and monopoly. Opposed to the state and the economic order of his day, the ideal society was one of "freedom in order and independence in unity," to be achieved through economic and moral emancipation of the individual. He regarded violent outbursts as inevitable, but he did not advocate them.
he attacked capital's power to exploit workers, with real evil in spheres of distribution, not production. Thus, he advocated a Loan Exchange Bank, with open credit leading to free associations of individuals having the same interests, organized on voluntary basis.
Proudhon's basic ideas was that the supreme law was Justice, which "is the central star which governs societies, the recognition of equality between another's personality and our own." This justice requires that every man has a right to the products of his own labor, and that he share with society what he secures from it. The right to the product of one's own labor is natural and universal, and exchange of labor for labor will recognize these two principles. It must be equal and voluntary.
All individual legal norms and state laws are inapplicable to the one norm demanded by Justice: All contracts must be lived up to.
"The Cost is the Limit of Price," and "the absolute value of a thing . . . is its cost in time and expense." Since man's needs are varied, and "isolated man can supply but a very small portion of his wants; all his power lies in association," which leads to the division of labor.
This division of labor itself leads to mutualism, to communality. There is to be equal opportunity to attain comforts, but not equal comforts; individual independence, or autonomy or reason, originates in the difference between talents and capacities, and can exist without danger to justice. Through Liberty, there is a "balance of rights and duties," a synthesis of "communism" and "property," which makes "Liberty the Mother of Order." the political order would dissolve into the economic one, with the Bank of Exchange, or Bank of the People, to be established for Mutual Credit (he did so in 1849).
Rent cannot be taken from land, except for what improvements are added by individual effort.
1 In his translation into English, Benjamin Tucker was to translate the subtitle as The Philosophy of Misery.
2 Proudhon himself claimed that the Bible, Adam Smith, and Hegel "caused fertile ideas to spring up in my mind." (What is Property?, p. 11).
3 Nettlau, Der Vorfruhling der Anarchie, etc. (Berlin, 1925).