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PAUL JOSEPH PROUDHON.* " CONTRADICTION is the fundamental law, not only of society, but of the universe ;" and Proudhon, who says so, is the best illustration of his maxim. His chief work is his Systeme des Con- tradictions Iconomiques. His whole teaching consists of reconcilia- tions of " Yes " and "No," black and white. His life and lot are a curious collection of contradictions. To begin with one of the most fundamental of them, it is doubtful whether Proudhon at any time believed in a God—he speaks of God as the Eternal X, and his Deity was not one to be worshipped ; but then he believed in several devils. Besides "le Mal," there were minor evil potentates,—not, indeed, Belial, Moloch, and Beelzebub ; Proudhon's devils were Proprilte, Capital, Competition, and other entities which he clothed with powers baneful as those possessed by the fallen angels. Fame, in its good sense, he never had ; the only saying of his which has clung to the popular mind, " Property is theft," has suffered the most cruel form of misquotation—it has been almost uniformly misunderstood. But the very stones flung at him form no inconsiderable heap, and in their eagerness to slay him his enemies have made for him a monument. The anti-Proudhon literature, published between 1848 and 1860, is at once bulky and dreary. There was, in fact, a time when it was the fashion for a clever young Frenchman to prove his conservatism by refuting ' Proudhon, and his pamphlet or article was regarded as the novice's first communion, the taking of the sacrament of respectability. When thieves are about there is a general looking to locks and bars, and in that period, when Proudhon was at large—Proudhon, who was supposed to have systematised burglary in half-a-dozen octavo volumes, each a jemmy to be had at Gamier Freres—there was a general furbishing up of the social contract, and a production of Anti-Proudhon property-preservers ; all which, from M. Thiera' clever volume down to countless thin, scrappy pamphlets, give Proudhon a prominent place in every large catalogue. From among his contemporaries one would have been apt to single out Proudhon as the likeliest of them all to be the founder of a new sect, for who had in ampler measure than this son of a Besancon artizan that unquenchable faith in him self, that thirst of strife and persuasive self-sufficiency which are the keystones of a new religious organization? If Jean Jacqum had won disciples, what was in store for Paul Joseph, almost as eloquent and with a robust confidence in himself such as the former never had ? And yet his doctrine, preached 'in and out of season, well-nigh perished with himself. No one has been found to expound it in its entirety. There was, indeed, a faithful friend at hand to indite the political testament of the dying Socialist, and to append it to his last work, the Political Capacity of the Working Classes. But he left no band of disciples ; there is such a thing as Proudhonism, and there are no Proudhonists. He warred against authority all his life, and such as he are wont in their old age to be solaced by haviug round their chairs a little knot of admirers repeating the master's sayings with saccharine comment, and to be regaled by the incense of flattery and whiffs of praise. This is the partizan leader's comfort, and yet it was denied to Proudhon, who had fought as few partizans ever did. Nobody long sided with him heartily. He never sat purring in salons while literary or revolutionary ladies stroked his patriarchal fur. Against the rich capitalist, and the noble, and priest, and rulers of all sorts, he made open war, and yet the poor mistrusted or jeered at their strange and unsavoury ally. An economist himself, he had a feud against the whole tribe of economists. A journalist and littirateur, he tossed and gored his confreres. More or less a martyr himself, he declares that, "next to persecutors, there is nothing I hate so much as martyrs ; " and so not unnaturally, some will say, no crowd gathered round the old apostle. Of well-nigh all he was deserted. His power and energy con- sidered, there are few lives that seem so tragically empty. A curse and a blight seemed to fall on all he did, and the curse, one would think, was this :—" Eloquent, yet not persuasive, thoa shalt have foes many and bitter, and few friends to lean upon ; and everything turning to evil in thy hands, thy good seed shall be as the chaff of other men." Such was the lot, looked at from end to end, details and minor vicissitudes unnoted, of Paul Joseph Proudhon
• La Capacite, Publique des Classes Oaoritret. Paris : Dania.
and his biographer, if indeed it be not part of the curse that he shall never get a biographer worthy of him, must reconcile these contra- dictions, and, in the favourite phrase of Proudhon, lift us to that 'higher synthesis in which they are harmonized.
We do not pretend to be able to explain the whole matter ; but -Obviously the root of much of this singularity lay in misappre- lension, and consequently mistrust. He seemed to outsiders to tread on all men's toes, and this not by accident, but on some high and inscrutable principle. Those with whom he commonly fought—all those Socialists who had regarded the work of 4789, as quite incomplete, and the Revolution of 1848 as the opportunity for crowning the edifice—dreaded this strange auxiliary. They did not know what to make of this brawny athlete, who was given to falling on his friends as soon as he had Touted the enemy, for, as a French critic observes, what Proudhon -chiefly detested was his neighbour. They could understand Fourierism, and how the phalaustere was to be laid out ; they saw daylight in Saint Simon, and, what is more, in the Circulus, Triad, and other poor staff with which his disciples overlaid his doctrine ; L'Organisation du Travail was simple as a song-book. It was only Proudhon, with his uncouth dialectical forms and appal- ling paradoxes, in doctrine and conduct, that there was no under- standing; and so, while acknowledging that among the crowd of Socialists of the time, Fourier, Pierre Llrous, Babeuf, Louis Blanc, this man towered above all, they were forced, some of the best of them, to own that he was impracticable, and the frivolous among them to conclude that Proudhonism was another name for running a muck. And they had an excuse. There was the -strange doctrine itself, Hegelianism mistranslated into French : "the lour of the universal equation," Proudhon said, was about to sound, and the multitude marvelled or smiled thereat. It also requires much philosophy to detect caresses beneath assiduous chastisement, and Proudhon was always—of course, in the cause of philanthropy— birching some of his friends. He might be logical in this, still his 'friends did not like it. Of the people, he was not with them, for did he not sometimes sneer at all their favourite notions ? Did he not criticize universal suffrage, co-operation, and all that they Eked ? And why his abuse and scorn of the other Socialist leaders ? Did he not rail at Fourier as any grocer might ? and then, when the enraptured grocer offered him the hand of fellowship, did he not scorn it, and insult, and spit upon every article in the grocer's creed?_ There was no trusting such a man. Out of the camp of Democracy with him, in spite of all his talk about the principles of 1789 !
But we get but a glimpse of the man until we know his tem- perament. For our part, we figure Proudhon as a sort of Hecla. From amid wastes of statistics and metaphysics, bleak and cold as 'the snows that lie on Hecla, he keeps belching forth sulphureous games and murky smoke. There is scarcely a pause in the torrent of fiery indignation. He is always in a towering passion ; he has been so since a youth. Formerly they would have said, -4"This man has some sort of demon,—in fact, demons enough for many herds of swine." He snorts forth his anarchical syllogisms, and rejoicing in his controversial strength, he tramples under foot and makes riotous havoc of his foes. Destruam et oidificabo is the proud motto he prefixes to his Systeme, and with what glee he -sacks, or tries to sack, the domains of popular religion, politics, economics, and aesthetics ! Ia that work there are passages touching the most sacred articles of the creed of the world which sound to us as a war-whoop or feast-song snug by cannibals dancing round their victim. Not even in Carlyle do we find such abundance of consuming, pitiless wrath. Why, one man against millions though he be, it is Proudhon that is the persecutor and tyrant, with his cruel words and hatred. And all this, which is a therm of Proudhon when one first gets his acquaintance, by and by makes him pall. Force, no doubt, there generally is in the genuine expression of a strong will and clear mind ; but though Jeretnialas -such as he was are not to be gathered under every hedge, Proudhon in hand we are sometimes reminded of Joubert's saying that " force is not energy," and occasionally we are disposed to think that Prondhon was varicose rather than muscular. No; the writer, as an artist, at all events, must not always be at the top of his speed, and this golden rule Proudhon somehow never mastered. Whilst the flow of your true artist is like the stately, measured march of an ample river, his is formed of a succession of cataracts or rapids, along which the navigator or reader is painfully jolted. Proudhon is the most ardent and enthusiastic of socialists. Touching this trait of his character, there is a problem in spiritual mechanics which only a poet could solve ; perhaps Browning alone is equal to the task. We greatly want a compressed biography of some of the irreligious or unreligious regenerators of our time, so
as to make it clear how and why they have been so frequently apostolically zealous. We know how the religious enthusiast feeds and fans his ardour. It may be he has by night visions to comfort him. Perhaps by day angels minister to his wants with meat and drink which other men know not of. At any rate, before him are the open doors of heaven and the glories thereof, behind him the flaming doors of hell and the lamentations that come therefrom. Why should he, thus caressed and spurred, be a laggard? Strange, or almost so, if he were. But those unsaintly martyrs and devout heretics, those believers whom all Churches have anathema- tized, who have no heaven to fly to and no hell to fly from, to whom the present is all, and that present, with the sun quite taken out of the firmament, dull and miry ; who see no inspiriting visions, look for the advent of no Messiah or millennium, and whose motives, one would say, must be thin and feeble, even as their horizon is contracted and their ambition earthy—how and by what curious grafting find we such imperial flowers blooming on so mean a stem ? We see on the one hand miser- able motives, and on the other splendid fruition of enterprise, and Joshuas, whom Israel never knew go forth with as much courage and confidence as did those who of old went up from Gilgal by night against the Amorites, and to whose leader the Lord said,—" Fear them not ; I have delivered them into thy hand." Once or twice in an age no doubt chance will have it that bees hive in a carcase, and honey come therefrom ; but how happens it that, to take the whole band of French Socialists of this century, they have been marked by indomitable and un- selfish energy ? We want a poet, and a poet who is also a thinker, to bridge the gulf that seems to sever this supernatural zeal from this hatred of supernaturalism, this immersion in the present from this wise and divine carelessness of the gains of to-day which we were taught was born only of " the sublime attractions of the grave ;" so that we, wafted by the poet to their places, shall forswear with St. Simon riches and social rank and embrace poverty, and with Owen shall devote an often tried ability to amass a fortune to carrying out, amid contumely and sneers, a
project of philanthropy. Meantime, until that poet is forth- coming, we shall be content to put together some considerations partially explaining why Proudhon never slacked his hand. Think of him as come of a sturdy workman stock. The Proudhons were never known to budge. They were constitutionally sceptical, but sceptical without levity or immorality. From them he learned to be a hermit in society. They taught him to dispense with sym- pathy, and to be heedless of the talk of the street-corner, or the cafe, or the journal. War with the authorities at Besancon re- vealed, if it did not educate, his native fierceness. In time he came to look upon opposition as his due. If it was not forthcoming, he greedily made it. And reading some of his vituperative pamphlets, and regarding the circumstances of their publication, we are tempted to think that they sprang from some such undercurrent of feeling as this: " They are becoming respectful to me; this must be stopped " ; and so " bang, bang !" in among his old foes go the contents of his gun. Need we say that he accomplished his purpose ? And think also of the system and principles which he professed ; they help to explain his unflagging ardour. It can scarcely be doubted by one who examines his numerous works, and reflects on his scheme of social and political amendment, that with all its numerous gaps and errors, it exhibits far more mastery of practi- cal difficulties than most of the many rival schemes. His Guide to the Bourse shows his knowledge of details, and his success in business is a proof of his capacity. Take the great socialistic works from Plato's Republic and compare them with Proudhon's ; few, if any, are marked by such sagacity, breadth of view, regard to details, and so much enlightened appreciation of institutions unfavourable to his notions. And if all this is not acknowledged, it is probably because most have been scared away by his rough language, and have hastily and erroneously set him down as a mere bawling incendiary. If we are to sound this difficulty, we must not forget the egotism, the sublime egotism, of Proudhon. There is not perhaps in literary history another instance of such obtrusive, ponderous self-sufficiency. Rousseau, who thinks his meanest and dirtiest emotion worth bringing to market, is an egotist ; if Montaigne pared his nails yesterday, down goes to-day the fact, for the admiration or meditation of all the ages to come ; Cobbett is always drawing himself up to his full length, and bluntly saying that he, William Cobbett, of Botley Farm, is as good a man as the best of them. These and a thousand other men of letters were egotists. But we search biographies to little purpose for another instance of that proud imperturbable feeling which Proudhon displays that it is he against the world, and that the world has got no case,—a sectarian feeling that dissenting humanity itself is a mere clique or faction, to be put down as one might some hooting urchin in the back benches. Whole classes, batches of respectables, are coolly sentenced to transportation or exile by this friendless autocrat. We shall cite an instance or two, though of course only the continuous perusal of his books, would. convey an adequate idea of this egotism. On the 11th of July, 1848, he presented to the Committee of Finance of the National Assembly a plan for taxing incomes. The nature of it is immaterial ; enough that the payment of debts was to be post- poned for three years. The reporter of the Committee, M. Thiers, announced that "The proposition of Citizen Proudhon is im- moral, unjust, factious, full of malice, perfidy, and ignor- ance, anti-financial, anti-social, savage, extravagant, emanating from misanthropy, chagrin, and loneliness, an encouragement to informers and civil war, an assault upon property, and tend- ing to the abolition of the family and atheism." And when Proudhon proceeded to unfold and defend his plan, the Assembly, not easily shocked by vagaries of theory, was so averse to the pro- posed jubilee, that it interrupted him with laughter and jeering, and cries of "To the Moniteur with his speech, to Charenton with the author," "Intolerable !" " It is all very clear,—your purse or your life." Modesty in these circumstances would have sat down discomfited; your mongrel egotist would have broken out in helpless scolding. But. Proudhon's egotism was thorough-bred ; and, seeing that the reporter had got hold of all the heaviest missiles within reach, he took down other weapons,—he became insultingly calm, and with a suavity that was luxurious insol- ence in the circumstances, he promised his six hundred and ninety-one raging opponents that he should be indulgent to them. Then, putting his whip, so to speak, in his pocket, he began, interruptions unnoted, to go through his demonstrations, and to show how signally wrong the whole assembly was ; and amid uproar he closed with a fine—a sublime—touch of egotism. Usury will never return ; " I (Paul Joseph Proudhon) prohibit it." Or shall we cite the sentences with which he drives away those who would steal from him his famous definition of property ? "This definition of property is mine, and all my ambition is to prove that I have comprehended its meaning and scope, Property is theft ! There are not uttered in a thousand years two sayings like that ; I have no other possession on earth save this definition of property ; but I hold it more precious than the millions of the Rothschilds, and I make bold to say that it will be the most considerable event of the government of Louis Philippe." Or shall we cite an instance of the manner in which he is wont to deal with an opponent? Take his rejoinder to M. Michelet, a writer with whom he was disposed to sympathize ; it is this :—" In five lines M. Michelet has exhibited a talent for being five times absurd." We might quote other pas- sages showing how be always took the wall ; how he bullied his brother socialists when he talked of reform ; and how be claimed to have displaced the axis of the universe, and to have made the earth turn from east to west. But perhaps the above quotations sub- stantiate our assertions.
And this egotism was revealed in another way. Your self- sufficient man dispenses with services ; and Proudhon ground his own philology, his own metaphysics, his own history, and sometimes, too, in perfect honesty, his own fact& He ran up a theory of the origin of languages, turned out a new exegesis of the zEneid, and mixed his own Hebrew, as easily as another might whittle a stick. What though it might be all at feud with scholarship ! Was it not I, Paul Joseph Proudhon, that made it all? Yet partly pardon this egotism and truculence. He was intellectually lonely. Others might have intellectual domestics ; he, at variance with his fellows, might not. It was necessary that he should be his own factotum. Others, too, might deal gently with an antagonist ; they had auxiliaries and a reserve ; he had none. And his loneliness and isolation shut up, or drew the blinds on, one window of knowledge after another. It is the fate, as it is the punishment, of the egotistical man that the avenues of knowledge are one by one closed, and that his " ego " is in time everything. This was Proudhon's lot.
Though we have carefully avoided going at present into Proudhon's system, an exception must be made with respect to his famous phrase. " Property is theft" seems to have as its supplement the doctrine that we are all thieves, or that we must hold all things in common. In reality the saying has of necessity nothing to do with either of these conclusions. That formula, according to himself too well known and too little understood, was a machine de guerre he owned. Property is indeed theft ; again and again he emphatically repeats it : the last of the false gods, the hoary and wicked Jupiter, it is pernicious and doomed But while property is theft, proprietors are not at heart thieves. Communism, on the other hand, would make the earth barren. Even of socialism he says that it is " void of ideas, powerless, immoral, and fit only to' make dupes or rogues." The proprietor is in Proudhon's system to have the right of using, but not of abusing. He is to be paid only for labour, whereas he now is paid for gifts of nature or the labours of others. Savigny's discrimination of property and posses- sion was a novelty at the time ; and Proudhon, applying the dis- tinction not quite accurately, says that it is his wish that there• should be possession, but not property. With all its limitations, especially those prefixed to it in late years, this doctrine, so harshly- and forbiddingly announced, would recommend itself to some- quiet citizens.
The truth is, he was weakly fond of paradoxes. He generally- begins his discourse by clapping a pistol to the brains of his. audience ; as he proceeds, he fires at intervals a random volley of slugs into their midst. All this excites and keeps up attention. Your street crier gives a roll of the drum before he says his say ;- Proudhon shrieks menteurs, letches, voleurs, and when a crowd gathers round him to learn what the uproar is about, he stops. shrieking and takes to arguing. This was a weakness on which, Bastiat had rallied him, and which he never got over. Though in his later works we think we can detect a more sparing indulgence in the vocabulary of abuse, he never altogether got rid of his little. trick of discharging a blunderbuss into the midst of his friends. And- yet though the phrase, " Property is theft," is uniformly misunder-- stood, in singling it out and treasuring it up the popular instinct has judged rightly. On theft much learning and thought had made him, mad. He found it everywhere. We can compare his kleptophobia only to Carlyle's mania with respect to lies and shams. The gambler stole; so did the lottery-keeper ; the money-lender stole ; the. employer robbed his servants ; rent was theft. Everywhere there- reigned authorized thieving. Lift the cloak of the best, and you found that Cato was skulking out with a bag of gold, and was as great a rogue as the rest. And so general was the sin, that we cannot: help thinking that Proudhon must have suspected himself of at least some form of petty larceny. In his tract on the celebration of Sunday, he observes that Christ, in speaking of the Decalogue,, kept silence with respect to the Eighth Commandment, " judging the hardness of the hearts of his audience to be too great to listen.. to the truth ;" and he asks, " After eighteen centuries, are we worthy of hearing it?" And Proudhon, "mover of ideas," fiercest. of philosophers, died with the conviction that we were not.
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