Books

Paris: J.-F. Brocard,, 1840. A "diabolical work which frightens even me" (Proudhon) First edition, one of 500 copies and correspondingly scarce in commerce, of the French anarchist philosopher's notorious thesis, which caused a scandal by equating all property with theft. In the wake of the social turmoil caused by the economic decline in France in 1839-40 and the July Monarchy's lapse into a "religion of property", Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) argued that - unlike freedom and equality - the right to property was not a natural right. Yet he also opposed collective ownership, "as he was persuaded that only a society without government is able to establish social harmony. The First International was, indeed, destroyed in the great fight between those who supported a libertarian socialism of the kind Proudhon had advocated and those who followed the authoritarian pattern, devised by Karl Marx. Kropotkin and Herzen were all his confessed disciples. Even Tolstoy sought him and…