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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 borrowed the title and much of the theoretical background of his masterpiece War and Peace from Proudhon's book, La guerre et la paix … One can place Proudhon among the great socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century" (Simons, pp. 301-2). Proudhon himself referred to Qu'est-ce que la propriété? as a "diabolical work which frightens even me" (Correspondance I, p. 296), and he was called to defend himself against insurrection charges at his local court immediately after its publication. Qu'est-ce que la propriété? was followed in 1841 by his "Lettre à M. Blanqui sur la propriété Deuxieme mémoire", and "Avertissement aux propriétaires, ou Lettre à M. Considérant sur une défense de la propriété" (often referred to as the "troisième mémoire"). READ MORE Duodecimo (168 x 105 mm). Recent quarter calf, marbled paper boards to style, spine lettered gilt, vellum tips, sprinkled edges. Binder's stamp (Ateliers Laurenchet) to front pastedown. Short marginal tear just entering text to page 93 repaired without loss, pale marginal dampmark to head and foot, final gathering with short marginal tear, occasional light spotting, withal a very good copy of a fragile publication. Not in Mattioli or Sraffa. See Correspondance de P.-J. Proudhon. Paris: Rivière, 1960-74; William Bradford Simons, Private and Civil Law in the Russian Federation. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009.