CHAPTER 1
Proudhon and His Interpreters
This book interprets Proudhon as a political theorist, through close analysis of his most systematic writings, and consequently differs in both method and aim from the standard studies of his thought. It differs in method by examining the consistency, truth, and meaning of Proudhon's ideas, without looking into their historical origins and effects. It differs in aim by arguing for the inherent merit of his theory, apart from its bearing on his personality or on the intellectual climate of his time.
The thesis of the book is that Proudhon, though a radical, was a realist and a moralist as well. His theory can therefore be regarded as an attempt to integrate these three divergent orientations toward politics into a tolerably coherent whole. The difficulties Proudhon encountered in this attempt are not his alone; they arise for any radical who faces facts and has a conscience. An analytic study of his writings should therefore clarify the problems of a sober and scrupulous kind of radicalism that will always be of interest.
The analytic approach to Proudhon adopted here is bound to arouse misgivings in those acquainted with the main interpretations of his thought, all of which, for different reasons, suggest that his ideas are too mistaken or confused to merit analytic treatment. Hence a helpful start for such a treatment is a review of the interpretations that seem to stand in its way.
Among economists, Proudhon has long been known as a self-taught dilettante, prolific in schemes for abolishing interest on money, but incompetent at economic science. Joseph Schumpeter well summarized this verdict: Proudhon realizes that his findings are "absurd," but, "instead of inferring from this that there is something wrong with his methods, [he] infers that there must be something wrong with the object of his research so that his mistakes are, with the utmost confidence, promulgated as results."
Like the other interpretations to be examined, this one has more than a grain of truth. Many of Proudhon's explanations of social and economic facts are either untestable or else invalid by empirical scientific standards. But the weakness of his thought as social science does not disqualify it for analytic treatment. Proudhon does more than explain the facts; he makes conjectures and moral judgments about them. These non-empirical aspects of his thought show that standards other than those of science may be applied to it, which may well reveal that Proudhon's ideas are correct enough to merit analytic study despite their weaknesses from a scientific viewpoint.
Dismissal of Proudhon as an inept theorist is not widespread, except among economists. Most commentators make no overt appraisal of his work and so cannot expressly call it worthless, but they disagree so much about its purpose that they too make critical analysis seem misplaced. When the most disparate goals have been plausibly ascribed to a theorist, it is natural to regard him as too muddled for analytic treatment.
The first goal ascribed to Proudhon was revolution. Those who did so saw him as a ferocious, atheistic, leveler, out to destroy bourgeois institutions, by violence if necessary, and to replace them with equal power and wealth for all. Proudhon's early pronouncements about property being theft occasioned this revolutionary image; his actions in 1848 confirmed it. Then, by siding with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and by extolling "the sublime ghastliness" of the insurrectionary "cannonade," he became known as l'homme-terreur. In a play of the period he figured as the snake, inciting Adam and Eve to revolt. A Daumier cartoon shows him, pickax in hand, demolishing the roofs of Paris. The caption reads: "The only way to destroy property." Conservative writers have worked hard to perpetuate this image. As late as 1905 a book was written to expose Proudhon's subversive aim and to denounce his anti-clericalism.
To Marxists, Proudhon's aim has seemed quite different: to thwart a revolution, not to make one. The source of this contention is their master's dictum that Proudhon was a petty bourgeois. Marx never clarified his epithet, but this only made it more persuasive. Generally, the Marxists have claimed that whereas they want to press the class struggle to a definitive proletarian victory, "the petty bourgeois Proudhon opts for equilibrium, for mutual support of conflicting forces: the bourgeoisie is not to be abolished, but preserved by means of class collaboration."To defend this reading they cite Proudhon's conciliatory attitude toward class conflict, his opposition to strikes, his qualified defense of private property (something the conservatives usually overlook), and his sympathy for les petits — those whose means of livelihood are independent but modest. This view of Proudhon as a bourgeois counterrevolutionary seems more popular than any other and is accepted by many non-Marxists. Its popularity is no doubt due to the wide diffusion of Marxist ideas, which leave their mark even on those who reject them.
Still another goal has been ascribed to Proudhon by French reactionaries, who say his purpose was the same as theirs. This thesis was first suggested in 1909 by the anti-Semitic Edouard Drumont when he certified that "because of [Proudhon's] instinctive loathing of cosmopolites, he was the first of the nationalists." A year later Charles Maurras confirmed this judgment: "Except in his ideas, Proudhon instinctively favored French [i.e. Maurrassien] policy." Such pronouncements could hardly be convincing, since they deliberately ignored Proudhon's ideas. But this oversight did not last long. In 1912 the Cercle Proudhon, a leftish front for the Action françhise, began publishing its Cahiers, in which it tried to prove that its namesake was a forebear. The Cercle's most cogent spokesman was Georges Valois, then, as ever, eager to blur the line between left and right. "The core of Proudhon ... is the artisanal, military and Christian thought of traditional, Catholic, classical France," he claimed. At the center of this "core" Valois and his Cercle put Proudhon's patriarchic views on marriage and family life, his criticism of democracy, his peasant regionalism, and, above all, his French nationalism as typified by his stand with the pope against Italian unification. As for aspects of his thought that do not agree with this interpretation, "these outbursts are merely ... an echo of contemporary ideas that he gave up bit by bit." The Proudhon who emerges from this treatment may not be the most orthodox reactionary, but he seeks almost everything that they seek, except a restoration of the king.
The ideology most recently attributed to Proudhon has been fascism; the case for it rests partly on points made by the reactionaries and partly on points omitted by them. Among the latter are Proudhon's occasional anti-Semitic remarks, his qualified support of Negro slavery, and his obscure attempt to persuade Louis Napoleon to reform society. When these aspects of his position are conjoined with those stressed by the Maurrassiens, Proudhon's ideas appear to be not just nationalistic and authoritarian, but racist and socialistic too. This version of his thought was first presented by the Nazis themselves, but it was most skillfully defended by an anti-fascist American; the French, however, have made only half-hearted attempts to support it.
Proudhon's theory would not merit analytic treatment if two or more of these familiar portrayals of its aim could withstand critical examination, for then his theory would be proved a hopeless muddle. Fortunately, evidence abounds to refute all of these interpretations.
First of all, the biased concerns of the interpreters color their portrayals. Authors of theses about Proudhon's aim were not chiefly concerned with defining his thought fairly; what mattered most to all of them was the advantage they could win for their political positions by arguing for a particular concept of his objective. Conservatives, for instance, could hope to attract support from the political center by depicting Proudhon as a terrorist. Marxists, in contrast, might win converts among committed leftists by calling him an enemy of revolution. The reactionaries could use their identification with Proudhon both to attract leftists hostile to Marx and to distinguish themselves from those conservatives who thought that Proudhon was subversive. Fascists too could find advantages in equating Proudhon's objectives with their own, since this maneuver might win support among his sympathizers, whatever their place in the political spectrum.
These interpretations of Proudhon's thought, however, are not necessarily invalid; they might be accurate despite their authors' partisan concerns. But in comparison with what Proudhon himself said about his purposes, all of these interpretations miss the mark.
The conservatives' contention, that he was a revolutionary, ignores his well-known opposition to violence, as well as his explicit praise of the very inequality and religion that they see as targets of his attack.
The Marxist view of him as an enemy of the workers overlooks his many pronouncements in favor of the proletarian cause. This view also mistakes the reasons behind some of his positions, such as his opposition to strikes: Proudhon did not oppose strikes because he was devoted to class collaboration, but because he was suspicious of the trade union mentality which strikes so often induce among the workers.
The thesis of reactionaries that Proudhon was their forerunner does not withstand examination either. For one thing, this thesis totally neglects some of his most clearly stated teachings, such as his condemnation of tradition and the Church. The reactionary argument also twists the meaning of those of Proudhon's teachings it does consider. His opposition to Italian unification, for instance, was not a defense of Catholic objectives, as Valois implied, but of the small-scale governments that unification would destroy.
As for the view that Proudhon aimed for fascism, it too rests on a weak foundation. Fascists seek dictatorship, which Proudhon hated. Fascists spurn individual freedom, which to Proudhon was the greatest good. These differences between Proudhon and the fascists make the resemblances in their thought too superficial to serve as proof that their objectives are the same.
This is not the first time that the standard readings of Proudhon's aim have been deplored as caricatures. After the First World War the Société des amis de Proudhon was organized to develop and publicize a more accurate view of its mentor. To this group we owe thanks for the new critical edition of Proudhon's works, a great aid to the study of his writings. The Société also published a useful collection of Proudhon's essays and several anthologies of his work. Probably most important was the group's encouragement of serious scholarship; some of the best recent studies of Proudhon have been written by authors connected with the Société.
But though the Société effectively challenged some interpretations, it did not altogether replace them with more acceptable ones, which is not surprising, since many of the group's adherents brought the same sort of partisan concerns to their studies of Proudhon that had animated previous interpreters of his thought. Some of the group, sympathetic with the French labor movement, equated Proudhon with the syndicalists, despite the fundamental differences between their ideas. Others, like Armand Cuvillier, reworked the Marxist reading of Proudhon, while Daniel Halévy tried to make Proudhon an anticipator of his own highly personal outlook on politics.
It is true that not all associates of the Société brought partisan concerns to their writings on Proudhon; but these impartial portrayals of his theory are not much more satisfactory than the politically inspired ones. The scholarly Célestin Bouglé, for example, had no partisan motive for saying that Proudhon was a sociologist at heart; yet this interpretation, like that of the economists, ignores the normative and conjectural elements in his thinking. Other impartial writers interpret Proudhon inadequately for a different reason. Although they say nothing about the general character of Proudhon's theory and so cannot oversimplify it as Bouglé does, their unwillingness to characterize deprives them of a thesis to unify their vision of his work, and inclines them to focus so minutely on its details and background that they convey a fragmented and eclectic picture of it. Though these writers impose no artificial unity on Proudhon's theory, they find little unity in it of any kind.
Since impartial commentators do find Proudhon inconsistent, while only biased and mistaken ones do not, it is tempting to conclude — which would be fatal to this study — that his theory is indeed confused. There can be no doubt that Proudhon is the kind of theorist who, because both his life and his writings are highly ambiguous, invites partisan and eclectic readings. But inconsistency does not preclude coherence. A look at the ambiguities that induce the inaccurate readings may reveal the possibility of an acceptable interpretation of his theory, despite its absence up to now.
Even Proudhon's early biography has supplied grist for the interpretational mill. Do you want to paint him as a peasant, rooted in the tradition of soil? Then you note that in his youth he spent long months alone in the fields tending cattle. Are you interested in depicting him as a petty bourgeois ? Then you dwell on his father's marginal economic status as an impecunious and ultimately bankrupt brewer. If your aim is to portray a dangerous proletarian revolutionary, you can stress his early experience as a printer and his links with the insurrectionary secret societies of Lyons. And if you want to take a nonpartisan stand, you can acknowledge that all of these experiences influenced his thought and that all of them contribute to its inconsistency. Many other cases of ambiguous biographical influences could be mentioned, for they crop up throughout Proudhon's life. But enough has been said to show how these diversities are used to develop both the mistaken though coherent, and the accurate though unsynthesized, interpretations of the man and his thought.
Even a life as ambiguous as Proudhon's could not have furnished enough material for his disparate images. The necessary supplement was provided by his writings themselves, for they are even less definable than his biography. As one commentator complained, "It is literally impossible to analyze not only his complete works but even his most important writings; ... certain chapters are so turbid and diffuse that even the best informed reader is unable to discern any general point; and ... the critic continually wonders if he is misrepresenting his author by citing a passage which is demolished with equal vigor ten pages later." The apparent contradictions in Proudhon's work, more than anything else, explain why it invites polemical distortion and keeps conscientious critics from portraying it as unified. Proudhon's work seems inconsistent for several reasons, one being that it is resolutely unmethodical, since Proudhon was not, and did not wish to be, a systematic philosopher. "My aim is not to write a moral treatise, any more than a philosophy of history," he said in his most comprehensive work. "My task is more modest: first we must get our bearings, everything else will then follow automatically."
Proudhon's incompetence in economics adds to the apparent inconsistency of his theory, by making an important part of it a muddle. In 1841, soon after publishing his second book on economics, he confessed to a friend, "Political economy is not my strong point and it will be most unfortunate if I have not given it up completely before I am forty." His foreboding came true, because he dabbled confusedly in economics all his life.
Frequent polemical exaggeration is another of Proudhon's traits that make him seem inconsistent. It is common in the history of political theory for a writer to slant his position so as to sharpen its contrasts with that of his adversary. Proudhon often did this because he found polemical exaggeration difficult to avoid: "It is impossible for me to retain philosophical composure and indifference, especially when I have to deal with biased and dishonest opponents." With most writers such a disposition does not lead to contradiction. Polemical exaggeration is usually aimed at only one, or at most a few, allied opponents; its excesses therefore produce parallel, not conflicting, distortions. But Proudhon found opponents everywhere. He thought himself "l'excommunié de l'époque." "The development of my thought has deprived me of almost all community of ideas with my contemporaries," he explained. Finding himself surrounded by enemies, all of whom opposed him for different reasons, he lashed out simultaneously in contradictory directions. In 1848, for example, being equally opposed to democrats, socialists, and conservatives, he assaulted all three with equal vigor. By doing so, he exposed himself to plausible charges by each adversary of sympathizing with the others. There are many other cases where Proudhon's attack on a variety of rival opponents made his own position seem self-contradictory.
