I was under a great obligation to Proudhon for my intellectual development, and after a little consideration I consented, though I knew that the fund would soon be gone.
The reading of Proudhon, like reading Hegel, gives one a special method, sharpens one's weapon and furnishes not results but means. Proudhon is pre-eminently the dialectician, the controversialist of social questions. The French look in him for an experimentalist and, finding neither an estimate for 'l Fourierist phalanstery nor the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Cabet's Icaria, shrug their shoulders and lay the book aside.
It is Proudhon's own fault, of course, for having put as the motto on his Contradictions: 'Destruo et aedificabo'; his strength lay not in creation but in criticism of the existing state of things.
But this mistake has been made from time immemorial by all who have broken down what was old. Man dislikes mere destruction: when he sets to work to break something down, he is involuntarily haunted by some idenl of future construction, though sometimes this is like the song of a mason as he pulls down a wall.
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In the greater number of sociological works the ideals advocated, which almost always either are unattainable at present or boil down to some one-sided solution, are of little consequence; what is of importance is what, in arriving at them, is seen as the question. Socialism touches not only on what was decided by the old empirico-religious way of living, but also on what has passed through the consciousness of partial science; not only on juridical conclusions founded on traditional legislation, but also the conclusions of political economy. It treats the rational way of living of the epoch of guarantees and of the bourgeois economic system as unmediated rudiments for itself to work upon, just as political economy is related to the theocratic-feudal state.
It is in this negation, this volatilisation of the old social tradition, that the fearful power of Proudhon lies; he is as much the poet of dialectics as Hegel is, with the difference that one stands on the tranquil summit of the philosophic movement, and the other thrusts into the hurly-burly of popular commotions and the hand-to-hand fighting of parties.
Proudhon is the first of a new series of French thinkers. His works constitute a revolution in the history not only of socialism but also of French logic. There is more power and fluency in his dialectical robustness than in the most talented of his fellowcountrymen. Intelligent and clear-thinking men like Pierre Leroux2 and Considerant3 do not grasp either his point of departure or his method. They are accustomed to play with ideas as with cards already arranged, to walk in a certain attire along the beaten track to familiar places. Proudhon often drives ahead bodily, not afraid of crushing something in his path, with no regret for running down anything he comes across, or for going too far. He has none of that sensitiveness, that rhetorical revolutionary chastity, which in the French takes the place of Protestant pietism . . . that is why he remains a solitary figure among his own people, rather alarming than convincing them with his power.
People say that Proudhon has a German mind. That is not true; on the contrary, his mind is absolutely French: he has that ancestral Gallo-Frankish genius which appears in Rabelais, in Montaigne, in Voltairl', and in Diderot . . . even in Pascal. It is only that he has assimilated Hegel's dialectical method, as he 2 Leroux, Pierre ( 1 797-1 87 1 ) , a prominent follower of Saint-Simon.
( Tr.)
:J Consid�rant. Victor ( 1 808--93 ) . a philosopher and political economist, an advocate of Fourierism. ( Tr.)
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has assimilated also all the methods of Catholic controversy. But neither Hegelian philosophy nor the Catholic theology furnished the content or the character of his writings; for him these are the weapons with which he tests his subject, and these weapons he has squared and adapted in his own way just as he has adapted the French language to his powerful and vigorous thought. Such men stand much too firmly on their own feet to resign themselves to anything or to allow themselves to be lassoed.
'I like your system very much,' an English tourist said to Proudhon.
'But I have no system,' Proudhon answered with annoyance, and he was right.
It is just this that puzzles his fellow-countrymen, who are accustomed to a moral at the end of the fable, to systematic formulae, to classification, to binding, abstract prescriptions.
Proudhon sits by a sick man's bedside and tells him that he is in a very bad way for this reason and for that. You do not help a dying man by constructing an ideal theory of how he might be well if he were not ill, or by suggesting remedies, excellent in themselves, which he cannot take or which are not to be had.
The external signs and manifestations of the financial world serve him, just as the teeth of the animals served Cuvier, as a ladder by which he descends into the mysteries of social life; by means of them he studies the forces that are dragging the sick body towards decomposition. If after every such observation he proclaims a new victory for death, is that his fault? There are no relations here whom one is afraid of alarming: we are ourselves dying this death. The crowd shouts indignantly: 'Remedies!
Remedies! Or be quiet about the disease! ' But why not speak of it? It is only under despotic governments that we are forbidden to speak of crops failing, of epidemic diseases and of the numbers slain in war. The remedy, obviously, is not easily to be found ; they have made plenty of experiments in France since the days of the immoderate blood-letting of 1 793 ; they have treated her with victories and violent exercise, making her march to Egypt and to Russia ; they have tried parliamentarianism and agiotage, a little republic and a little Napoleon-and has anything done her any good? Proudhon himself once tried his own pathology and came to grief over the People's Bank-though in itself his idea was a good one. Unfortunately, he does not believe in magic charms, or else he would have added to everything: 'League of Nations ! League of Nations! Universal Republic! Brotherhood of all the World ! Grande Armec de la Democratic!' He does not use
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these phrases, he does not spare the Old Believers of the revolution, and for that reason the French look upon him as an egoist, as an individualist, almost as a renegade and a traitor.
I remember Proudhon's works, from his reflections On Property to his Financial Guide; many of his ideas have changed-a man could hardly live through a period like ours and whistle the same duct in A minor like Platon Mikhaylovich in Woe from Wit. What leaps to the eye in these changes is the- i nner unity that binds them all together, from the essay \'\Titten as a school task at Bcsa!l(;on Academy to the carmen horrendum of Stock Exchange depravity,� which has recently been published ; the same order of thought, developing, varying in aspect, reflecting events, runs through the Contradictions of Political Economy, through his Confessions and through his Journal.