Proudhon, PIERRE JOSEPH, a noted French socialist, was born July 15, 1809, at Besançon, in which town his father was a poor cooper. Through the good offices of charitable friends, he received the rudiments of his education at the college of his native place, and from the first gave great promise of talent. While still very young, however, he quit the institution in order to aid his family, who had fallen into great distress, and sought employment in a printing establishment. Here he was noted for the most punctual discharge of duty; and, in the hours not occupied in work, he contrived, by a rare exercise of resolution, to complete and extend his education. In 1830 he declined an offer of the editorship of a ministerial journal, preferring an honourable independence as a workman to the career of a writer pledged to the support of authority. In 1837 he became partner in the development of a new typographical process; was engaged on an edition of the Bible, to which he contributed notes on the principles of the Hebrew language; and in 1838 published an Essai de Grammaire Générale, in approval of which a triennial pension of 1500 francs was awarded to him by the Académie de Besançon. On this accession of funds he paid a visit to Paris; and subsequently contributed to the Encyclopédie Catholique of M. Parent Desbarres the articles 'Apostasie,' 'Apocalypse,' and others. In 1840 he issued the work entitled Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? ('What is Property?') which afterwards became so famous. The nature of the doctrine announced in it is sufficiently indicated in its bold paradox, soon to be widely popularised—La Propriété c'est le Vol ('Property is Theft'). Notwithstanding his attack on property, which gave great offence to his patrons, Proudhon held his pension for the regular time. In 1842 he was tried for his revolutionary opinions, but was acquitted. In 1846 he published his greatest work, the Système des Contradictions Économiques. During the revolution of 1848 Proudhon attained to great notoriety. He was elected member of Assembly for the Seine department, but he could not there gain a hearing for his extreme and paradoxical opinions. He found more adequate scope for his energy in the press, publishing several newspapers, in which the most advanced theories were advocated in the most violent language. He attempted also to establish a bank which should pave the way for a socialist transformation, by granting gratuitous credit, but failed utterly. The violence of his utterances at last resulted in a sentence of three years' imprisonment, and in March 1849 he fled to Geneva, but returned to Paris in the following June, and surrendered at the prison of Sainte Pelagie.
While shut up there he married a young working-woman. During his imprisonment he gave to the world the works entitled Confessions d'un Révolutionnaire (1849), Actes de la Révolution (1849), Gratuité du Crédit (1850), and La Révolution Sociale démontrée par le Coup d'État (1852); the last of which is remarkable, in the light of subsequent events, for the clearness with which it states the alternative of l'anarchie ou le Césarisme, as pressed on Louis Napoleon, then president. In June 1852 he was set at liberty, but in 1858 was again condemned to three years' imprisonment, and retired to Belgium, where he continued to publish from time to time on his favourite subjects of speculation. Amnestied in 1860, he died in obscurity near Paris, January 19, 1865.
The theories of Proudhon cannot be presented in a clear or systematic form; we can only give some account of the most important of them. He held that property was theft, inasmuch as it appropriates the value produced by the labour of others in the form of rent, interest, or profit without rendering an equivalent. He maintained that one service can be duly repaid only by rendering another, whereas the owner of land and capital abuses his position by exacting all manner of service without giving an equivalent. His famous paradox respecting anarchy, which he regarded as the culmination of social progress, was simply an exaggerated and premature assertion of the great principle that the fully-developed man should be a law to himself—that is, the moral progress of man should make government and external law unnecessary. In the perfect society order would be secured and maintained in the absence of government through the reasonable self-control of the free individual. Laws, police, the whole machinery of government as now established are the marks of an imperfectly developed society. Personally Proudhon appears as an original and not unattractive character in the monograph of Sainte-Beuve, which unfortunately was not finished. His complete works fill 33 vols. (Paris, 1868-76); his correspondence, 14 vols. (1874).
See Sainte-Beuve, Proudhon, sa Vie et Correspondance (1872); A. Desjardins, Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1896); the articles ANARCHISM, SOCIALISM, and works there cited.