69 Facts About Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's background was as a French socialist, politician, philosopher, economist and the founder of mutualist philosophy.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as "the synthesis of community and property".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was born in Besancon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language.

Some such as Edmund Wilson have contended that Marx's attack on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had its origin in the latter's defense of Karl Grun, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's work.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born in Besancon, France, on 15 January 1809 at 23 Rue du Petit Battant in the suburb of Battant.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's brothers Jean-Etienne and Claude were born in 1811 and 1816 respectively and both maintained a very close relationship with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon received no formal education as a child, but he was taught to read by his mother, who had him spelling words by age three.

However, the only books that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was exposed to until he was 10 were the Gospels and the Four Aymon Brothers and some local almanacs.

In 1820, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mother began trying to get him admitted into the city college in Besancon.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was unable to afford basic things like books or shoes to attend school which caused him great difficulties and often made him the object of scorn by his wealthier classmates.

In spite of this, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon showed a strong will to learn and spent much time in the school library with a pile of books, exploring a variety of subjects in his free time outside of class.

In 1827, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon began an apprenticeship at a printing press in the house of Bellevaux in Battant.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon supervised the printing of the book, which gave him ample opportunity to talk with Fourier about a variety of social and philosophical issues.

In September 1830, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon became certified as a journeyman compositor.

The period following this was marked by unemployment and poverty, with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon travelling around France where he unsuccessfully sought stable employment in printing and as a schoolteacher.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon accepted his offer despite concerns about how it might disrupt his career in the printing trade.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon began mingling amongst the circle of metropolitan scholars surrounding Fallot, but he felt out of place and uncomfortable amidst people who were both wealthier and more accustomed to scholarly debate.

Ultimately, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon found that he preferred to spend the majority of his time studying alone and was not fond of urban life, longing to return home to Besancon.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon applied for the Suard Pension, a bursary that would enable him to study at the Academy of Besancon.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was selected out of several candidates primarily due to the fact that his income was much lower than the others and the judges were extremely impressed by his writing and the level of education he had given himself while working as an artisan.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon arrived in Paris towards the end of autumn in 1838.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's entry, titled De la Celebration du dimanche, essentially used the essay subject as a pretext for discussing a variety of political and philosophical ideas and in it one can find the seeds of his later revolutionary ideas.

Many of his ideas on authority, morality and property disturbed the essay judges at the Academy and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was only awarded the bronze medal.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was tried for it at Besancon, but he was acquitted when the jury found that they could not condemn him for a philosophy that they themselves could not understand.

For some time, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ran a small printing establishment at Besancon, but without success.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon died in Passy on 19 January 1865 and was buried in Paris at the cemetery of Montparnasse.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person to refer to himself as an "anarchist".

In 1849, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared in Confessions of a Revolutionary that "[w]hoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy".

Towards the end of his life, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon modified some of his earlier views.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon defined anarchy differently as "the government of each by himself" which meant "that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon stated that in presenting the "property is liberty" theory, he is not changing his mind about the earlier "property is theft" definition.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon did not only rely on "synthesis", but emphasized "balance" between approaches such as communism and property that apparently cannot be fully reconciled.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon urged "workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopted the term mutualism for his brand of anarchism and socialism which involved control of the means of production by the workers.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called this use-ownership possession and this economic system mutualism, having many arguments against entitlement to land and capital, including reasons based on morality, economics, politics and individual liberty.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon supported the right of inheritance and defended "as one of the foundations of the family and society", but he refused to extend this beyond personal possessions, arguing that "[u]nder the law of association, transmission of wealth does not apply to the instruments of labour".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had wanted to prove that the reign of political economy would be the reign of peace, finding it difficult to believe that people really thought he was defending militarism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon saw the privileged property as a form of government and that it was necessarily backed by and interlinked with the state, writing that "[t]he private property of privilege called forth and commanded the State" and arguing that "since the first related to the landowner and capitalist whose ownership derived from conquest or exploitation and was only maintained through the state, its property laws, police and army".

Unlike capitalist property supporters, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon stressed equality and thought that all workers should own property and have access to capital, stressing that in every cooperative "every worker employed in the association [must have] an undivided share in the property of the company".

When saying that "property is theft", Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was referring to the landowner or capitalist who he believed "stole" the profits from laborers.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon rejected entitlement regardless of the source and accepted possession based on occupancy.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocated workers' self-management and was opposed to the private ownership of the means of production.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon warned that a society with private property would lead to statist relations between people, arguing:.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon initially refers to legitimate rights of ownership of these goods as 'possession,' and although in his latter work he calls this 'property,' the conceptual distinction remains the same.

Late in his life, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued for increasing the powers of government while strengthening property, by making it more egalitarian and widespread, in order to counter-balance it.

In other words, this 'heterodoxy' came from a period in which Pierre-Joseph Proudhon did not think that state could be abolished and so 'property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was denouncing the property of the man who uses it to exploit the labour of others without any effort on his own part, property distinguished by interest and rent, by the impositions of the non-producer on the producer.

Towards property regarded as 'possession' the right of a man to control his dwelling and the land and tools he needs to live, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had no hostility; indeed, he regarded it as the cornerstone of liberty, and his main criticism of the communists was that they wished to destroy it.

James Boyle quotes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as stating that socialism is "every aspiration towards the amelioration of society" and then admitting that "we are all socialists" under this definition.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called himself a socialist, was recognized as one and still is.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was one of the main influences on the theory of workers' self-management in the late 19th and 20th century.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued that while society owned the means of production or land, users would control and run them with the "organising of regulating societies" in order to "regulate the market".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made no public criticism of Karl Marx or Marxism because in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's lifetime Marx was relatively unknown.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocated industrial democracy and repeatedly argued that the means of production and the land should be socialized.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was first used as a reference in the Cercle Proudhon, a right-wing association formed in 1911 by Georges Valois and Edouard Berth.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was given a place of honour in the weekly section of the journal of the movement entitled, precisely, 'Our Masters.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had great influence on the anarchist and non-anarchist socialist movement.

Anarchist Albert Meltzer has argued that although Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term anarchist, he was not one and that he never engaged in "anarchist activity or struggle", but rather in "parliamentary activity".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon engaged in an exchange of published letters between 1849 and 1850 with the French Liberal School economist Frederic Bastiat discussing the legitimacy of interest.

In 1945, J Salwyn Schapiro argued that Proudhon was a racist, "a glorifier of war for its own sake" and that his "advocacy of personal dictatorship and his laudation of militarism can hardly be equalled in the reactionary writings of his or of our day".

Robert Graham states that while Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was personally racist, "anti-semitism formed no part of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's revolutionary programme".

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was not consistently libertarian in his ideas, tactics and language.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made some bad decisions and occasionally ranted in his private notebooks.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon expressed strongly patriarchal views on women's nature and their proper role in the family and society at large.