Try three claims together and they look like a contradiction. Property is the origin of liberty — the thing that lets a person refuse, walk away, and build a life no one else can veto. Property is theft — Proudhon's […]
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave the nineteenth century one of its most durable lines and then largely vanished from the century that kept quoting it. "Property is theft" outlived the book it came from, the movement it was meant to launch, and, […]
A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]
Every institution we deal with — our job, our lease, our culture, our education and training, our government -- has social implications and importance
from General Idea of the Revolution I beg that the reader will pardon me, if in the course of this study an expression should escape me which might betray any feeling of self-esteem. I have the double regret, in this great question of authority, of being, on the one hand, as yet alone in asserting […]
from: the general idea of the revolution in the 19th century To you, business men, I dedicate these new essays. You have always been the boldest, the most skillful revolutionaries. It was you who, from the third century of the Christian era, drew the winding-sheet over the Roman Empire in Gaul, by your municipal federations. […]
The theologians answer: All justice comes from God That is true; but we know no more than before. The philosophers ought to be better informed: they have argued so much about justice and injustice! Unhappily, an examination proves that their knowledge amounts to nothing, and that with them — as with the savages whose every […]
Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The […]
Proudhon 1840 Chapter I. The Idea of a Revolution If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his […]
Social Liberty