What do we call sociological theories? Those that share this common postulate: from the union of individual units there results an original reality, something greater than and different from their mere sum.
Now, arguably no thinker has made broader use of this postulate than Proudhon. Properly sociological theories constitute the true centre of his system. It is worth identifying them in order to better understand his attitude, so often difficult to classify, towards various philosophical tendencies.
Until now, this undertaking does not appear to have greatly tempted commentators. No doubt they perceived, more or less clearly, the great difficulties it presents. One antithesis, in particular, must have barred their way: the classic opposition between the sociological postulate and the individualist affirmation. Does not the latter imply, by common admission, an ‘atomist’ or at least ‘nominalist’ social philosophy – the idea that the only realities to be taken into account are distinct persons? Yet who has affirmed the superior value of the individual more vigorously than Proudhon? Is he not regarded as the father of anarchy itself? Let us recall, in any case, his diatribes against communism, inspired by the desire to defend ‘the free, active, reasoning, unsubmissive personality of man’.[1] Proudhon wants equality, but on the condition that it be the natural fruit of liberty. ‘Liberty, charm of my existence, without which work is torture and life a lingering death!’[2] He himself recalls that he remains a man of liberty and individuality above all.[3] Louis Blanc reproached him for pushing this worship to the point of frenzy, and thus placing himself ‘completely outside the movement of this century’.[4] Conversely, he would reproach Louis Blanc for ‘contradicting the manifest tendencies of civilisation’: its wish is not to subordinate the private person to the public person, but on the contrary for every human soul to become ‘an exemplar of humanity as a whole’.[5] With such intense personalist sentiments, how can social realism, in any form whatsoever, logically be reconciled?
Whether or not the two tendencies logically agree, one thing is certain in the meantime: in Proudhon’s work they coexist. With as much vehemence as he affirms the worth of personality, Proudhon insists upon the reality of the social being. The reflections by means of which he demonstrates this count, in his eyes, among the principal gains of his intellectual effort. In his Theory of Property,[6] when he draws up the balance sheet of the sixteen ‘very positive’ demonstrations he bequeaths to the world, does he not – he, the ‘demolisher’ – cite in the very first line a theory of Collective Force, a ‘metaphysics of the group’, to which he links both his theory of Nationality and his theory of the Division of Powers? He hoped, in a book he had promised many times, to elucidate these theories completely; yet already, on more than one occasion, he had sketched their broad outlines. The Fourth and Seventh Studies of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church accord a large place to the notions of collective power and reason. The System of Economic Contradictions points out the needs as well as the powers specific to Prometheus – that is, to society considered as a single being.[7] Better still, from his very first memoir on Property, Proudhon exploits the distinction between collective force and the sum of individual forces: he would go so far as to declare that this distinction was, at that time, his fundamental thought.[8] This is to say that from the beginning to the end of his work, the sociological preoccupation is present.
To summarise and classify conveniently the theories suggested to him by this preoccupation, we shall examine in turn, recalling how Proudhon passes from one of these terms to the next: collective force, the collective being, and collective reason.
Collective force is something other than the sum of individual forces. As soon as the latter associate, a surplus of energy is released which is not the work of any one of them, but indeed of their association. A very simple reflection suffices to demonstrate this. Two hundred grenadiers, manoeuvring under the direction of an engineer, erected the obelisk of Luxor upon its base in a few hours:[9] is it supposed that one man, in two hundred days, would have accomplished the same? Here is a ditch to be dug: a hundred workers, dividing into squads to share out the tasks – diggers, loaders, carriers, and fillers – spend one day on the job: how many more than one hundred days would a single worker take, charged with all these tasks at once! This is proof that the union and harmony of workers, the convergence and simultaneity of their efforts, are creators of value.[10]
From this observation Proudhon would draw one of his capital arguments for the assault he led against property in the first period of his life. He was able to denounce the individual appropriation of the benefits of common labour as a particular species of theft. The capitalist, you say, reaps his profits legitimately: has he not paid the daily wages of the workers he employs? Say rather that he has paid as many times one day’s wage as he has employed workers each day. It is not the same thing.[11] The resultant of the workers’ cooperation, ‘different in quality from the forces that compose it and superior to their sum’, is monopolised by the employer without loosening his purse strings. Say’s axiom, ‘Every product is worth what it costs’,[12] is therefore violated here. Between masters and workers, an ‘accounting error’ (erreur de compte) is uncovered.[13] Generalising this, one realises that, all production being necessarily collective, all accumulated capital is social property: it is impossible, as Proudhon liked to say at the time, for anyone to hold exclusive ownership of it.
Here we recognise arguments analogous to those used by Karl Marx in the first part of Capital. He too, in order to contrast the private character retained by appropriation under the capitalist regime with the social character assumed by production, shows the ‘collective Briareus’{1} at work: when he applies himself to the construction of a house, do not his hundred hands pass the stones much faster than the hands of isolated workers climbing up and down the scaffolding? Whether cooperation passes from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’, whether tasks are increasingly subdivided, or whether the movement of machines entrains and coordinates the gestures of ever more numerous men, it becomes increasingly manifest that the values created are not the work – and consequently should not be the property – of any person in particular:[14] they are emanations of groupings.
Must we say that Karl Marx borrowed the core of this argument from Proudhon? We know how much the young Marx, in Paris, admired the brilliant typesetter, through whom the ‘conscious’ proletariat seemed to him finally to come to life and voice.[15] In particular, we recall the esteem in which the polemicist of The Holy Family held What Is Property?, comparing it, for the landmark date it represents in the history of classes, to Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? It would be no surprise if, from this famous Memoir, the distinction between collective force and individual force passed into Capital. Yet it must be admitted that it could have reached Marx’s mind by other paths. ‘Quantitative changes, when they reach a certain degree, entail qualitative changes’: this was one of Hegel’s favourite principles. Was it not this principle that was bound to draw the attention of his socialist disciples to the new facts that follow from the grouping of a certain number of individual units? The manner in which Engels sets about explaining these facts in Anti-Dühring would suggest so.[16] No doubt a synthesis of the two traditions, German and French, took place here in Marx’s mind, as was to happen so many times.
The fact remains that Proudhon was the first to launch this theory of collective force into circulation:[17] he was the first to mark clearly, alongside the economic principle to which the observed phenomenon relates, the various sociological consequences derived from it. One of the men of whom Proudhon most willingly proclaims himself a disciple is Adam Smith. It was through political economy first – the science that was to offer straightaway ‘the highest degree of positivism’, the key to history, the theory of order, the creator’s final word – that the young prophet of The Creation of Order in Humanity sought to regenerate philosophy.[18] It is in The Wealth of Nations that he claims to have found the germ of his theory of collective force. Man is par excellence the animal that works. ‘This single word, Work, therefore contains a whole order of knowledge.’ Adam Smith glimpsed this well, showing not only in labour in general the source of all exchange values, but in the division of labour in particular the source of all progress in production. Now, the force of collectivity is nothing other than a consequence of the division of labour, a precondition of fruitful cooperations and ‘commutations’.[19] Germain Garnier had indicated this in passing. It sufficed to develop this remark to make Smith’s law yield all its ‘organic applications’. On this point as on so many others, one may verify that socialist doctrines are initially nothing other than the audacious heirs of orthodox political economy.
In the manner in which Proudhon exploits this legacy one will recognise, alongside the influence of Smith, that of another master whom Proudhon acknowledges less willingly, yet whose inventions are nonetheless always present in his thought: his compatriot Fourier. Just as Marx remains, despite himself, steeped in Hegelianism, so Proudhon, despite himself, remains steeped in Fourierism. The vocabulary of The New Industrial World – administrations, pivots, foci, etc. – would survive right into his final works. Above all, for a long time, the notion of the series{2} would remain his obsession and, as it were, his supreme hope. It is upon this that he relies, in The Creation of Order, to renew logic and bring order to the chaos of the sciences. He would not fail to connect it to the notion he borrows from economic science. Whoever says series says, among other things, alongside the specification of groupings, the coordination of units. Now, are specified groupings of coordinated units not precisely the natural fruits of the division of labour? That is doubtless why Proudhon would write[20] of the division of labour that it is the series itself manifesting before our eyes, ‘incarnating itself in society’. And thus, on two sides at once, the notion of series adapts to that of labour: on the side of nature and on the side of society. Human labour may be defined as an effort to superimpose or substitute, in bodies, artificial series for natural series:[21] it alters the relations of elements; it thus models hitherto unknown species. Yet to accomplish this transformation of the world, human beings must themselves mesh their activities according to certain relations. It is thus that they form social series which are, as it were, the substrates of collective force.
Let us note that while Proudhon generalises the economists’ observation in this way, he does not go so far as to endorse the affirmation with which many among the socialist reformers of his time contented themselves: ‘Association is creative.’ Formulas of this kind appear to him vague and heavy with mysticism. On this point, he separates himself sharply from Fourier, as from Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc. In The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century he criticises the societary principle with vehemence.[22] That is because he sees in it, along with a synthesis of confused ideas, a threat to individual liberty. ‘Association, presented as a universal institution, the principle, means, and end of the revolution, appears to me to conceal an ulterior motive of exploitation and despotism.’ In fact, association possesses, of itself, no organic or productive virtue: foolish indeed is he who, to leave the field clear for this problematic and suspect power, would curb the initiative of individuals. Consider instead with attention the mechanism of the division of labour. The collaborators here remain autonomous and each of them expends on his own side an entire energy: yet we see born from their concentrated energies[23] the surplus of power whose benefit it is their right to share equally. What use is there in seeking any further for the secret of the effects of collectivity? Fortified by this economist’s analysis, Proudhon mocks the efforts of the sociocrats to explain the superior yield provided by labour when organised in association. They invoke emulative competition, mutual stimulation, the joy born of grouping by natural affinities, etc. Of these psycho-sociological explanations, Marx will perhaps retain or rediscover something: Proudhon wishes to keep nothing of them. The forces shown at work here are not, in his eyes, industrial forces. All these dreamers’ theories are nothing but the ‘mystical and apocalyptic’ expression of facts discovered in industrial practice.[24] Reread Adam Smith: you will have the key to your enigmas. You will be brought back, at a stroke, from mysticism to positivism.
Yet while it is true that Proudhon wants us to stick to the analyses inaugurated by the economists in explaining the genesis of this collective force, he at least extends its field of application well beyond the circle of political economy proper. It is not only in a workshop, but in an army, an orchestra, or an academy that he sees constituted a ‘synthetic power specific to the group, superior in quality and energy to the sum of the elementary forces that compose it’. Elsewhere he observes that what he says of the division of labour in industry may be repeated of the division of powers in politics. It is therefore not solely through effects appreciable to the senses that the force pointed out by G. Garnier manifests itself. It is capable of producing something other than a surplus of mintable values. The intellectual world as well as the material world is subject to its law. Even in the realm of imponderables it remains queen.
In broadening the theory of the division of labour in this way, Proudhon was naturally bound to encounter, as one senses, ‘commonplaces’ that the philosophy of solidarity has restored to honour in our own day.
Of Proudhon one may repeat what has been said of Bastiat.[25] However concerned he may be for individuality, he is, from a certain point of view, a solidarist avant la lettre. ‘Not a man, then, who does not live off the product of several thousand different industrialists; not a worker who does not receive from society as a whole his consumption [...][26] All industries are united by mutual relations in a single bundle; all productions serve one another reciprocally as end and means. Now, this indisputable and undisputed fact of general participation in every species of product has the result of rendering all particular productions common: so that every product, emerging from the hands of the producer, finds itself mortgaged in advance by society.’ Elsewhere:[27] ‘All of us, as many as we are, work for as many masters as we count collaborators; we have as many creditors as associates.’ Yet let us note that Proudhon does not confine himself to recalling the interdependence of individuals in this way. What distinguishes his solidarist argument here from that of a Bastiat, for example, is precisely the idea that wherever a bundle is formed, a new force is released. Human beings are not merely debtors to one another; they are one and all beneficiaries of, and consequently indebted to, a sort of common fund constituted by the very association of their activities. From this point of view, the demonstration of solidarity appears as a corollary of the theory of collective force.[28]
A demonstration valid, as we said, in the intellectual order as well as in the material order. And that is why, in the world of ideas as in that of things, it will be permissible to present the individual, even the genius, as a debtor. ‘The finest genius is, by the laws of his existence and development, the most dependent upon the society that creates him: who would dare to make a god of this sublime child?’[29] Upon this conclusion Proudhon would insist with mischievous pleasure: he would find in it a pertinent argument – he, the ‘poor industrialist’ bursting into literature – against the pride of the professionals of the pen, those ‘intellectuals’ as we would say today, who do not hesitate to demand privileged remuneration and the indefinitely extended ownership of their works. As early as 1841, in his letter to Blanqui,[30] he praises Mr Wolowski for having spoken out forcefully, in his course at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, against the perpetual and absolute ownership of works of genius for the profit of authors’ heirs. The exchange value of a book stems even more from the social fact than from the talent that the book presupposes. ‘Society holds a right of collective production over every creation of the mind.’ When he demonstrates these formulas, remarks Proudhon, Mr Wolowski does nothing other than generalise this principle of collective force that I established in my first memoir. Later, when he himself attacks Literary Entails (Majorats littéraires), Proudhon would undertake to unfold all the consequences of these observations.
‘It is a fact[31] that when an idea’s hour has come, it blossoms everywhere at once, like a sowing, so that the merit of the discovery, compared with the immensity of humanitarian production, is reduced to almost nothing. Here is a field of wheat: can you tell me which ear emerged first from the earth, and do you claim that the others that followed owe their birth solely to its initiative? Such is more or less the role of those creators to whom one would make the human race indebted.’
To guarantee the ownership of their works to their heirs would be not only to declare venal things that by nature are not; it would be to surrender a public domain over which society holds eminent rights; it would be to ‘violate the law of collectivity’.
Thus, by virtue of collective force, treasures accumulate – intellectual as well as material – from which passing individuals draw. Yet is this saying enough? Collective force does not merely accumulate things; it constitutes beings, living a life of their own. In Proudhon there is not only a solidarism, but indeed a social realism.
Expressions of it abound, whatever book one consults and to whatever period of his intellectual development it belongs. In the Economic Contradictions:[32] ‘In the eyes of anyone who has reflected upon the laws of labour and exchange, the reality – I almost said the personality – of the collective man is almost as certain as the reality and personality of the individual man.’ In the articles of La Voix du peuple, addressing those who seem to regard the collective being as a mere being of reason: ‘Society is a person, do you hear? just as humanity as a whole is a person.’[33] In The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century:[34] ‘There can be no question of touching society itself, which we must regard as a superior being endowed with a life of its own.’ In Justice: ‘It is thus that the hypothesis (which Proudhon will strive to demonstrate for his part) was formed of a social, real, positive, and true being.’ In Pornocracy:[35] ‘Collectivities are not pure fictions of our understanding; they are realities as real as the individuals, monads, or molecules that constitute them.’
Should these formulas, encountered under the pen of the ‘father of anarchy’, astonish us? Our astonishment will quickly subside, in any event, if we recall the theory of being and knowledge at which their author arrived. It is not because he ceases to be a relativist; it is on the contrary because he is a relativist to the very end that Proudhon can permit himself to reify society in this way. Because he affirms that reason grasps, in all and everywhere, nothing but relations, it is permissible for him to attribute as much existence to the collectivity as to individuality.
Already in The Creation of Order, in explaining the role reserved for that sort of critique of the sciences he calls metaphysics, he lets us glimpse the consequences of this principle that order alone, in nature, is accessible to us: we can perceive laws or relations in it, never substances or causes. Yet it is above all in 1851 – when, in reply to Mr Romain-Cornut, he casts a backward glance over the whole of his works and the movement of his thought – that he brings this principle to the foreground. Over against the absolute, which he denies in all and everywhere, his originality consists, he declares, in affirming in all and everywhere progress. Yet this affirmation implies another. What Proudhon pursues in the notion of the absolute is not only the notion of immobility, but that of simplicity, which one would like to make the supreme reality. Now, the search for simple elements is of all quests the most deceptive. They flee from us in proportion as we believe we are drawing closer to them.[36] In truth, we never grasp a simple being: everything that exists is a group. Every truth is a relation. Every being is a group. The notion of the group takes precedence here, it seems, in Proudhon’s mind, over the very notion of the series – or at least, in his eyes, the series is defined increasingly by the grouping. He insists upon the necessarily synthetic character of being.[37] To traditional ontology, it is a properly sociological philosophy that he opposes.
Thus the sort of reversal of argument with which those accused of social realism have so often replied can already be utilised by Proudhon. Society does not exist in itself and apart, you say, as an individual exists? Pay attention, however, to the fact that the individual himself is already a multiplicity, a colony, a society. Why would you refuse to the secondary compound the reality that you grant to this primary compound?[38] It must be added that Proudhon perceived very clearly how this sociological conception of the world can serve to safeguard the originality of beings, preventing the uniform ‘reduction’ of the superior to the inferior. Let us remember that there is more in the group than the sum of its elements; consequently, the bursts of novelty of which the universe offers the spectacle will no longer appear disconcerting to us. If, in particular, man is capable of innovating initiatives, it is precisely because he is the compound of compounds. In him all the powers of nature are gathered together, yet from their very gathering a superior power surges forth, whereby he becomes ‘super-nature’. ‘It is this force of collectivity that man designates when he speaks of his soul.’ ‘It is with the aid of these notions of collective force, group, and series that I rise to the comprehension and certainty of my free will.’[39]
What use Proudhon will make of this philosophy for the solution of the social problems – economic or political – that he encounters along his way is visible as early as The Philosophy of Poverty. If he claims therein to resolve, through a genuinely social economy, the antinomies against which political economy collides, it is precisely by relying upon the theory of the collective being as an organic and synthetic unity.[40]
Picture society as an immense Prometheus gradually mastering nature – by turns ploughman, vine-grower, baker, weaver – organising his labour according to his needs, multiplying his needs in proportion to his labour. This hypothesis will enable you at last to understand the nature of general wealth, in which all values produced by private industries merge in order to be proportioned therein.[41] So long as you remain at the standpoint, familiar to classical economics, of individuals seeking to gain at one another’s expense, you see use-value and exchange-value standing opposed. Each striving to multiply values for his own profit, all concur in debasing them. It is the world of perpetual fluctuations as well as of essential contradictions. Place yourself, on the contrary, at the standpoint of the whole: use-value and exchange-value absorb one another and disappear, ‘leaving in their place a compound endowed, to a superior degree, with all their positive properties’. Value is at last constituted. It becomes apparent that production and consumption are harmonious and that society has but a single interest: to multiply products which can indeed, as Say wishes, be exchanged for products, and ‘to proportion values’ in such a way that all labour leaves the worker a surplus, and that every worker can at least buy back the value of his product.[42]
Yet for this ideal to be realised, values must still be effectively measured by labour. We must no longer see idle proprietors levying, like a sort of toll, a disproportionate tribute upon circulation, nor producers condemned to a starvation wage. Where the purchasing power – and consequently the consumption – of the latter is reduced to a bare pittance, the entire system of production is threatened. This is to say that harmony presupposes equity. The theory of the proportionality of values, itself deduced from the theory of the social being, leads to the theory of equality.[43]
Whether Proudhon’s reasoning here attains perfect clarity is open to doubt. What at least begins to appear clearly is the dual tendency that constitutes the originality of his enterprise: at once realist and egalitarian, he presents the phenomena of production, consumption, and circulation as manifestations of the activity of a single being; he goes so far as to personify society, yet for the sole purpose of instituting more securely the equity of exchanges among individuals.
The same tendencies break through in the explanation he proposes of the genesis and nature of social power. Proudhon too, just like a de Maistre or a de Bonald, protests against the philosophers who see in the State merely an artificial being, the product of a convention among individuals. Religious mysticism was closer to the truth here. It maintained at least, among peoples, the sense that a State is not a thing that is manufactured.[44] In truth, social power does not issue from a deliberation of individuals: it is born of the bringing together of groups. Whether families or enterprises, when elementary associations – different in nature and object, each formed for the exercise of a special function and the creation of a particular product – enter into relations, the collective forces released from these associations concentrate, as it were, into a new power that presides over their common life. The quality of the power in question varies, and its authority rises or falls according to the number and diversity of these ‘formative groups’ – proof that it is nothing other, in effect, than their common emanation.
Yet if this is so, it is all too clear that the benefit of social power, like that of all collective force generally, must return to all those who have concurred in forming it, pro rata to their contribution. Now, is that the spectacle history offers us? All too often we see the force thus constituted ‘alienated’[45] for the profit of a dynasty, a race, or a caste. All too often religion seconds these abuses of power instead of thwarting them, covering such sleights of hand with its cloak of illusion. Yet the moment the genesis of the State is unveiled, misappropriations and monopolisations become ‘impossible’. Here again, the properly understood theory of collective reality sets humanity back upon the path of justice.
Such being his tendencies, one can surmise in what sense Proudhon’s social realism will approach, and in what sense it will distance itself from, what has been called organicism. Proudhon also employs biological metaphors on various occasions, making them serve diverse purposes – first of all for the critique of solutions sketched by his predecessors. He declares those solutions utopian because they are overly mechanistic. ‘A deplorable error’, he says in speaking of a Phalansterian theory, ‘yet natural in a system where one conceives of society as a machine rather than as a living being. Society reforms itself only by continually growing and developing, and this fact, the most striking in history, is the condemnation of all hypotheses that proceed by the overthrow of forms and substitution of systems.’[46] Let us not touch that which lives: would Proudhon in his turn, at least at a certain moment, have countersigned this formula? The idea of spontaneous growth proper to societies serves him in any event to oppose to castles in the air a continuist philosophy of history. Yet it is still more a pluralist view of things that he takes pleasure in suggesting to us through the comparison of societies with organisms. Ought not Proudhon to be ranked, alongside Louis Ménard, among the ‘polytheists’? At the very least, he increasingly professed the cult of multiple forces, irreducible to one another, whose relative independence appeared to him the very condition of life.
Simplistic reformers strike him as like physicians who would say: ‘With elements so diverse – bone, muscles, tendons, nerves, viscera, arterial and venous blood, gastric and pancreatic juice, chyle, lachrymal and synovial humours, gas, liquids, and solids – the body is ungovernable. Let us reduce it to a single, solid, resistant matter: bone, for example. Hygiene and therapeutics will become child’s play.’ Yet society no more than the human body allows itself to be ossified. Within its ever-moving complexity there is discovered ‘a thought, an intimate collective life that evolves outside the laws of geometry and mechanics, which it is repugnant to assimilate to the rapid, uniform, infallible movement of a crystallisation, for which ordinary, syllogistic, fatalistic, unitary logic is incapable of accounting, but which is marvellously explained with the aid of a broader philosophy admitting within a system the plurality of principles, the struggle of elements, the opposition of contraries, and the synthesis of all indefinables and absolutes’.[47]
Yet while he knows how to utilise organic analogies to draw our attention both to the spontaneity of movements and to the multiplicity of social elements, Proudhon is not without sensing their dangers. He seems in particular to foresee what arguments they could furnish against the will for egalitarian justice that lies at the bottom of his soul. How many times since Hegel was it to be repeated that societies, by the very fact that they are organisms, require a strict hierarchy, and not only attachment to the traditional division of functions, but respect for the privileges and prerogatives of the ruling classes! Proudhon strives to demolish these apologies in advance when he recalls that ‘as an organism, society, the moral being par excellence, differs essentially from living beings, in whom the subordination of organs is the very law of existence’.[48] It is repugnant ‘to any idea of hierarchy’. Far rather than a subordination of organs, the social system entails the balancing (pondération) of forces, services, and products. It thus appears as a general equation, a balance. The balance was, in Proudhon’s imagination, to take decisive precedence over the organism. When he wishes to specify his conception, always egalitarian in its tendencies, it is to the vocabulary of the physico-mathematical sciences that he has recourse, more often than to that of the biological sciences.
Does not the latter, moreover, become less and less adequate to reality in proportion as history unfolds and consciousness gains ground?[49] When governments become democratic, it appears increasingly chimerical to derive morality from physiology; in vain will one thenceforth compare the State to all known animals. ‘Here[50] physiology counts for nothing: the State appears as the product no longer of organic nature, of the flesh, but of intelligible nature, which is spirit.’
In truth, naturalist tendencies do not succeed in dominating Proudhon’s philosophy. More than once, doubtless in reaction against the spiritualism of those university philosophers whose lectures he may have heard, he displays a passing inclination to erase the distinctions between forms of being. He strives to weld humanity back to animality and sends societies back to the school of life. He appears to believe, at certain moments, that nature methodically consulted would lend superior authority to the egalitarian dreams that haunt him: at the very least, it would furnish him with as many justificatory analogies as it does the partisans of aristocratic doctrines.[51] Yet without losing hope of demonstrating that the system of the laws of justice is at bottom the same thing as the system of the laws of the world,[52] he realises that societies will never grasp these laws more directly than by folding back upon themselves and analysing the content of that consciousness which constitutes one of their originalities. They are ‘spiritual collectivities’.[53] And it is because the spirit gives itself free rein therein that the social realm must be superimposed upon the others.
The principal characteristic of this realm is in truth, in Proudhon’s eyes, to be an ‘industrial realm’. We know the great role that the author of Justice assigns to technology. As early as The Creation of Order, he comments in every way upon Franklin’s dictum: ‘Man is a tool-making animal.’[54] He writes that labour is the plastic form of society, the archetype-idea (idée-type) that determines the various phases of its growth; and that the ‘progress of Society is measured by the development of industry and the perfection of instruments’. In this, as has been justly remarked,[55] he appears as one of the precursors of historical materialism. Is not the latter first of all, as Marx himself indicates, a philosophy of technology – an attempt to explain everything in the development of societies by the perfection of the means of production? Yet whereas from this theory Marx draws the conclusion that ideas are merely shadows and reflections devoid of importance – veritable epiphenomena – Proudhon continues to place ideas at the centre of society and to show the collective mind at work in history. To establish the laws of development of this mind, to note its progress, to disengage its tendencies, and to formulate its volitions is precisely the primordial task he would have assigned to what we call sociology. And that is why, after having recalled how he conceives of both collective force and the collective being, it is important that we emphasise the manner in which he conceives of collective reason.
From his earliest works, no doubt, this notion is present in Proudhon’s mind. Does he not define society, in his Warning to Proprietors,[56] as an unconscious collective mind that follows, with admirable certainty, laws that the scholar’s eye has difficulty discerning? Yet in proportion as his experience broadens, he accords greater attention to this impersonal reason that lives within human society. He recognises ever greater authority in it; he goes so far as to oppose its oracles to the problematic conclusions of personal reason. In Justice he already indicates why collective reason possesses synthetic ideas very different from – and often inverse to – those of the individual self. Yet it is in one of his last writings, the Theory of Property, that he draws the greatest effect[57] from this antithesis. We know that he strives to justify therein, in order to erect it as an impassable barrier against the encroachments of the State, no longer merely the right of possession, which even his first memoir did not contest, but the right of absolute property, the jus utendi et abutendi according to the ancient Quiritary formula. An indefensible right, Proudhon acknowledges, for anyone who wishes to assess it solely according to the norms of individual reason. Yet precisely this method, however frequently applied by jurists, is imprudence itself: the maxims of general reason that end up imposing themselves upon particular reason are often the inverse of those yielded by the latter. There are contraries that the social genius delights in uniting, ‘whereas individualist reason most often knows only how to set them at variance’.[58] The ‘inspirations of that immanent reason which directs human collectivities’ naturally surpass the conceptions of the self. One step further, and Proudhon would lead us back to Joseph de Maistre. Does he not seem to think that the more incomprehensible or inadmissible an institution appears to individual reason – as is precisely the case with Quiritary property – the greater the likelihood that, conforming to the demands of a superior reason, it is by that very fact ‘providential’?
One sees clearly, at least, how this antithesis justifies the method advocated by Proudhon: his distrust of a priori constructions and his confidence in the lessons of history. Since collective reason does not use the same yardstick as individual reason, it is clear that the latter cannot deduce from its own stock the products of the former. Proudhon’s precepts here foreshadow those of sociologists who remind us of the necessity of studying social institutions from the outside, as things, in facts. Knowledge of social laws, by the very fact that it corresponds to the theory of collective ideas, could never be, according to him, anything other than empirical knowledge.[59]
Conversely, however, by the very fact that historical facts translate the ideas of a collective reason, empirical knowledge of them can become revelatory of an eternal order. Humanity as a whole – humanity as a social being – can neither deceive nor be deceived:[60] it is infallible, and this is the first postulate of Proudhon’s philosophy of history. How, were it otherwise, could there be any truth? Collective reason is none other than absolute reason manifesting itself in history.[61] From this point of view, society and God tend to merge, the thought of the one doing nothing other than becoming conscious of the volitions of the other.[62]
Let us not hasten, however, to identify these two terms completely. Between society and God, the manner in which the revelation of eternal truths is accomplished obliges us to maintain an infinite distance. There exists a system of ideas, superior to time, by which the conditions of social equilibrium are defined.[63] It is above all in the first period of his life that Proudhon manifests this conviction, yet to the very end, it seems to us, it remains present in his thought and accounts for his intellectual attitude. And that is why it is permissible to maintain that Proudhon, too, does not escape Platonism. It is even his Platonism that explains the particular colour of his anarchism. If he rises up with such force against governmental arbitrariness, it is because he believes a ‘scientific’ organisation of humanity to be possible: ‘scientific’, that is to say conforming to that plan of the just city of which he never ceases to dream.[64] And since this plan reveals itself only to collective reason, one arrives at the paradox that Proudhon’s anarchism is justified first and foremost by his confidence in the discoveries of collective reason.
Yet these discoveries themselves take place only little by little, after a long series of efforts, gropings, and hopes of every kind – a veritable Way of the Cross for humanity. Through repeated falls it rises to the truth. It attains equilibrium only after centuries of oscillation. Revelation through suffering, through war, through evil – this is precisely what furnishes Proudhon with the wherewithal to turn humanity against God. Those eternal truths of which His intelligence is, as it were, the bond – why did God not deliver them directly to human beings? Why does He leave them to spell out so painfully the tablets of justice? He could have granted them the synthetic intelligence that perceives by intuition the conditions of equilibrium. Instead, He compels them to follow a slow dialectic that progresses through successively resolved antinomies. That is why between God and humanity the antithesis subsists. That is why humanity has the right – or rather the duty – to regard God as an intimate enemy. That is why one must be not an atheist, but an antitheist.[65]
Thus is explained the original stance Proudhon adopts on this question of the relations between society and divinity. He begins by travelling the same road as what he calls humanism – a term that in his thought applies, it seems, as much to the doctrine of Feuerbach as to that of Auguste Comte. Yet from a certain point onwards he separates himself sharply from it.
The author of the Economic Contradictions would doubtless grant, he too, that ‘humanity as a whole is the reality pursued by the social genius under the mystical name of God’. Like Feuerbach, he denounces the ‘projections’ whereby man elevates to the absolute, in divinity, the qualities dear to his heart. He does not fail to add that the idea of God is above all social. ‘It is far more an act of faith of collective thought than an individual conception.’ It is starting from the collective self, taken as the superior pole of creation, that man extends the idea of creative personality.[66] Societies worship, in their gods, emanations of their own spontaneity. From this point of view, theocracy appears as ‘a symbolism of social force’.[67] And Proudhon arrives at this formula, which could serve as an epigraph for more than one contemporary work: ‘What the theologian pursues unbeknownst to himself in the dogma he teaches is not the mysteries of the infinite, but the laws of our collective and individual spontaneity.’[68] Yet are these explanations sufficient grounds either to deny God or to deify society? Proudhon does not think so. And it is here that he enters his reservations towards this humanism, in which he sees, along with the final form of atheism, an attempt to launch a new religion. That our conception of God is anthropomorphic – or, more precisely, sociomorphic – cannot directly prove that God does not exist. One may, on the contrary, continue to need, from various points of view, the hypothesis of God. One thing in the meantime is certain: by the mere fact of raising human attributes to the infinite in order to define God, one digs an impassable gulf between God and man. Human attributes raised to the infinite no longer suit man. Imperfection belongs to his essence, and that is why perpetual struggle is his lot. Let no one, then, erect humanity into God: to do so would be to slander both the one and the other. The two terms are intelligible only through their antithesis.[69]
Doubtless one could attempt to explain this antithesis itself by the characteristics of social reality, which dominates the individual. Proudhon anticipates explanations of this kind: ‘Will it be said that the opposition between man and the divine being is illusory, and that it stems from the opposition that exists between the individual man and the essence of humanity as a whole?’ Yet one would then have to grant that humanity as a collective being is spared those gropings from which, by definition, the divine being is exempt. Now, this is precisely what Proudhon denies. Collective reason tends towards eternal equilibrium, but it tends towards it humanly, discovering it progressively through a slow advance that is the necessary preface to order. And that is why, ultimately, it cannot be identified with divine intelligence.
Yet is this collective reason truly a reason – that is to say, does it presuppose a consciousness? Up to this point we scarcely see this consciousness at work. The philosopher examines the deeds and gestures of humanity, compares the ‘manifestations of collective spontaneity’, and traces the series of institutions whose very ruins form the steps of order. Thus he becomes capable of inducing the principles that direct the general movement. Yet it is only within his personal intelligence that these principles become conscious. Must we then grant that always and everywhere their action is exercised upon societies, as if by night, without the latter realising it? Humanity, says Proudhon somewhere, is like the ropemaker who reaches the end of his walk backwards. Will he never turn around? Does there not come a moment when society, ceasing to be ‘unconscious’ (inconsciencieuse), creates for itself organs of reflection to which we might have recourse in order to grasp its thought at last folded back upon itself?
The first answer that comes to mind is that these organs have existed for a long time: they are States. The very action they seek to exercise obliges them to become conscious of the principles that preside over the spontaneous movement of societies. In the State, through the State, society becomes conscious, and in this sense the State is truly the throne of God. That was Hegel’s solution, and it was also, mutatis mutandis, the solution of Louis Blanc. Yet it could in no degree be the solution of Proudhon.
Horror of statism, in all its forms, is one of his most powerful sentiments. In vain does one assure him that, through the happy seesaw of democracy, humanity is at last going to pass from the politics of the Master-State to that of the Servant-State. Would governmental forces henceforth be employed to guarantee individual rights? Everywhere there is governmental force, Proudhon sees a source of inevitable abuses. Democratic or monarchic, a State always implies a delegation of powers, and consequently always renders misappropriations possible. The State is the ‘external constitution of social power’.[70] This is to say that it is organised to permit ‘alienations’ of that very power. For too long the imagination of peoples has assisted it in this. That idealism in which Proudhon denounces one of the worst enemies of the morality of human dignity has, as it were, surrounded governments with a halo – a prestige perhaps useful at a given moment of history, but soon the most dangerous of all. It is high time to destroy forever these ‘political myths’ by carrying out the ‘purgation of ideas’. Instead of inviting society to seek its centre of consciousness in the State, let it understand that the State is itself merely a social product: not a hearth, but smoke.{3}
At bottom, those who continue to revere in the State the necessary centre of consciousness of society are accused by Proudhon of lacking sociological faith. Misled still by biological metaphors, they seem to believe that a head is needed at all costs for this great body, and that it can think only by delegation. According to this hypothesis, it is impossible for collective power, ‘which belongs essentially to the mass, to express itself and act directly, without the intermediary of organs expressly constituted and, so to speak, ad hoc. It seems, we say – and this is what explains the constitution of the State in its varieties and species – that the collective being, that society, being merely a being of reason, cannot render itself perceptible otherwise than by way of monarchic incarnation, autocratic usurpation, or democratic mandate, and consequently that any proper and personal manifestation is forbidden to it.’ It is precisely against this scepticism that Proudhon erects his theory. For if he is, as he said, a Pyrrhonian in politics, the obverse of his Pyrrhonism is faith in the intellectual capacities of the people themselves. ‘We deny the government and the State, because we affirm – what the founders of States have never believed – the personality and autonomy of the masses.’[71] If he rises with vehemence against those who, in seeking to direct it, caused the Revolution of ’48 to go astray, it is precisely because they allowed themselves to be won over once again by that ‘malady of opinion’ which Aristotle studied under the name of politics: it prevented them from communing with the people. They did not believe in the people; they did not understand them; they did not know how to interrogate them.[72]
‘Let each one, in these difficult days, turn towards the people; let each one study its sovereign thought, which is that of no party and of no school, and which yet lets itself be glimpsed in all schools and in all parties – which will know how to define itself and answer all our questions, provided we know how to interrogate it. To interrogate the people! There lies the secret of the future! To interrogate the people is the whole science of society.’[73]
Yet how, then, is one to go about obtaining an answer from the people? ‘The people, no more than God, has eyes to see, ears to hear, or a mouth to speak.’ It speaks only through the mouths of individuals. What resource thenceforth remains to us, if not to invite individuals to express their opinion by a vote? We shall count those votes, and we shall have the right to suppose that the opinion uniting the greatest number corresponds to collective thought. That is the solution devised by democracy. Yet this solution too is merely a snare in Proudhon’s eyes. He proves just as severe towards believers in universal suffrage as towards devotees of the State.
It is not only with the majoritarian system that he finds fault, or with the representative regime.[74] Certainly it appears iniquitous to him that half plus one of the citizens should make the law for the other half: ‘Democracy is ostracism.’ It appears inevitable to him, on the other hand, that representatives will abuse the power entrusted to them: ‘Democracy is a disguised aristocracy.’ Yet even if we were to inaugurate direct legislation, the government of the people by the people, the results would doubtless be no better. It suffices that voting by head, viritim, be instituted for collective thought to be unable to express itself. Universal suffrage is an axe for dividing the people. ‘Testimony of discord, it can produce only discord.’ ‘How could you believe that a thought at once particular and general, collective and individual – in a word, synthetic – could be obtained through the ballot box, that is to say precisely through the official formula of diversity?’[75]
Reading these texts, one might believe that in Proudhon’s eyes, for the people to think, they must remain in some way in indivision, that individualities must be as if melted into a superior unity. And in fact Proudhon often employs, to specify his theory, the unitary language of the Revolution. ‘God forbid that the people could ever either deceive itself or lie. I say the people one and indivisible, not the multitude, which is merely plurality without unity.’[76] At the beginning of a chapter of the Economic Contradictions,[77] he describes lyrically, in the sort of vision he dedicates to Lamartine, the near-swooning of the individual in social communion: ‘From this intimate commerce was born in our hearts the delicious sentiment of a unanimous will. In that ecstasy of an instant, in that absolute communion which, without effacing individual characters, raised them through love up to the ideal, we felt what society can be, what it must be: and the mystery of immortal life was revealed to us.’ And if one went back to the Celebration of Sunday,[78] one would find there a formal apology for the sort of ‘fusion of minds and hearts’ of which Moses dreamed for his young nation: he wanted it to be ‘not an agglomeration of individuals, but a truly fraternal society’. Does one not discover here the outlines of a theory of the Volksgeist analogous to that which was to serve in Germany as the foundation for juridical and economic nationalism?
One would be completely mistaken, however, to believe that Proudhon’s thought, in developing, was going to rejoin that of a Savigny, for example. Quite the contrary: between the Volksgeist and his ‘collective reason’ the distance would only grow. It becomes all the clearer, as his thought gains precision, that he is averse to any resorption whatsoever of individuality. He refuses to trust in the obscure powers of unanimous sentiments. In particular, he does not grant that the final word of political wisdom is to yield to spontaneous movements born of the sort of fusion of hearts accomplished in national unity. We know the resistance Proudhon mounted against those who invoked the principle of nationalities as the sure guide of foreign policy: he stubbornly refused to declare the partition of Poland regrettable, or the establishment of Italian unity desirable. To justify this attitude, which scandalised so many people, he wished to define once and for all the very notion of nationalities.[79] He did not have time to bring his project to completion. One sees clearly enough at least, from the discussions sketched here and there in his works, in what direction the tendencies of his mind drew him. He protests against those who would make of nationality a ‘physiological and geographical thing’; he strives to prove that it is at bottom – and in fact becomes ever more so – ‘a juridical and moral thing’. Far from seeing, in the manner of a de Maistre, unnatural and consequently non-viable products in the written constitutions whereby peoples strive to define the conditions of government, he rejoices that since 1815 the era of constitutions has been open.[80] He sees therein a gain for the regime of liberty over the regime of authority. He heralds the hour when all associations will rest upon voluntary pacts.
The ardour and vehemence of his imprecations against Rousseau have often been recalled. Yet let us note that what he reproaches him for is in no way the artificialism for which de Bonald reproached him; it is not for having imagined a society born of a convention. It is for having legislated solely for the properly political forms of association, and also for having envisaged only a single contract, indeterminate in its terms and unrealisable in practice. Far from eliminating the idea of contract from his philosophy, Proudhon retains it and accords it the central place. His ambition is to bring this idea down into reality itself. Thus he is led to substitute for the single contract – which is merely an abdication of the mass into the hands of an arbiter – a multitude of genuinely synallagmatic contracts. It is through positive contracts duly countersigned by the parties that the conditions of cooperation ought to be regulated.[81] And it is doubtless so that these multiple contracts may become the rule that Proudhon is led to prefer federalist organisations to unitary organisations.[82]
Such being Proudhon’s tendencies, one surmises that he could under no circumstances demand, in order for public reason to make itself heard, the prior silence of personal reasons. Quite the contrary. Let each of these freely formulate its idea and clearly state its claims. From the clash of ideas light flashes forth. From the antagonism of claims rules are disengaged that rest upon the relations of things. ‘The impersonality of public reason presupposes as its principle the greatest contradiction, and as its organ the greatest possible multiplicity.’[83] Proudhon rediscovers here one of the ideas dearest to him: the idea of the balance, whereby forces are set in opposition in order to discover the conditions of their equilibrium. Every human self is an insatiable ambition; it aims at the absolute. To correct this ‘exorbitance’, there is nothing like setting man face to face with man, balancing the self by the self. Thenceforth individual absolutisms neutralise one another; there takes place a sort of ‘winnowing of ideas’ (ventilation des idées). Truths emerge that define just relations, and whose system forms, as it were, the framework of public reason. ‘When two or more men are called upon to pronounce adversarially upon a question, whether of the natural order or, all the more so, of the human order, there results from the reciprocal and respective elimination they are led to make of their subjectivity – that is to say, of the absolute that the self affirms and represents – a common way of seeing that no longer resembles at all, either in substance or in form, what their individual way of thinking would have been without this debate. This way of seeing, into which only pure relations enter, without any admixture of a metaphysical or absolutist element, constitutes collective reason or public reason.’ There is no need, then, to conceive of it as a separate metaphysical entity, an anterior and superior logos: it is ‘the resultant of all particular reasons or ideas whose inequalities, stemming from the conception of the absolute and its egoistic affirmation, offset one another through their reciprocal critique and cancel each other out’.[84]
Here again, one might ask whether Proudhon is as far removed from Rousseau as he believes. Rousseau too regards the general will as something other than the sum of particular wills. For the former to be constituted, he requires that in the latter ‘the pluses and minuses destroy each other’.[85] And he regards this reciprocal neutralisation as the guarantee of equality. The fact remains that, far more than Rousseau, Proudhon insists upon the necessity of prior debate. Daily discussion is in his eyes the indispensable ‘usher’ (appariteur) of justice. ‘In order to ensure peace, keep social energies in perpetual struggle’:[86] such is the paradoxical solution in which he delights. For the collective self to posit itself, individual selves must oppose one another. Above all, Proudhon energetically refuses to admit that individuals, having one fine day deliberated to create the State, should abdicate into its hands and pride themselves on being henceforth the humble slaves of their own creature. We know that far rather than towards the apotheosis of the State, it is towards its dissolution that he tends: what he hopes for from the regime of partial, genuinely synallagmatic and commutative contracts, whereby individuals will freely debate the terms of their exchanges, is precisely that it will render possible an order without masters, without functionaries, without government.
The idea that clearly surfaces here is the idea of economic society as opposed to political society; it is the idea of civil society. When Proudhon demands universal discussion preceding the establishment of commutative contracts, the ideal he wishes to serve is no doubt, against the theocratic tradition, that of freedom of thought, but even more so, against all statist intervention, that of the equity of exchanges. Those selves who confront their claims are above all, in his eyes, exchangers; and the truth that collective reason must disengage from their confronted claims is the value of things, measured by the labour incorporated therein. In a word, it is of the life of commerce that Proudhon thinks above all when he elaborates his theory of the relation of individual thoughts to impersonal thought. ‘Translate these words, contract, commutative justice, which belong to juridical language, into the language of business, and you have commerce – that is to say, in its highest signification, the act whereby man and man, declaring themselves essentially producers, abdicate towards one another all claim to government.’[87]
The tradition that Proudhon rejoins here is altogether different from that of Rousseau and the theorists of the political contract: it is that of the economists of the late 18th century – the very tradition that had furnished Saint-Simon with the elements of his central antithesis. Just as he opposes the industrial regime to the feudal regime, Saint-Simon sharply opposes the administration of things to the government of persons. Proudhon’s thought simply welds itself, on this point, to that of Saint-Simon. He indicates this clearly himself: ‘Commutative justice, the reign of contracts – in other words, the economic or industrial reign – such are the different synonyms of the idea which, by its advent, must abolish the old systems of distributive justice, of the reign of laws, or in more concrete terms, of the feudal, governmental, or military regime. The future of humanity lies in this substitution.’[88]
In Hegel too, the influence of concepts elaborated by the economists had made itself felt: in the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of Spirit, between the family and the State takes place bürgerliche Gesellschaft (civil society), in which the ‘system of needs’ is realised. – And it was doubtless from there that it passed into the philosophy of Marx, to furnish the substructure for the entire social world. – Yet for Hegel, the order constituted by the system of needs is in no degree an order capable of sufficing unto itself. Far rather does the philosopher see therein, by the very fact that individuals take their particular interests as their end, a sort of return to atomism. At bottom, the associations born of commerce appear to him as minimally associative as possible: they could not serve as a support for the collective spirit. And that is why bürgerliche Gesellschaft must be surpassed by the State, in which alone the social substance attains consciousness of itself. The Proudhonian tendency, on this point, is the exact opposite of the Hegelian tendency. Civil society is, for the author of The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, the medium in which he wishes to immerse the State in order to dissolve it therein. ‘What we put in the place of public force is collective force.’ In elliptical terms, he thus signifies that the ‘economic organism’, in which this collective force takes shape, must reabsorb governmental power.
Where a free agro-industrial federation has been instituted, what need will there be for legislators, prefects, public prosecutors, customs officers, or gendarmes! When agreement is obtained through the multiplication of equitable contracts, the coercive apparatus will no longer have to function. ‘Contractual solidarity’ (much later this expression was to be rediscovered) renders authoritarian centralisation useless. Proudhon is thus very far from seeing in the world of exchange a dispersive atomism. He is very far from believing that when individuals stand face to face, debating the terms of their exchanges, the collective spirit lacks support. On the contrary, it is this debate itself that delivers its verdict. Let free men contract in complete equality: it is then that justice, the supreme interest of society, manifests itself; it is then, in other words, that collective reason speaks.
We now understand why Proudhon could write that political economy is the depository of the secret thoughts of society. His sociology is neither statist, nor democratic, nor nationalist; it is the sociology of an economist, an ‘accountant’, a ‘mutualist’, at once liberal and egalitarian. He attributes force, life, and even intelligence to society; yet he arranges matters in such a way that this force, this life, and this intelligence presuppose, far from crushing it, the equal liberty of exchanging workers.
Egalitarian and liberal at the same time as federalist, one can foresee what special attitude Proudhon will adopt towards the particular groupings that survive or arise within nations themselves. Certainly he extends broad credit to these groupings. And it is on this point that his politics stands most sharply opposed to that of Rousseau. War on particular societies was the motto of the author of the Social Contract. They constitute, on the contrary, for the author of the Federative Principle, the veritable ‘pivots of democracy’. Yet if they are to render all the services legitimately expected of them, their organisation must be subject to certain conditions: the very conditions that render possible, through debate among individuals, the manifestation of collective reason.
Commentators have recently taken pleasure in discovering in Proudhon the authentic ancestor of that syndicalist philosophy which strives, in rectifying the political deviations of socialism, to sever it from democracy. The vocabulary of Proudhonian sociology has been utilised to define, between individualist anarchy and statist socialism, the positions proper to revolutionary syndicalism.[89] And it is quite true that the commentary Proudhon wrote in haste on his deathbed for the Manifesto of the Sixty[90] sounds in places like a hymn to ‘class consciousness’. The working class has won its ‘political capacity’ precisely because its members have at last become conscious of the special situation created for the collectivity they compose. They fold back upon themselves to disengage the original idea that answers to this situation. Henceforth they have understood that they must think among themselves. Their collective self posits itself by opposing itself. The role that workers’ associations – the ‘working groups’ – can play as organs of this self was no doubt foreseen by Proudhon. A hearth of education as well as of production, the workers’ association is first of all in his eyes a centre of consciousness. It is therefore permissible to maintain that he would have applauded, had he known them, the action of those trade unions (syndicats) which strive to disengage, by bringing it to birth out of their assembly, the thought proper to producers. It is important, however, on this slope as well, to stop in time. One would give a singularly narrow idea of Proudhon’s sociology if one allowed it to be believed, for example, that the working group is, according to him, the sole organ of justice, and above all that it suffices in his eyes, for social progress to be accomplished, to whip up the non-possessors against the possessors and sweep them along by some irresistible collective emotion.
Let us recall first of all that for Proudhon – whatever privilege he accords to work, honoured by him as the revealer of the most precious truths – it is not only in the industrial company that collective reason speaks, but equally in the learned society and the artistic company; in academies, schools, and municipalities; in the National Assembly, the club, and the jury – in a word, in ‘any gathering of men formed for the discussion of ideas and the search for right’.[91]
And furthermore – as this last formula itself warns us – these groupings, whatever they may be, could never hear the conclusions of collective reason had they not first guaranteed free speech to individual reasons. From this point of view, sentimental unanimity is not a thing to be desired, but a thing to be dreaded. Above all, let the collectivity being consulted not go ‘voting as a single man by virtue of a particular sentiment that has become common’. It would then become as antipathetic to Proudhon as to Rousseau himself. Multiplicity, contrariety, even contradiction of opinions – let us remember that these are, for our philosopher, within particular societies as elsewhere, the preconditions for the impersonality of conclusions. This is to say that it would be excessive, in order to draw Proudhon’s thought towards syndicalism, to turn it against individualism. It is to say also that he would in no way have shared the faith of the ‘new school’ in class instinct. That instinct, suitably whipped up, ought, so it is thought, to make the working class march as a single man against the bourgeoisie. Yet at no moment does Proudhon take pleasure in this prospect.[92] He denounces with indignation any attempt to ‘incite working-class democracy to contempt and hatred for those dreadful and elusive conspirators of the middle class’. He refuses to grant the working class a sort of ‘power of extortion’ that would allow it to dispense with winning the majority over to its idea peacefully and legally. Not content to condemn strikes, he goes so far as to oppose – invoking against Émile Ollivier precisely the kind of force proper to collectivities[93] – granting workers a right of combination (droit de coalition) that would be destructive of competition. That is because Proudhon does not dream of setting class interests at loggerheads: he dreams of balancing the rights of individuals. The idea he wishes to see rediscovered by workers rising to reflection within their autonomous groupings is, far rather than an exclusively working-class idea, a human, universal, rational idea: that of justice in exchange – service for service, product for product – which must, while leaving them independent, equalise human beings. In other words, whether constituted by working companies or otherwise, what Proudhon expects of particular societies is not, it seems, that they should fashion so many specific collective souls, but that each on its own side, by offering environments conducive to the confrontation of individual reasons, should foster the bringing to light of that impersonal reason which pronounces justice.
There are, however, among these societies some whose role deserves to be specified separately: those that form in complete spontaneity, prior to the State and prior even to economic association – namely, families. From one end to the other of his career as a thinker, Proudhon – model son, husband, and father – never ceased to feel the worth of the domestic group. If there is one religion he preserves, it is indeed that of the hearth. Saint-Simonians and Fourierists easily arouse his anger and even his disgust: even more than their mysticism or illuminism, their shared immodesty alarms him. On the subject of family duties he is as intransigent as Auguste Comte. Both are anti-feminists, so greatly do they fear opening the slightest breach in family unity.
Proudhon, in truth, could not praise without reservation the influence historically exercised by the domestic group. Is it not responsible for the authoritarian form assumed by the political group? The latter is merely the enlarged shadow of the former. Along with de Bonald, Proudhon notes the fact. Yet his ideal is the inverse of that of the theocrats; far from rejoicing, he laments this sort of survival. And precisely what he reproaches the governmental socialism of a Louis Blanc for, for example, is that his doctrine is merely a clumsy application of domestic economy to society.[94] Before Spencer, Proudhon mocks the anti-individualists of this school as incapable of conceiving anything other than a ‘pot-au-feu economy’. The society whose progress it is vital to further is economic society, born of the workshop, which individualises human beings.[95] As for political society, born of the family, which aims to melt them into one another, one must desire and hasten its dissolution. Domestic in its origins, the order instituted by the State is authoritarian in its means and communist in its tendencies; whereas the true order, the definitive order, can only be at once egalitarian and liberal. Innumerable pillars sustain it, erected by wills in accord: they are just contracts.
Yet by a detour, to this order – anti-familial in its tendencies – the family finds itself rendering the most signal services. That collective reason should at last discover the conditions of equilibrium, which are at the same time the rules of justice, is a great deal; yet it is not everything. For the idea, once conscious, to become active, the concurrence of sentiment appears necessary. As his reflections as a moralist deepen, Proudhon realises this ever more clearly: so severe towards ‘idealism’, in which he sees the great corruptor of moral life, he comes to recognise that justice itself stands in need of the reinforcement brought by the methodical cultivation of sentiments.
Certainly idealism could never discover the rational law of equal exchange; yet once that law is discovered, idealism can help it triumph over the resistances it encounters. It presupposes in all individuals the will to respect and to enforce respect for human dignity, in themselves as in others. Yet does not experience prove that when appeal is made to this sentiment of dignity, the individual thinks of himself first, of himself above all? To combat the egoistic instinct, which so easily assumes the mask of right, is it not useful that justice should constitute a proper organ for itself? Through its action, hearts would be inclined towards that social goodwill without which equilibrium itself could never be established. Now, this organ is precisely the couple – the androgyne – in which, at the same time as selves complete one another, their absolutisms correct one another. ‘For the production of justice there is needed a premotion, a grace, as the theologians say: there is needed love.’ From this point of view we discover that woman in marriage – the wife, the mother – is the most precious auxiliary of right itself. ‘Man is bound to society through woman, neither more nor less than the child is bound to the mother by the umbilical cord.’[96] The family spirit prepares the way for the civic spirit. This small group, which the citizen must sustain, in turn sustains him, restrains him, exalts his pride, and curbs his arrogance. Whoever says bachelor soon says unsociable, ‘intractable’, ‘unapproachable’. Let family bonds, at once so strong and so gentle, come to break: it is then that one would see erupt, ‘with indomitable violence, the contradiction between the individual and society’.[97] Society subsists through the subordination of all human forces and faculties, individual and collective, to justice. The family naturally prepares this subordination. Domestic discipline is the finest school one could dream of for contractual solidarity. The ideal that collective reason disengages from the confrontation of individual reasons could never descend into reality had the sentiments of individuals not previously received, within those groupings specially favourable to moral education that are families, a social orientation. Ultimately, here again, the products of reflection presuppose, in order to live, those of spontaneity.
These brief summaries allow us to glimpse the complexity of what may be called the sociology of Proudhon. One feels highly diverse influences intersecting therein. Proudhon the sociologist calls to mind now Adam Smith, now de Bonald, sometimes Rousseau, more often Saint-Simon. Yet in the series of systems that open the way to sociological research, his occupies a place quite apart, determined no doubt by the very nature of the tendencies he seeks above all to satisfy.
Proudhon remains faithful to that passion for equality which the earliest experiences of life deposited in the depths of his heart: yet he is a liberal egalitarian. He reacts against so many utopias he saw constructed, all of which tended more or less to mechanise human beings. He fears even more, one might say, the abuses of authority than the excess of inequality. To save civilisation, he relies upon the sole virtue of equitable contracts. Individuals will decide at last to fix the value of the products they exchange by measuring it according to the quantity of labour they have incorporated therein.
This solution has but one flaw: it presupposes in the contracting parties the firm resolve to be just, the determination not to abuse a privileged position, the will to equality. The entire edifice built by the powerful accountant’s imagination that lived in Proudhon is ruined in advance if the individual prefers himself to others and does not effectively recognise their equal dignity. More than once Proudhon felt this. And it is doubtless because he felt it that he does not remain purely and simply an individualist. He seeks an authority upon which to found the precept he needs. He strives to prove that his will to equality is commanded by the very nature of the collective being, by its progress, by the consciousness it acquires of the conditions of its equilibrium. The supposed father of anarchism calls to the rescue, in order to discipline individual reasons, the prestige of collective reason.
Yet in thus attributing life and reason to the collectivity, he takes great care not to render it oppressive and, as it were, absorptive of individuals. He finds a way to justify, by the very manner in which he reifies society, his distrust of the State. It is economic society that he personifies – that is to say, precisely the society that presupposes exchange, commerce, contract, and the whole free play of individual activities. Likewise, it is not from the effacement of personal reasons, but from their adversarial affirmation, that he causes the system of impersonal reason to issue. It is only when it is a question of placing active sentiments at the service of this reason that Proudhon, forewarned no doubt by his own experience, glimpses the worth of the fusion of souls. He then praises the miracle of the family. Yet let us note that it is in no way towards the establishment of a public order modelled on the family that he wishes to set to work the citizens formed by it. He intends to leave them face to face, confronting their claims, measuring their rights, united by the sole rational bond of equal exchange. In this sense, if one wishes to call individualist those doctrines which claim to respect and enforce respect for the equal liberty of all individuals, one is right to continue to say that Proudhon’s dominant tendency remains individualist. His originality consists in setting to work, to the glory of individualist ideas thus understood, that very sociological spirit which for a long time appeared capable only of preparing their discredit.
C. Bouglé.
[1] Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? (1841 edn), p. 281.
[2] Les Majorats littéraires, p. 46, note.
[3] Système des contradictions économiques, II, p. 237. (Unless otherwise indicated, citations refer to the Œuvres complètes edition.)
[4] Questions d’aujourd’hui et de demain, 3rd series, p. 162.
[5] Articles from La Voix du peuple, in Mélanges, III, p. 22.
[6] Théorie de la propriété, pp. 215–216.
[7] Système des contradictions économiques, Ch. II, § 3.
[8] Correspondance, I, p. 238; Lettre à M. Blanqui (1841 edn), p. 118.
[9] Qu’est-ce que la propriété ?, p. 121. Cf. Contradictions économiques, I, p. 243.
[10] De la Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, p. 269.
[11] Qu’est-ce que la propriété ?, p. 124. Proudhon goes so far as to say in the conclusion (p. 311): ‘All human labour resulting necessarily from a collective force, all property becomes, for the same reason, collective or undivided; in more precise terms, labour destroys property.’
[12] Contradictions économiques, I, p. 242.
[13] Création de l’ordre, p. 245. Cf. Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle, p. 81.
[14] I have analysed Karl Marx’s theory at greater length in this journal (November 1908 issue: ‘Marxisme et sociologie’).
[15] Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, II, pp. 127 et seq.
[16] See my article cited above, p. 724.
[17] One finds more than one trace of it in workers’ journals. See No. 1 of L’Association, international bulletin of cooperative societies (cited by Proudhon, De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières, p. 52), and La Rive gauche, cited by Albert Thomas in Histoire socialiste, Vol. X, p. 289.
[18] Création de l’ordre, p. 236.
[19] De la Justice, 7th Study, p. 154, in a note replying to Renouvier.
[20] Création de l’ordre, p. 269.
[21] Ibid., p. 265.
[22] Idée générale de la révolution, pp. 77 et seq.
[23] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 98.
[24] De la Justice, 4th Study, p. 112.
[25] See the lecture by Charles Gide, ‘La Morale de Bastiat’, in Études sur la philosophie morale au XIXe siècle.
[26] Qu’est-ce que la propriété ?, p. 157.
[27] Avertissement aux propriétaires, p. 46.
[28] Création de l’ordre, p. 286.
[29] Lettre à M. Blanqui, p. 171.
[30] Ibid., p. 120.
[31] Les Majorats littéraires, pp. 94–95.
[32] Contradictions économiques, I, p. 92.
[33] Mélanges, III, p. 12.
[34] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 75.
[35] La Pornocratie, p. 117.
[36] Philosophie du progrès, p. 36.
[37] Philosophie du progrès, p. 36; cf. De la Justice, 12th Study, p. 102.
[38] De la Justice, 4th Study, p. 112.
[39] Ibid., 7th Study, pp. 99, 102; 12th Study, p. 102.
[40] Contradictions économiques, I, pp. 82, 92.
[41] Contradictions économiques, I, p. 75.
[42] Ibid., p. 84.
[43] Ibid., pp. 82, 100. In Vol. II, p. 330, Proudhon writes: ‘The division of labour acts upon the collective being like harmful industries upon those who engage in them: in procuring abundance for it, it poisons it, and after having invited it to life, plunges it back into death.’ The example clearly shows Proudhon’s effort to place himself at the standpoint of the interests of the collective being. When it is a question of those of the individual being, Proudhon brings his critique of the division of labour to bear upon other points.
[44] De la Justice, 4th Study, pp. 112, 117.
[45] Ibid., pp. 119, 122.
[46] Avertissement aux propriétaires, p. 62.
[47] Théorie de la propriété, pp. 213, 229.
[48] De la Justice, 7th Study, p. 127.
[49] Du Principe fédératif, p. 267.
[50] Ibid., p. 15.
[51] Création de l’ordre, p. 193.
[52] De la Justice, 12th Study, p. 105.
[53] Ibid., 8th Study, p. 140.
[54] Création de l’ordre, pp. 242 et seq.
[55] E. Droz, P.-J. Proudhon, p. 88.
[56] Avertissement aux propriétaires, pp. 37, 71.
[57] De la Justice, 8th Study, p. 118.
[58] Théorie de la propriété, pp. 207, 99, 77.
[59] Contradictions économiques, I, p. 5.
[60] Ibid., p. 21.
[61] Ibid., p. 327.
[62] From his earliest memoirs, Proudhon formulates this dogmatism clearly. Cf. Lettre à M. Blanqui, p. 146: ‘Whereas the short-sighted spectator begins to despair of humanity, and casts himself, bewildered and blaspheming what he does not understand, into scepticism and fatalism, the true observer, certain of the spirit that governs the world, seeks to comprehend and divine Providence.’
[63] Contradictions économiques, II, p. 398: ‘All human science consists in rediscovering within this confusion the abstract system of eternal thought.’ Cf. I, p. 370: ‘Progressive reason resulting from the projection of eternal ideas upon the mobile and inclined plane of time...’
[64] Qu’est-ce que la propriété ?, p. 302; Idée générale de la révolution, p. 103; Mélanges, III, p. 75.
[65] Contradictions économiques, I, pp. 360 et seq.
[66] Contradictions économiques, I, pp. 2, 5.
[67] De la Justice, 4th Study, p. 133.
[68] Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, p. 3.
[69] Contradictions économiques, I, p. 369.
[70] Mélanges, III, p. 11.
[71] Ibid. Cf. Louis Blanc, Questions d’aujourd’hui et de demain, III, p. 176.
[72] Les Idées révolutionnaires, p. 182.
[73] Solution du problème social, p. 17.
[74] Ibid., pp. 60 et seq.
[75] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 153.
[76] Solution du problème social, p. 7.
[77] Contradictions économiques, II, p. 183.
[78] De la Célébration du dimanche, p. 128.
[79] Du Principe fédératif, p. 106.
[80] Ibid., p. 267.
[81] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 124.
[82] Du Principe fédératif, p. 47.
[83] De la Justice, 7th Study, p. 123.
[84] De la Justice, 7th Study, p. 130.
[85] Du Contrat social (Dreyfus-Brisac edn), p. 53.
[86] De la Justice, 7th Study, pp. 129 et seq.
[87] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 115.
[88] Idée générale de la révolution, p. 115.
[89] See É. Berth, Les Nouveaux Aspects du socialisme (final part).
[90] Published posthumously as De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières.
[91] De la Justice, 7th Study, p. 133.
[92] Capacité politique, p. 338.
[93] Ibid., p. 336.
[94] Mélanges, III, pp. 40, 44.
[95] Création de l’ordre, p. 134.
[96] De la Justice, p. 92.
[97] La Pornocratie, p. 64.
{1} Translator’s Note: In Greek mythology, Briareus is one of the Hecatoncheires, giants with a hundred hands and fifty heads – used here as a metaphor for the collective power of associated labour.
{2} Translator’s Note: Series (la série) is a foundational concept in the philosophy of Charles Fourier, referring to the classification and grouping of things or persons by order, genus, species, and variety; Proudhon adapted this into a dialectical ordering of logical and social relations.
{3} Translator’s Note: The French foyer means both ‘hearth’ (centre of heat and domestic life) and ‘focus/seat’; translated here as ‘hearth’ to preserve the contrast with ‘smoke’ (fumée).