What Is Property?
Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement
Proudhon’s first memoir on property, which answers its title question “it is robbery” and in which Proudhon first calls himself an anarchist. He takes apart each claimed foundation of property (occupation, civil law, labour, consent, prescription), argues that labour leads instead to equality, and offers a would-be mathematical proof that property, as the right to an income without work, is impossible. A last chapter on justice and sociability sets “liberty”, a synthesis of communism and property, against both. Marx praised it in The Holy Family and attacked its author in The Poverty of Philosophy.
- Edition
- The First Memoir (1840), with its preface, in Benjamin R. Tucker’s translation (Princeton, Mass.: B. R. Tucker, 1876), from the Project Gutenberg text, compared word by word with two scans of the 1876 edition (HathiTrust and Google copies); italics, accents and the Greek are restored from the scans. Tucker’s volume also includes J. A. Langlois’s biographical sketch and the Second Memoir (the letter to Blanqui, 1841), which are not included here.
- Source
- Project Gutenberg
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Contents
- Preface 25 min 16
Proudhon’s dedicatory letter of June 1840 to the Academy of Besançon, which paid him the Suard pension, reports his studies and turns the Academy’s prize question on equal inheritance into the question “What is property?”. He then prints the Academy’s resolution disavowing the book, and the 1841 letter of the economist Adolphe Blanqui, who had defended him against prosecution while rejecting the abolition of property. Proudhon answers that by property he means only the sum of its abuses, and he sets out what a new system of equality must achieve.
- I Method Pursued in This Work. The Idea of a Revolution 1 h 6 min 19
Proudhon opens with his famous answer, that property is robbery, and asks the reader to follow his method. Errors fixed by habit, like the old belief in a flat earth, also distort our ideas of justice. He traces the progress of justice through the Christian revolution and 1789, which he calls progress rather than revolution: it moved sovereignty from king to nation, generalised property, and kept inequality. He asks whether authority, inequality and property are just, and outlines his plan to show that every argument for property leads to equality.
- II Property Considered as a Natural Right. Occupation and Civil Law as Efficient Bases of Property. Definitions 1 h 32 min 22
Proudhon examines the legal definitions of property, from the Roman “use and abuse” to article 544 of the Civil Code, and distinguishes property, a right, from possession, a fact. He argues that property is unlike the natural rights of liberty, equality and security, citing taxation and the conversion of state bonds. He then tests the theories of occupation (Cicero, Grotius, Reid, Destutt de Tracy, Cousin) and of civil law (Pothier, Toullier), and concludes that occupation implies equal shares varying with population, so that property cannot exist.
- III Labor as the Efficient Cause of the Domain of Property 2 h 24 min 42
Proudhon turns from occupancy to the theory that labour creates property. He first denies that land can be appropriated at all, or legitimated by universal consent or prescription, then argues from Say’s and Charles Comte’s own premises that labour gives no title to the means of production. If it did, every worker would become a part-owner, since capitalists pay individual wages but keep the unpaid “collective force” of combined labour. Because society pays each only in others’ products and every talent is a social product, all wages should be equal. Labour, justly considered, destroys property.
- IV That Property Is Impossible 2 h 34 min 30
Proudhon sets out to prove by arithmetic that property is impossible. His axiom defines property as the “right of increase” (droit d’aubaine): the owner’s claim to rent, interest or profit from things others work. Ten propositions follow. Property demands something for nothing; makes production cost more than it is worth; claims income in proportion to capital, not labour; ruins and starves the tenant; leaves workers unable to buy back their product, causing crises; breeds tyranny; destroys its own receipts; accumulates without limit; prevails only by force; and negates equality. Appendices attack the Fourierists, unequal wages and Malthusian remedies for poverty.
- V Psychological Exposition of the Idea of Justice and Injustice, and a Determination of the Principle of Government and of Right 2 h 16 min 34
Proudhon grounds justice in a social instinct shared with animals. Sympathy is the first degree of sociability, justice (the recognition of equality) the second, and équité (esteem without material privilege) the third. Reason, which lets humans reflect on instinct, also misleads them into selfishness and property. History runs from primitive communism to property, and both stand condemned: communism as “oppression and slavery”, property as robbery and despotism. Declaring himself an anarchist, Proudhon argues that government by will must yield to demonstrated truth. The synthesis he calls liberty: equal possession of the means of production, exchange of equivalents and equal wages.