Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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K. Steven Vincent
6 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and mutualist anarchism
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the most famous nineteenth-century opponent
of the state. He was the first to call himself an anarchist (in his 1840 book
What is Property?) and the most successful in popularising a position critical
of authoritarian structures like the church and the state.
Proudhon was proud of his humble origins in the French Jura, never
hesitating to remind acquaintances that he was, as he wrote in 1855,‘raised
in the customs, the mores and the thought of the proletariat’ (Haubtmann
1969,p.28). The connection continued throughout his life. When he was
eighteen years old, family finances forced him to discontinue his formal
education and, yielding to the promptings of his father, he became an
apprentice printer. He worked at this trade off and on between 1827 and
1843, and with a few friends he briefly attempted to operate a printing
house in Besanc¸on (1836–43), an unhappy experience that left him heavily
in debt. He also spent the years between 1843 and 1847 working for a
shipping firm located in Lyon, which exposed him to a wide range of
business practices.
18
Though disrupted because of financial need, Proudhon’s education was
extensive given his working-class background. During his adolescent years
(1820–7), he attended the Coll
`
ege Royal de Besanc¸on on a scholar ship.
He also received, as a young man, an award administered by the Academy
of Besanc¸on which allowed him to spend several years (1838–41)inParis,
reading, writing and attending the classes of prominent intellectuals like
Michelet and the economist J
´
er
ˆ
ome-Adolphe Blanqui. From this time for-
ward, he devoted himself to writing, except when forced by financial need
to take other jobs. From his late twenties he published a very large quantity
of books and articles: as one observer noted, when Proudhon found himself
with pen in hand, he seemed to have a fit of eloquence.
As a boy and young man, Proudhon was strongly religious, recalling
in De la Justice (published in 1858) that he had ‘been thinking of God
since [he] began to exist’ (Proudhon 1930, i,p.283). It is even possible to
imagine Proudhon having remained relig ious, even Catholic, if the French
Church had embraced a prophetic tradition that was sympathetic to change
and to the plight of the poor. During the nineteenth century, however,
the social policy of the French Church was conservative – counselling the
18 For biographical details, see Doll
´
eans 1948;Hal
´
evy 1913; Haubtmann 1982; Hoffman 1972;Sainte-
Beuve 1947; Vincent 1984; Woodcock 1956.
454
Visions of stateless society
poor to accept their station in life because it was divinely ordained, and
closely co-ordinating Church policy to the interests of the monarchy and
the upper classes. This was especially true during the Bourbon Restoration
(Proudhon’s formative years), when there was a widely recognised union
of Throne and Altar, and when counter-revolutionary theory was popu-
larised by so-called ‘Theocrat’ writers like Bonald, Maistre, Chateaubriand
and Lamennais (in his early writings).
19
Proudhon reacted strongly to the
reactionary social policy of the Church and to the counter-revolutionary
theories of the Theocrats, and he moved step-by-step to embrace a secular
position.
Proudhon initially hoped that the Church would reform itself and adopt
a humane progressive stance in favour of social equality (Proudhon 1926a).
But by 1840 he was calling for ‘the radical extirpation of Roman Christian-
ity’andinsistingthat‘torestorereligion...itisnecessarytocondemnthe
Church’ (Haubtmann 1969,p.120; Proudhon 1926b, p. 122). This insis-
tence on articulating a Christian position that would support social justice –
one which Proudhon assumed the Catholic Church and other Christian
churches had disregarded – placed Proudhon with a significant number of
French socialists of this period who saw Christ as an early social prophet and
who wished to save ‘true’ Christianity from the reactionary position of the
French Church. But unlike most of his contemporaries, Proudhon quickly
moved beyond Christian socialism to a more radically secular position. By
1843, he had given up entirely on religion, and by 1846, he was insisting that
‘each step in our progress represents one more victory in which we anni-
hilate the Deity’ (Proudhon 1923c, i,p.349). All Proudhon’s subsequent
works attacked religion and ‘transcendent morality’, though he continued
to recommend a secularised ‘immanent’ version of Christian morality.
As Proudhon’s hopes for religion declined, two different themes became
more pronounced: science and justice. Both were to hold at bay the spiritual
and moral devastation which the renunciation of religion was assumed to
entail. The first theme, science, was common in the nineteenth century,
as we have seen. What is striking in Proudhon’s case is how important his
scientific hopes became in the years surrounding his rejection of religion.
In 1839, he wrote of legislation and politics as being ‘objects of science’
(Proudhon 1926a, p. 45); in 1843 he made the entry of humanity into the
epoch of science the major theme of his book De la Cr
´
eation de l’Ordre
dans l’Humanit
´
e. ‘The new science’, he wrote, ‘must replace religion in
19 The title ‘Theocrats’ comes from Dominique Bagge (Bagge 1952).
455
K. Steven Vincent
everything’ (Proudhon 1927,p.63n). Though he never repudiated this
enthusiasm for science, in later years it received less attention, as Proudhon
focused more on voluntary human action.
The transition to a secular position was smoothed as well by the pres-
ence of a tradition of republican ideas that insisted on the interaction of
political institutions and social morality. This, too, assisted Proudhon in
salvaging humanity’s spiritual and moral side in this context of religious
doubt. The institutional side of republicanism was distinctive in that the
people were considered not only the ultimate repository of sovereignty,
but also active participants in politics. This was easily transformed, in the
thought of Proudhon, into an attachment to local institutions at the expense
of any other politics, national or otherwise. But the success of a republic was
dependent on more than just an institutional organisation: it required that
citizens exercise ‘virtue’, a socio-political morality which entailed respect
for law, love of country and a willingness to sacrifice immediate interests
for the good of the larger community.
This moral stance strongly influenced Proudhon. Like most of his con-
temporaries, he had absorbed such ideas from the writings of Enlightenment
luminaries like Montesquieu and Rousseau, and he was familiar with the
variety of ways these ideas echoed through the Revolution and into the
nineteenth century. This tradition provided Proudhon with a secular view
of justice that required neither the Church nor any other religious sanction.
He put forth a conception of ‘immanent justice’ which was based on respect
for the integrity, rights and equality of one’s neighbours.
20
Justice was a central component of Proudhon’s social view, as he made
clear in the famous pages of What is Property? where he embraced the label
‘anarchist’. This illustrated that, like Godwin, Proudhon’s view of a stateless
society did not countenance a perpetual war between egoistical individuals
fighting for their respective personal gains. Justice needed to be struggling
against selfish egoism for egalitarian society to operate successfully. It would
provide the moral and spir itual unity which the Church and Christianity
had traditionally represented, but which, in Proudhon’s opinion, it was no
longer able to provide. Proudhon embraced the label ‘anarchist’, but he
insisted that society must be infused with a social morality which would
lead people to recognise the personal dignity of their neighbours and which
20 This moral dimension of Proudhon’s thought is present in all of his works; it is especially pronounced
in De La Justice dans la R
´
evolution et dans l’
´
Eglise (Proudhon 1930).
456
Visions of stateless society
would promote the general interests of society over the egoistical interests
of isolated individuals.
This did not entail a belief in the innate goodness of mankind. Proudhon
always believed that human nature was inherently depraved. ‘The cause
of evil’, he wrote in 1846, ‘must be traced...to a primitive perversion,
to a sort of congenital malice in the will of man’ (Proudhon 1923c, i,
p. 349). According to Proudhon, it is necessary to overcome this inherent
tendency through struggle and education; moral progress would be achieved
by ‘taming our instincts’ (Proudhon 1923c, i,pp.371–2).
Closely tied to the need to develop a socially informed morality, according
to Proudhon, was the need to reorganise society. The context that informed
Proudhon’s vision of reorganisation was the ‘associative’ socialism of workers
and of French writers like Charles Fourier, Philippe Buchez and Louis Blanc
(Ansart 1970; Vincent 1984,pp.127–65).
Proudhon’s distinctive contribution to this tradition was to deny any
role for the state and to insist on a federal structure.
21
Like other anarchists,
Proudhon insisted that law and justice did not emerge from a social contract
and was not associated with state structures. Proudhon insisted that the basis
of law was not a political state or a political constitution, but rather the
agreements that developed over time between individuals acting in the
spirit of voluntarism, federalism and reciprocity (Reichert 1984,pp.122–
40). Central for Proudhon was his belief that workers should direct and
control the economy and that local communities should direct and control
politics. Both the economic and political side of Proudhon’s theory rested
on a model of small groups mediating between the isolated individual and
the authoritarian and centralised state.
During the 1840s, Proudhon focused on economic issues and called for
the establishment of ‘progressive associations’ within which workers would
make the decisions relevant to the conduct and operation of their trades.
He won notoriety in 1840 for his short book entitled What is Property?,to
which his famous response was: ‘It is theft.’ In fact, Proudhon’s position
was not as radical as this familiar epigram would lead one to believe. The
‘property’ that Proudhon so vociferously attacked was that which provided
21 Until the mid-1840s, Proudhon assumed that the government had an important role to play (Proud-
hon 1927,pp.387–8, 415, 422). By 1846, however, when he published Syst
`
eme des Contradictions
´
Economiques, he had changed his mind, arguing that governments needed to be eliminated. He
acknowledged the change in a note to the second edition of this work (Proudhon 1923c, pp. 388n).
The federal organisation of communities was developed extensively in Proudhon’s writings of the
1860s (Proudhon 1929).
457
K. Steven Vincent
an income without requiring any work: the type of owner ship that was
characteristic of the unproductive idle class which lived on interest and
rents. Proudhon carefully distinguished this ‘property’ from ‘possession’, by
which he meant the dwelling, land and tools necessary for day-to-day exis-
tence. For this latter type of ownership, Proudhon had the highest respect;
‘possession’ remained, according to him, one of the necessary elements of a
just society (Proudhon 1926a, pp. 60, 94–5, 1926b). The elimination of
‘property’ would have the beneficial consequence of removing from power
the oisifs – the idlers – who traditionally had exercised economic and
political control.
The attack on property was accompanied by proposals for the creation
of ‘progressive associations’ which were to serve as the foci of educational
and economic reform.
22
On the educational front, Proudhon advocated a
programme of apprenticeship within the workshops which would combine
work and education. Drawing on the ideas of Charles Fourier, Proudhon
insisted that apprenticeship should entail learning both manual and men-
tal skills, and he hoped that such education would promote fraternal ties
among workers.
23
On the economic front, associations would not only
push aside the idle ‘property owners’ who inappropriately skimmed off
profits, it would also eliminate the ‘arbitrary’ system of supply and demand
by introducing exchange based on a fair evaluation of goods – that is,
‘according to the time and expense’ incurred in their production. In addi-
tion, Proudhon believed that these associations would stimulate workers
to more productive effort because they would be working for themselves.
Finally – here Proudhon differed most substantially from contemporaries
like Buchez and Blanc – ‘progressive association’ would avoid what Proud-
hon termed ‘community’, the government ownership of property and the
central control of economic and social decision-making. Such an appeal to
the state, Proudhon believed, would needlessly sacrifice liberty. It would,
asheputitin1846, ‘extinguish all individual initiative, [and] proscribe free
labour’ (Proudhon 1923c, i,pp.246, 281–4).
22 In Qu’est-ce que la Propri
´
et
´
e? Proudhon spoke of ‘association’ as the synthesis of the preceding
dialectical progression leading from the thesis of ‘community’ through the antithesis of ‘property’.
‘The union of the two remainders will give us the true mode of human association’ (Proudhon
1926b, pp. 324–5;alsoseepp.221, 314n, 204). It is in his private notebooks that the most extensive
discussions are to be found (Proudhon 1960 i,pp.38, 74–96, 114–15, 126–9, 142–3, 145–9, 152–7,
etc.).
23 Proudhon discussed such educational reforms in Avertissement aux Propri
´
etaires (Proudhon 1926b) and
in De la Cr
´
eation de l’Ordre dans l’Humanit
´
e (Proudhon 1927,pp.298, 329, 338).
458
Visions of stateless society
In 1846, Proudhon referred to this same formula for socio-economic
justice as ‘mutualism’ (Proudhon 1923c, ii,pp.410–11).
24
And since this
time, ‘mutualist anarchism’ has been a short-hand label for the anti-statist
position that calls for education and socio-economic reform within the
context of workers’ associations and that recommends the avoidance of
revolution and other forms of violent confrontation.
25
Proudhon’s commitment to ‘mutualist anarchism’ was tested and
extended during the French Second Republic, initiated with the Paris Rev-
olution of February 1848. Proudhon participated in the February uprising
and composed what he termed the ‘first republican proclamation’ of the
new Republic (Proudhon 1875, ii,pp.278–84, 291–4). But he quickly
became unhappy with the new government because it was pursuing polit-
ical reform at the expense of socio-economic reform, which Proudhon
considered basic. He published his own prescription for reform, Solution to
the Social Problem, in which he articulated a plan to establish a bank which
would provide credit at a very low rate of interest and issue ‘exchange notes’
that would circulate in lieu of money based on gold (Proudhon 1868). In
early 1849, he attempted to put his plan in motion by establishing a ‘Bank
of the People’ to reform credit and exchange. It quickly failed. Such fiscal
reform, he hoped, would stimulate change in the direction he had been
advocating in his published writings of the 1840s: namely, to facilitate the
transfer of control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to
workers. The mast-head slogan of his paper in 1848, Le Repr
´
esentant du
Peuple, stated his goal clearly: ‘What is the producer in actual society? –
Nothing. What should he be? – Everything.’
26
Proudhon was shocked by the violence of the June Days, and though
he blamed the uprising on the forces of reaction, he never really approved
of the revolt. This was in accord with his lifelong stance against violence
and insurrection. He was, however, the master of verbal violence, especially
in the form of cynical and combative assaults on other individuals.
27
This
24 In 1848, Proudhon referred to essentially the same formula as ‘positive anarchy’ (Proudhon 1868,p.
87). But it was as ‘mutualism’ that the ideal was commonly referred to during the late nineteenth
century.
25 This was a prominent position within the International Working Men’s Association during the late
1860s, and among French workers during the early 1870s. See Guillaume 1985, infra.
26 Proudhon was connected with four different newspapers during the Second Republic: Le Repr
´
esentant
du Peuple (February 1848–August 1848); Le Peuple (September 1848–June 1849); La Voix du Peuple
(September 1849–May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June 1850–October 1850).
27 Maurice Agulhon has referred to Proudhon as ‘a sharpshooter among the democrats’ (Agulhon 1983,
p. 86).
459
K. Steven Vincent
led to his isolation from others on the left and, in March 1849,tohis
prosecution by the conservative authorities for his aggressive newspaper
attacks on the new President of the Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
He was sentenced to a stiff fine and three years in prison. While in prison
he wrote and published four books.
28
Proudhon’s writings of the 1850sand
1860s built on the vision of ‘progressive association’ that was central to his
anarchism, but now expanded to include regional organisations – it was, in
effect, a geographical extension of the mutualistic ideal (Vincent 1984,pp.
209–28).
Proudhon’s mutualist anarchism influenced many subsequent theorists –
collectivist anarchists like Michael Bakunin and communist anarchists like
Peter Kropotkin spoke highly of Proudhon’s writings. More faithful to the
mutualist strain in Proudhon’s thought was the American anarchist William
B. Greene (1819–78), who was concerned with sociability, mutuality and
the provision of free credit.
7 Michael Bakunin and collectivist anarchism
To move from the world of Proudhon to that of Michael Bakunin is to
experience a dramatic shift. Unlike Proudhon, Bakunin came from a back-
ground of wealth and comfort – his father was a gentry landowner with
a large estate in Tver province north-west of Moscow – which provided
the leisure for a broad education that encompassed European literature,
painting, music and poetry. After several years in the Artillery Cadet School
(1829–34) and two years in the army (1833–5), Bakunin settled in Moscow
to study philosophy. Like other members of the Russian intelligentsia of
his generation, he became enthralled during the 1830s with romanticism
and German idealism, especially with Fichte and Hegel, and then after he
left Russia for the West in 1840, with Left Hegelianism and the anarchism
of writers like Proudhon. Unlike other Russian thinkers of his generation,
however, Bakunin seems to have been especially impulsive and rebellious,
temperamentally unable to countenance any compromise between his ide-
als and an imperfect world. Some analysts have speculated that this was the
product of his psychological make-up – Bakunin was apparently impotent,
and he carried an enduring hatred for his mother whom he claimed was
28 Confession d’un R
´
evolutionnaire (November 1849); Id
´
ee G
´
en
´
erale de la R
´
evolution au XIX Si
`
ecle (July
1851); La R
´
evolution Sociale Demontr
´
ee par le Coup d’
´
Etat du 2 d
´
ecembre 1851 (July 1852); Philosophie du
Progr
`
es (September 1853).
460
Visions of stateless society
domineering.
29
Others have stressed that the emotional support provided
by the tight-knit circle he formed with his sisters at the family estate of Pria-
mukhino influenced his later vision of intimate conspiratorial societies in
revolt against authority (Lehning 1974,pp.57–8). Yet others have empha-
sised how his peculiar absorption of the thought of Fichte and Hegel led him
to assume a radical persona in which he viewed himself as the charismatic
embodiment of Reason in History (Malia 1961).
Whatever the cause, Bakunin developed an early intense dislike for state
authority and institutions, especially those of his native Russia. There was in
Nicholas I’s Russia no opportunity for political activity or political expres-
sion, even civil liberties were lacking, and as a consequence Bakunin’s
rebellion (again like many of his contemporaries’) was channelled into an
introspective and intellectualised revolt against reality that found sustenance
in German idealist philosophy. Bakunin’s positive ideals were a function of
his revulsion in the face of the social evils and moral scandals of the world
he lived in. As he put it in letters to his sisters in 1836, ‘The truth, as it is,
and not as adapted to particular circumstances – that is my motto.’ ‘Absolute
freedom and absolute love, that is our aim; the liberation of mankind and
the whole world – that is our destiny.’
30
Bakunin’s ideals were the antithesis of attempting to accommodate reality.
Scornful of the past, his eyes were always on the ideals that the future progress
of humanity could realise. As he put it in the early 1870s:
Behind us is our animality and before us our humanity; human light, the only thing
that can warm and enlighten us, the only thing that can emancipate us, give us dignity,
freedom and happiness, and realise fraternity among us, is never at the beginning, but,
relatively to the epoch in which we live, always at the end of history. Let us, then, never
look back, let us look ever forward. (Bakunin 1970,p.21)
Bakunin’s ideals were formed of the negations of the evils he desired to
eradicate. Confronted with the patriarchal structure of Russian society
and politics, Bakunin dreamed of a world of freedom and spiritual har-
mony. Finding himself in a world where peasants and workers had no
power, he idealised labour and imagined workers as central agents for social
29 E. H. Carr writes of his impulsive and destructive passions; Aileen Kelly analyses the relationships
between Bakunin’s psychological make-up and what she calls his ‘politics of utopianism’; Arthur
P. Mendel goes the furthest in this direction, reducing Bakunin’s millennial aims to Oedipal and
narcissistic complexes. See Carr 1961; Kelly 1982;Mendel1981.
30 Bakunin to Varvara Bakunin (March 1836); Bakunin to Tatyana and Varvara Bakunin (10 August
1836); cited in Kelly 1982,p.41.
461
K. Steven Vincent
regeneration. Faced with a world which seemed to resist all change, he
recommended explosive outbursts of destructive popular violence.
After leaving Russia in 1840, he first settled in Berlin to study German
philosophy and publish his first writings, then resided in Zurich, Paris
and Brussels. His contact with radicals like Karl Marx and Proudhon led
the Russian government to demand Bakunin’s return to Russia; when he
refused, he was sentenced in absentia in 1844 to hard labour in Siberia,
which Bakunin avoided by remaining in exile. During the 1840s, Bakunin
agitated for Polish national independence and pan-Slavism, and when the
revolutions broke out at the end of the decade, he took an active part in
the struggles in Prague in 1848 and in Dresden in 1849.
31
Handed over
by the Saxons to the Austrians, and then by the Austrians to the Russian
authorities, he spent over a decade imprisoned and in Siberian exile. In
1861, he escaped from Siberia to Japan, then travelled via the United States
to Western Europe.
During the remaining years of his life (he died in 1876), Bakunin was
particularly active in Italy and Switzerland, and it was during these years that
his views finally crystallised into full-fledged anarchism.
32
He devoted much
of his attention during this period to organising secret societies and plot-
ting revolutionary conspiracies, including the dubious association Bakunin
formed with the Russian terrorist Sergei Nechaev. It was during these same
years that he carried on his famous struggle with Marx within the First
International and wrote his major anarchist works.
What is striking about these works is their categorical and sweeping
nature. Bakunin’s anarchism is more general and abstract than that of, say,
Hodgskin or Proudhon. He is the archetypal alienated intellectual facing
an unyielding and uncaring society. His theory is principally critical, and
when he turns to positive prescription, he refers to ideals of wholeness and
a unified human community. ‘To look for my happiness in the happiness of
others, for my own worth in the worth of all those around me, to be free
in the freedom of others’ (Bakunin 1977,p.92).
To bring such millenarian dreams to fruition, Bakunin believed that
violence and terrorism were necessary. In a famous passage in ‘Die Reaktion
31 Bakunin recounts his role in events of the 1840s in the curious confessions he wrote to Tsar Nicholas
I while in prison. See Bakunin 1977.
32 There is a dispute among scholars concerning when exactly Bakunin became an anarchist. Max
Nettlau sees Bakunin as impregnated with anarchism as early as 1851 (Bakunin 1932,p.325n). It was
only in 1867, however, that Bakunin declared for the first time that ‘I am anarchist’ (Maitron 1975,
i,p.48n; Pernicone 1993,p.26).
462
Visions of stateless society
in Deutschland’ (1842), he exhorted the masses to ‘trust the eternal Spirit
which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and
eternally creating source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative
passion, too’ (Bakunin 1965,pp.403–6, 1977,p.93). What is so startling
about this statement is that it recommends violence not just because it is
instrumentally important for achieving some goal – like the stateless society
– but because it is intrinsically good, even liberating. This tendency to
glorify violence did not abate: over thirty years later, Bakunin continued to
call for a ‘war to the death’ between workers and the privileged classes, and
referred to destruction as ‘salutary and fruitful’ (Bakunin 1990,pp.20, 28).
Throughout his life, Bakunin remained convinced that only explosive
popular outbursts would create the social confusion, disorder and panic
that would entirely demolish authoritarian institutions like the state. Here
as elsewhere, Bakunin’s thought is all-encompassing: there is no allowance
for incremental change in order to usher in a progressively better world;
freedom is to be attained through purifying and regenerating destruction.
Revolutions become the privileged means for human will to affect the
course of human history; violence is assumed necessary to unleash the reason
and virtue of the popular classes, presently suppressed under authoritarian
regimes. Nor is revolution reserved, as it is in Marx’s thought, for highly
industrialised societies; Bakunin believed that revolutions were most likely
to occur where the majority of people remained near subsistence level.
Bakunin demanded the liberation of individuals from the constraints
imposed by all authoritarian institutions – political, religious, social or
philosophical – but he reserved a special hatred for the state. ‘If there is
a state’, he wrote in 1873, ‘then necessarily there is domination and con-
sequently slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is incon-
ceivable – that is why we are enemies of the state’ (Bakunin 1990,p.178).
Any state represented evil; but the most dangerous were those powerful and
extensive states which, because of their complex structures, were furthest
from the people’s interests and instincts (Bakunin 1990,p.53). Germany
was the pre-eminent example of such a powerful state in the late nine-
teenth century – Bakunin frequently analysed the dangerous and oppres-
sive quality of Bismarckian Germany – but Bakunin was suspicious of any
group that wished to capture the power of the state for their own specific
interests.
Connected to Bakunin’s analysis of different states were his generalisa-
tions concerning the mores of various ethnic groups, especially their differ-
ing proclivities for liberty or for authoritarian institutions. A crude racism
463