Proudhon’s essay “What is Government? What is God?” appeared first in the Voix du Peuple, November 5, 1849, then as the preface to The Confessions of a Revolutionary, as well as in the Melanges volumes of the Lacroix collected works. It was the occasion for one of the more important responses by Pierre Leroux—a response which seems to have influenced William Batchelder Greene.
Related Articles

Proudhon Library
On the Absolute (1851)
P.-J. Proudhon, Carnets, Vol. 4 (Carnet no. 9, 112-115): 287-290 [112] July 26 [1851]. — On the Absolute. — All the religions, all the old metaphysics, are based on the notion of the absolute, on […]

Proudhon Library
Proudhon’s projects
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] During his lifetime Proudhon was frequently accused of being primarily a critic, a destroyer, and within anarchist circles it is largely his destructive critique […]

Uncategorized
Proudhon and Tucker get psychedelic!
Wow, man! Tucker’s edition of Proudhon’s The Malthusians, in a very special digital edition. Google Books raises the Art of Screwing Up to the level of, well, ART.
1 Comment
Comments are closed.
“Who knows if we could not discover then that all these governmental formulas, for which the Peoples and citizens have slit each others’ throats for sixty centuries, are only a phantasmagoria of our mind, that the first duty of a free reason is to return to the museums and libraries?”
Authority is indeed an illusion. It’s simply amazing how people project the state as the institution which grants them their freedom, but it’s not surprising when you understand how people have been conditioned to believe so, and how the most arrogant view the state as an extension of themselves.
I think I will share this with a friend from college (who is also a philosophy major) since she is interested in anarchism.