The previous post, “What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us,” has spurred some further research on the relation of The Theory of Property to Proudhon’s works of the early 1860s. Check the comment thread for a number of of interesting items from Proudhon’s correspondence, and the Libertarian Library blog for the “Notice to the Reader” from The Principle of Art, the first of the Posthumous Works.
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Proudhon on Property (1846) – Part 5
THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS CHAPTER XI EIGHTH EPOCH.—PROPERTY [continued from Part 4] Thus property, which should consummate the holy union of man and nature, leads only to an odious prostitution. The sultan uses and abuses his slave: the earth is for him an instrument of luxury… I find here more than a metaphor; I discover a profound analogy. What is it that, in the relations of the sexes, distinguishes marriage from concubinage? Everyone senses the difference between these two things; few people would be in a state to render an account of it, so obscure has the question become […]
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Note on slavery and the origins of property
Several people, knowing my interest in the question of property, have sent me links to a blog post by Stephen Keating, “Are Freedom and Violence Linked?,” which discusses some of what David Graeber has to say about slavery and the origins of property in his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. There are parts of Keating’s argument to which I’m sympathetic, such as his concern that the notion of individual property rights may mask the essentially social nature of property. But his key point seems to be this: “The dirty secret is that this conception of property emerged out of […]
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Proudhon on possession, 1840
I see that Francois Tremblay has again raised the issue of the distinction between property and possession, citing db0 (citing Proudhon, and ultimately intervening in an old debate about Kevin Carson’s work on Roderick Long’s blog), as if somewhere in all the citations there was some clear way to distinguish “possession” from “property.” For Francois, the issue seems to be that propertarians “wish to hide the injustices of property theory under the pretense that we have no choice but to have property rights.” db0 argues that “there is a hard core difference which splits the ownership scale in half [between […]