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.
Contr'un
From my notebooks
[This may, or may not, end up being part of “Owning Up,” the next issue of The Mutualist, but it seems useful enough to share at this point.] I certainly never anticipated spending years wrestling […]
Proudhon Library
Ms. 2846 — Theory of Property
[This page is a work-in-progress.] [1] Dedication. Persons, Property. We work to avoid the economic question. It is from this point of view that I judge contemporary politics. We imagine meeting the needs of the […]
Utopian and Scientific
Pierre Leroux, “Individualism and Socialism” (1834)
At times, even the most resolute hearts, those most firmly fixed on the sacred belief of progress, come to lose courage and to feel full of disgust at the present. In the 16th century, when one murdered in our civil wars, it was in the name of God and with a crucifix in the hand; it was a question of the most sacred things, of things which, when once they have procured our conviction and our faith so legitimately dominate our nature that it has nothing to do but obey, and even its most beautiful appanage disappears thus voluntarily before the divine will. In the name of what principle does one today send off, by telegraph, pitiless orders, and transform proletarian soldiers into the executioners of their own class? Why has our epoch seen cruelties which recall St. Bartholemew? Why have men been fanaticized to the point of making them coldly slaughter the elderly, women, and children? Why has the Seine rolled with murders which recalls the arquebuscades of window of the Louvre? It is not in the name of God and eternal salvation that it is done. It is in the name of material interests.