What Is Property?

Just a bit more on Destutt-Tracy: on page 61-2, there is one of the clearest expressions of Proudhon’s argument that a significant amount of property theory rests on a semantic slide, and it comes in the context of one of Proudhon’s few direct encounters with the concept of self-ownership. Here’s Proudhon: “Shameful equivocation, not justified by the necessity for generalization! The word property has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say the properties […]

I had some unexpected delays of a better sort yesterday, including two rather random encounters with one of my best friends from high school (in California, not Oregon, where I am now), who I haven’t seen in about 20 years. A familiar voice in a coffee shop turned out to be just who it sounded like. And then the voice again, from a parking lot I was walking by, hours later, on my way home from the bookstore. Good stuff. Anyway, we left off at page 54, at the start of section 2, on “Occupation, as the Title to Property.” […]

These are notes from the ongoing Proudhon seminar. Page numbers refer to the Benjamin R. Tucker translation of What Is Property? Chapter II covers “PROPERTY CONSIDERED AS A NATURAL RIGHT.—OCCUPATION AND CIVIL LAW AS EFFICIENT BASES OF PROPERTY. DEFINITIONS.” Proudhon announced in the first chapter that: “The first of these chapters [Ch. 2] will prove that the right of occupation OBSTRUCTS property; the second [Ch. 3] that the right of labor DESTROYS it.” So we know pretty much what to expect. p. 42: Property is defined as “the right to use and abuse one’s own within the limits of the […]

I don’t think there is anything in the first chapter that is terribly difficult, but there’s a lot that is interesting. p. 12: Proudhon claims that property is “an effect without a cause:” none of the justifications given for it hold up. He imagines the objection being aimed at his contradiction of widely-held received wisdom on the subject, and at his *uniting of contraries*. p.13: “The work of our race is to build the temple of science,” “truth reveals itself to all,” and “you will find here a series of experiments upon justice and right.” Proudhon’s social science is fairly […]

I’ve engaged in what I hope is a helpful reversal here—the reversal of a reversal, actually. In Chapter One of What Is Property? Proudhon wrote, “I think best to place the last thought of my book first,” and declared himself within his rights. I, on the other hand, have gone to some trouble to push that “last thought” back a bit. My reasons are simple: the phrase “property is robbery” is the one thing we all “know” about the work, and it is something of a distraction, particularly as there are some difficulties in knowing what it means in the […]

Proudhon’s What Is Property? poses a variety of interpretive problems, not the least of which is that its careful series of examinations of the various justifications for simple, individual property are frequently overshadowed by the slogan, “Property is robbery!” That phrase remained important to Proudhon, even after he came to his own terms with property. “I do not come to retract,” he said in May, 1848, “heaven forbid! I persist in regarding this provocative definition as the greatest truth of the century.” However, in the same “Toast to the Revolution,” he clarified the nature of the statement: “When I say, […]