Part Second.

§ 1. — Of the Causes of our Mistakes. The Origin of Property.

The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following question has been solved: — Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold? Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred in the case of man? Why is man, who was born for society, not yet associated?

Proudhon’s answer involves that distinction between modes of association that I just noted. He continues:

J’ai dit que l’homme est associé en mode composé : lors même que cette expression manquerait de justesse, le fait qu’elle m’a servi à caractériser n’en serait pas moins vrai, savoir l’engrenage des talents et des capacités. I have said that man is associated in a compound manner: even if that that expression lacks precision, the fact that it helps me to characterize is no less true, namely the [meshing/interweaving] of talents and capacities.

Tucker’s translation of engrenage as “classification” is a bit of a blunder, but also suggests that he was not aware enough of Fourier’s ideas to see these rather overt references. Engrenage refers to the way that toothed gears fit together, moving individually but also forming a mechanism together. More generally, the term refers to circumstances from which one cannot extricate oneself. So we have yet another statement about the sense in which we are associated by the force of circumstances. But obviously, that alone is not enough to answer Proudhon’s question—perhaps because that association is still en mode simple, not so different from the links between animals, until we can address the apparent antinomy between society and property.

The rest of the paragraph could also use a bit of revision:

Mais qui ne voit que ces talents et ces capacités deviennent à leur tour, par leur variété infinie, causes d’une infinie variété dans les volontés ; que le caractère, les inclinations, et si j’ose ainsi dire, la forme du moi, en sont inévitablement altérés : de sorte que dans l’ordre de la liberté, de même que dans l’ordre de l’intelligence, on a autant de types que d’individus, autant d’originaux que de têtes, dont les goûts, les humeurs, les penchants, modifiés par des idées dissemblables, nécessairement ne peuvent s’accorder ? L’homme, par sa nature et son instinct, est prédestiné à la société, et sa personnalité, toujours inconstante et multiforme, s’y oppose. But who does not see that these talents and capacities become in their turn, through their infinite variety, causes of an infinite variety of wills; that the character, the inclinations and, if I dare put it this way, the form of the self, is thus inevitably altered: so that in the order of liberty, just as in the order of intelligence, there are as many types of individuals, as many originals as heads, whose tastes, moods and penchants, modified by dissimilar ideas, necessarily cannot agree? Man, by his nature and instinct, is predestined to society, and his personality, always inconstant and multiform, opposes it.

This is fun stuff, which perhaps a later Tucker, having made himself familiar with Stirner, might have handled a little differently. Certainly, there are some likely points of contact between Proudhon’s world of originals and Stirner’s world of uniques.

The various attempts here to compare humans to other animals are sufficiently clear in their intent, whether or not we would endorse the details. The characterizations of animal nature essentially function as foils for the antinomic account of human nature Proudhon is developing.

All that he does from instinct man despises; or, if he admires it, it is as Nature’s work, not as his own. This explains the obscurity which surrounds the names of early inventors; it explains also our indifference to religious matters, and the ridicule heaped upon religious customs. Man esteems only the products of reflection and of reason. The most wonderful works of instinct are, in his eyes, only lucky god-sends [trouvailles, “finds”]; he reserves the name discovery — I had almost said creation — for the works of intelligence. Instinct is the source of passion and enthusiasm; it is intelligence which causes crime and virtue.

Intelligence makes both crime and virtue [c’est l’intelligence qui fait le crime et la vertu]. If, knowing Proudhon’s predilections, you feel inclined to stop here and think about (fortunate?) “the Fall of Man” and the origin of evil, you probably wouldn’t be too far wrong. After all, we have already been treated to one discussion of Adam in the Garden, just before Proudhon told us that “Man errs, because he learns.” And here we are focused on the human “power of considering our own modifications.”

It is not enough, then, to say that we are distinguished from the animals by reflection, unless we mean thereby the constant tendency of our instinct to become intelligence. While man is governed by instinct, he is unconscious of his acts. He never would deceive himself, and never would be troubled by errors, evils, and disorder, if, like the animals, instinct were his only guide. But the Creator has endowed us with reflection, to the end that our instinct might become intelligence; and since this reflection and resulting knowledge pass through various stages, it happens that in the beginning our instinct is opposed, rather than guided, by reflection; consequently, that our power of thought leads us to act in opposition to our nature and our end; that, deceiving ourselves, we do and suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one and avoid the other.

We are presented with a kind of dialectical play in human consciousness between instinct and intelligence. Even at this point in Proudhon’s development, it probably makes sense to treat this as an instance of that irreducible, antinomic oscillation which he will champion in later works, despite the somewhat clumsy attempt to apply some bits of Hegel in his analysis. But we can also just treat his appropriation of Hegelian terms in roughly the same way we treat his appropriation of natural science: there is no real difficulty in understanding the progression he is describing, providing we don’t get distracted by concerns about issues (German philosophy, animal psychology) that are secondary at best. So here is the (in)famous summary that ends the section:

Communism — the first expression of the social nature — is the first term of social development, — the thesis; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term, — the antithesis. When we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution. Now, this synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the antithesis. Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to sociability. The union of the two remainders will give us the true form of human association.

§ 2. — Characteristics of Communism and of Property.

We know that we are headed toward “union of the two remainders” left when the “features which are hostile to sociability” are eliminated: the “synthesis of community and property.” But we also know that, however neatly Proudhon has fit these elements to a more or less Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework, almost everything else in the last section leads us to expect that perhaps the “synthesis” in going to be far from a one and done affair. We also know that, starting just a couple of years after the critiques assembled here, Proudhon would begin to elaborate a constructive vision in which that synthesis and elimination of unsociable features would take the form of a balancing of institutions—teasing out the senses, already at least implicit here, in which property, which always remained for him a matter of theft and a certain kind of impossibility, was also allied with liberty. The waters get deep here very, very quickly. What is perhaps most important is that the “economic contradictions” with which Proudhon increasingly concerned himself were not literal, logical contradictions, but instead arose from what he described in 1849 as considerations of different orders. But one of the things that he seems to have demonstrated pretty clearly through the work we’re reading is that property itself exists at the intersection of considerations of various different orders. To make different observations about norms and institutions that simply do not have a uniform foundation and character is perhaps the only way to avoid tying ourselves, with little in the way of recourse, to contradictions of the sort we probably should avoid. When we recognize the elements from Fourier and Leroux that exist in the work—as well as the somewhat unorthodox uses to which Proudhon put them—we have to consider whether or not the various antisocial elements that emerge with human intelligence and lead to property are a kind of freedom, but a different kind than that “synthesis of community and property” we are moving toward. Perhaps the individual tendency is a simple liberty and the social state is a compound liberty (liberté composé.) (A quick search on the French phrase shows that Proudhon did indeed make a similar distinction in 1849.) Perhaps the think we, as readers, need to be most aware of is that part of the process that he is proposing here is a *transformation of concepts and institutions, through a progressive practice of experimentation that we already knows involves both virtue and evil, erring and learning. In the Study on Ideas in Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858), Proudhon summarized his method, in the context of a series of imagined questions about how he would replace the objects of his critiques, including: “What do you put in place of property?” And his response was: Nothing, my good man, for I intend to suppress none of the things of which I have made such a resolute critique. I flatter myself that I do only two things: that is, first, to teach you put each thing in its place, after having purged it of the absolute and balanced it with other things; then, to show you that the things that you know, and that you have such fear of losing, are not the only ones that exist, and that there are considerably more of which you still must take account. Now, all of this may seem like a long prologue for the section, but we should probably extend it just a bit more. After all, Tucker’s translation renders communauté as “communism” and has inspired all sorts of debate about the relation of Proudhon’s critique to anarchist communism or the more libertarian forms of communism that were emerging in his own time. My own sense is that it is most useful to treat the opposition between propriété and communauté like the distinctions between human and animal psychology: we know what Proudhon is up to and it’s going to be quite a few years before Kropotkin or even Déjacque enters the conversation, so we can almost certainly focus safely on the conception distinctions being made. When Proudhon starts this section by suggesting that community and property are not, contrary to popular belief, the only options, I think we get a glimpse of how “eliminating the absolute” is likely to involve an engagement that emphasizes existing contradiction and alternatives, eliminating the aura of inevitability around some option or choice of options. Proudhon suggests that community and property are inextricably linked, so the process of that strips away what is antisocial and inimical to equality in both of them appears either as a radical clarification or an entire rethinking, but in either case involves a significant transformation. Those who look to the “synthesis” as a vindication of either property or community probably need to look more closely. Obviously, one of the most interesting subsections here is the second, where Proudhon attempts to show the “perfect identity” of property and theft. In the process, he expands on the etymological argument he made in The Celebration of Sunday, he provides fifteen different various of theft, noting that: Robbery is committed in a variety of ways, which have been very cleverly distinguished and classified by legislators according to their heinousness or merit, to the end that some robbers may be honored, while others are punished. And having raised the issue of honorable and punishable forms of theft, he goes on to give us an interesting account of the development of justice, in the context of which we have to make space for elements like “the right of force and the right of artifice.” This is a good early indication that the odd, sneering remarks about Proudhon’s alleged “idealism,” which so often depend on remarks he made about “eternal justice,” probably don’t get very close to the target. For Proudhon, justice has had a development and what might have been the best social balancing of “rights” in a given place and time still has to contend with more of that erring and learning. New balances have to be struck. By 1861 and War and Peace, Proudhon’s conception of “rights” had obviously escaped the purely legal sphere: RIGHT, in general, is the recognition of human dignity in all its faculties, attributes and prerogatives. There are thus as many special rights as humans can raise different claims, owing to the diversity of their faculties and of their exercise. As a consequence, the genealogy of human rights will follow that of the human faculties and their manifestations. Consider that definition in the context of all that human originalness we noted earlier and it seems obvious that the balancing is going to be complex and subject to a good deal of trial and error. So we can expect that justice—which ultimately meant little for Proudhon beyond balance—will be anything but a fixed idea. So perhaps it is no surprise that Proudhon’s next argument, addressing property as a source of despotism, leads to the question of “the form of government in the future” and to the answer of anarchy What is to be the form of government in the future? hear some of my younger readers reply: “Why, how can you ask such a question? You are a republican.” “A republican! Yes; but that word specifies nothing. Res publica; that is, the public thing. Now, whoever is interested in public affairs — no matter under what form of government — may call himself a republican. Even kings are republicans.” — “Well! you are a democrat?” — “No.” — “What! you would have a monarchy.” — “No.” — “A constitutionalist?” — “God forbid!” — “You are then an aristocrat?” — “Not at all.” — “You want a mixed government?” — “Still less.” — “What are you, then?” — “I am an anarchist.” “Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the government.” — “By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me.”

Je suis anarchiste. I’m absolutely fascinated by this moment, which we traditionally treat as the first in which someone declared themselves an anarchist in a positive sense. It is an anarchic moment, full of uncertainty. The rules of French don’t even allow us to decide definitively if anarchiste is, in this instance, a noun or an adjective. The phrase could as easily mean something like “I am anarchistic.” After all, if this is the first instance of this anarchist declaration, then the phrase works as a sort of manifesto—making manifest or revealing a new political positioning—but in that moment what is revealed is almost purely negative. Given the sort of declaration it is, the sort of thing that anarchy is, giving positive content to the statement obviously poses interesting difficulties. And that is perhaps why we still struggle with it. What Proudhon can give us is a history of development, and particularly of the development of a division between social roles based in either instinct or intelligence, which he traces back to non-human animals. Sociable animals follow their chief by instinct; but … the function of the chief is altogether one of intelligence. In this sort of sociability, not every individual in the society responds to both impulses. Someone takes the role of head in the social body. And perhaps sometimes that is the best that can be done. Proudhon has always willing to acknowledge necessity as the one law it made no sense to resist, as long as it really was in force. Royalty may always be good, when it is the only possible form of government; legitimate it is never. Neither heredity, nor election, nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate. Whatever form it takes, — monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic, — royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd. Those remarks should, I think, have gone a long way toward dismissing the partisan rumors about Proudhon’s affection for monarchy—but those sorts of rumors are seldom driven by facts. In any event, we know that the general growth and exercise of intelligence is the apple in the Eden of instinct and that the path toward a higher degree of sociality involves periods of rebellion against authority. In proportion as society becomes enlightened, royal authority diminishes. That is a fact to which all history bears witness. Eventually, science emerges—and emerges precisely as an alternative to the instinctual politics of obedience. And: having reached this height, [the individual] comprehends that political truth, or the science of politics, exists quite independently of the will of sovereigns, the opinion of majorities, and popular beliefs, — that kings, ministers, magistrates, and nations, as wills, have no connection with the science, and are worthy of no consideration. He comprehends, at the same time, that, if man is born a sociable being, the authority of his father over him ceases on the day when, his mind being formed and his education finished, he becomes the associate of his father; that his true chief and his king is the demonstrated truth; that politics is a science, not a stratagem; and that the function of the legislator is reduced, in the last analysis, to the methodical search for truth. And the endpoint in this development—to the limited extent that we dare talk about endpoints—is anarchy. Property and royalty have been crumbling to pieces ever since the world began. As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. Anarchy, — the absence of a master, of a sovereign, — such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating, and which our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule, and his will for law, leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of chaos. The story is told, that a citizen of Paris in the seventeenth century having heard it said that in Venice there was no king, the good man could not recover from his astonishment, and nearly died from laughter at the mere mention of so ridiculous a thing. So strong is our prejudice. As long as we live, we want a chief or chiefs; and at this very moment I hold in my hand a brochure, whose author — a zealous communist — dreams, like a second Marat, of the dictatorship. The most advanced among us are those who wish the greatest possible number of sovereigns, — their most ardent wish is for the royalty of the National Guard. Soon, undoubtedly, some one, jealous of the citizen militia, will say, “Everybody is king.” But, when he has spoken, I will say, in my turn, “Nobody is king; we are, whether we will or no, associated.” Every question of domestic politics must be decided by departmental statistics; every question of foreign politics is an affair of international statistics. The science of government rightly belongs to one of the sections of the Academy of Sciences, whose permanent secretary is necessarily prime minister; and, since every citizen may address a memoir to the Academy, every citizen is a legislator. But, as the opinion of no one is of any value until its truth has been proven, no one can substitute his will for reason, — nobody is king. In my own work on Proudhon’s basic ideas, I have settled on the formula of “between science and vengeance” to capture two competing tendencies that we find throughout his work. On the one hand, we find the careful elaboration of an anarchistic social science, but means of which Proudhon hoped to avoid the worst horrors of revolutionary social upheaval. The anarchy of the Terror in the French Revolution was among the things he hoped would not recur. On the other, however, we find, particularly in the private writings, an element of rage. In the Carnets, Proudhon talks about being motivated by hatred of injustice and of those who defend it. For some time he planned to release a Testament at the time of his death, founding a “Society of Avengers” who would undertake acts of assassination against key defenders of authority—provided, of course, no more peaceful solutions had been found in the meantime. But the formula really captures something of a much more basic dynamic, since we see the expansion of intellectual activity and that of rebellion appearing in Proudhon’s account as interconnected forces. And it is no coincidence, I think, that he declares himself an anarchist “in the full force of the term” in the midst of a section dealing with property and despotism, products of the same development as science and rebellion, which he ends with a question about how society at this degree of sociality could “be anything but chaos and confusion.” We don’t have far to read before we can presumably connect anarchy and a liberty understood as a third form of society, but perhaps we still have a few logical steps to work through.

§ 3. — Determination of the third form of Society. Conclusion.

I retranslated this final section a few years ago and I’m gong to include that full translation here, with comments interspersed where appropriate.

[See also: “Reading What is Property? — The Third Social Form,” and earlier reading of this material.]

Therefore, no government, no public economy, no administration is possible with property for a basis. Community seeks equality and law. Property, born of the autonomy of reason and the feeling of individual worth, wants, above all things, independence and proportionality. But community, taking uniformity for law, and leveling for equality, becomes tyrannical and unjust. Property, through its despotism and its invasions, soon shows itself oppressive and unsociable. What property and community seek is good; what both produce is bad. And why? Because both are exclusive, and are unaware, each from its own side, of two elements of society. Community rejects independence and proportionality; property does not satisfy equality and law.

One of the questions that comes up frequently is whether Proudhon’s basic understanding of property had to change in order for him to move from the sort of overwhelming critique of property that we find here to the approach in works like Theory of Property, where Proudhon has found ways to use the despotic character of property against property itself, through balancing of holdings, and against whatever State-like institutions might persist even in an anarchist society. One of the things that Proudhon emphasizes is a shift in focus. We don’t have to look beyond the table of contents to find: “New Theory: that the motives, and thus the legitimacy of property, must be sought, not in its principle or its origin, but in its aims.” But twenty-five years earlier Proudhon had written that “what property and community seek is good,” so while there are undoubtedly differences that emerged over time, a key part of the “New Theory” was right at the heart of the old one.

Now, if we imagine a society based on these four principles—equality, law, independence, and proportionality—we find: 1) That equality, consisting solely of the equality of conditions, that is to say of means, not in the equality of well-being, which with equal means must be the work of the laborer, does not in any way violate justice and equity; 2) That law, resulting from the science of facts, and consequently relying on necessity itself, never offends independence; 3) That the respective independence of individuals, or the autonomy of private reason, deriving from the difference of talents and capacities, can exist without danger within the limits of law; 4) That proportionality, only being allowed within the sphere of intelligence and sentiment, not in that of physical things, can be observed without violating justice or social equality. This third form of society, the synthesis of community and property, we will call LIBERTY. [1] Thus, in order to determine liberty, we do not join community and property indiscriminately, which would be an absurd eclecticism. We seek, by an analytic method, what each contains that is true, in conformity with the wishes of nature and the laws of sociability, and we eliminate the foreign elements that they contain; and the result gives an expression suitable to the natural form of human society, in short, to liberty.

Whether you want to call this a dialectical process or not may come down to personal preferences. At base, it seems that the task is examining two systems that Proudhon has already described as interdependent and stripping out a lot of what makes them appear to be two diametrically opposed options.

Liberty is equality, because liberty only exists in the social state, and apart from equality there is not society. Liberty is anarchy, because it does not accept the government of the will, but only the authority of law, that is to say of necessity.

It may come as a surprise to those who have adopted the same anarchist label as Proudhon that anarchy appears here as just one aspect of liberty, alongside notions that are perhaps not so significant for us. We know that Proudhon was always rather proud of that declaration, je suis anarchiste, but it isn’t clear that the identification assumed—immediately or at any time in his career—quite the same significance that we attach to it. That does not, by itself, mean that Proudhon was any less an anarchist than we are. Some well-known stumbles aside, he was probably more consistently anti-authoritarian—even more broadly anti-absolutists—than most of us. But to expect him to testify to the fact in our own language is undoubtedly misguided. So we are left to wrestle a bit with how well our own identifications with anarchy match up with his.

Regarding the acceptance of necessity as “law,” we find similar ideas in Bakunin.

Liberty is infinite variety, because it respects all wills, within the limits of law. Liberty is proportionality, because it leaves complete latitude to the ambition for merit [2] and the rivalry for glory. Now we can say, after the example of Mr. Cousin: “Our principle is true; it is good and social; let us not fear to deduce all its consequences.” Sociability in man, becoming justice through reflection, and equity through the interweaving [engrènement] of capacities, having liberty for its formula, is the true foundation of morals, the principle and rule of all our actions. It is this universal cause [mobile] that philosophy seeks, that religion fortifies, selfishness supplants and that pure reason never replaced. Duty and right arise in us from need, which, according to whether we consider it in relation to external beings, is right, or, in relation to ourselves, duty. We need to eat and to sleep. We have a right to procure the things necessary for sleep and nutrition; it is a duty to use them when nature demands it. We need to work to live. It is a right and a duty. We have a need to love our wives and children. It is a duty to be their protector and to support them; it is a right to be loved by them in preference to all others. Conjugal fidelity is in accordance with justice; adultery is a crime of treason against society [lèse-société]. We need to exchange our products for other products. It is a right that the exchange be made for equivalents, and since we consume before producing, it would be a duty, if the thing depended on us, that our last product follow our last consumption. Suicide is a fraudulent bankruptcy. We need to accomplish our tasks according to the insights of our reason. It is a right to maintain our free will; it is a duty to respect that of others. We need to be appreciated by our fellows. It is a duty to be worthy of their praise; it is a right to be judged according to our works. Liberty is not contrary to the rights of succession and testament: it is content to ensure that equality is not violated. Choose, it says to us, between two inheritances, but never accumulate. All the legislation concerning the transmissions, the substitutions, the adoptions, and, if I dare use this word, the coadjutoreries, is to be remade.

There is, perhaps, an appeal to something like what we would call “occupancy-use-standards” in the approval of inheritance, but the condemnation of accumulation. Choose, but never accumulate.

Liberty promotes emulation and does not destroy it: in [conditions of] social equality, emulation consists of acting under equal conditions; its reward is all in itself, and no one suffers from the victory. Liberty applauds devotion and respects its votes [suffrages], but it can do without it. Justice is sufficient for social equilibrium; devotion is a supererogation. Happy, however, is the one who can say: I devote myself. [3] Liberty is essentially organizing: in order to insure equality between men, and equilibrium between nations, it is necessary that agriculture and industry, the centers of instruction, commerce and warehousing, are distributed according to the geographical and climacteric [4] conditions of each country, the varieties of the products, the character and natural talents of the inhabitants, etc., in proportions so accurate, so skillful, so well matched, that nowhere is there ever present an excess nor a lack of population, consumption or product. That is the beginning of the science of public and private right, the true political economy. It is up to the legists, freed from now on from the false principle of property, to describe the new laws, and bring peace to the world. They do not lack science and genius; the point of application [point d’appui] has been given to them. [5]. I have accomplished the work that I proposed to myself. Property is vanquished; it will never rise again. Everywhere that this discourse is read and reported, there a seed of death will be deposited for property: there, sooner or later, privilege and servitude will disappear; the despotism of the will will be succeeded by the reign of reason. Indeed, what sophisms, what obstinate prejudices could hold before the simplicity of these propositions.

There’s a bit of “famous last words” in this claim that “property is vanquished” and it’s hard not to think of those eternal revendications we referenced in the beginning. But as a “seed of death,” this work certainly has been every bit as successful as a relative unknown like Proudhon might ever have expected.

I. Individual possession is the condition of social life; [6] five thousand years of property demonstrate it: property is the suicide of society. Possession is within [the realm of] right; property is against right. Eliminate property by preserving possession; and, by that single modification of principle, you will change everything in the laws, the government, the economy and the institutions: you will sweep evil from the earth. II. The right to occupy being equal for all, possession varies like the number of possessors; property cannot form. III. The effect of labor also being the same for all, property is lost through foreign exploitation and rent. IV. All human labor necessarily resulting from a collective force, all property becomes, for this reason, collective and undivided: in more precise terms, labor destroys property. V. Every capacity for labor being, like every instrument of labor, an accumulated capital, a collective property, inequality of salary and fortune, under the pretext of inequality of capacity, is injustice and theft. V. The necessary conditions of commerce are the liberty of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged: now, the value being expressed by the quantity of time and expense cost by each product and the liberty being inviolable, the labors necessarily remain equal in wages, as they are in rights and duties. VII. Products only exchange for products. Now, the condition of every exchange being the equivalence of the products, profit is impossible and unjust. Observe this most elementary principle of economics, and pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime, along with hunger, would disappear from our midst. VIII. Men are associated by the physical and mathematical law of production, before being associated by their full agreement: so the equality of conditions is [a matter] of justice, that is to say of social right, of strict right; esteem, friendship, recognition and admiration all fall solely within the realm of equitable or proportional right. IX. Free association, liberty, which limits itself to maintaining equality in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only form of society that is possible, the only one that is just and true. X. Politics is the science of liberty: the government of man by man, no matter the name with which it is disguised, is oppression; the highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.

Proudhon was thoroughly anti-utopian and we don’t find a lot of programs in his work, but they tend, like this one, to be more like a serious of sociological observations than a blueprint for a perfect society.

And then the sociological summary is followed by a kind of revolutionary benediction—and we’re done with the First Memoir.