Proudhon: What is Property?

A 1994 translation of one of the most notorious and influential critiques of private property ownership.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Author), Donald R. Kelley (Edited by), Bonnie G. Smith (Edited by)

9780521405560, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 February 1994

270 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.31 kg

This is a 1994 translation of one of the classics of the traditions of anarchism and socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a contemporary of Marx and one of the most acute, influential and subversive critics of modern French and European society. His What is Property? (1840) produced the answer 'Property is theft'; the book itself has become a classic of political thought through its wide-ranging and deep-reaching critique of private property as at once the essential institution of Western culture and the root cause of greed, corruption, political tyranny, social division and violation of natural law. A critical and historical introduction situates Proudhon's 'diabolical work' (as he called it) in the context of nineteenth-century social and legal controversy and of the history of political thought in general.

1. Method followed in this work
2. Property considered as a natural right
3. Labor as the efficient cause of the domain of property
4. That property is impossible: demonstration
5. Psychological exposition of the idea of the just and the unjust and the determination of the principle of government and right.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]