Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (47 page)

Stirner’s corrosive egoism makes him reject society as an organic being, but his celebration of the individual does not lead him to deny the existence of others. Sartre may have found that ‘Hell is other people’, but for Stirner they are individuals who enable one to fulfil oneself by uniting with them. As Emma Goldman pointed out, Stirner is not merely the apostle of the theory ‘“each for himself, the devil take the hind one”’.
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Marx’s and Engels’ rightly accused Stirner of being still sufficiently Hegelian to have an idealist approach to history, believing that ‘concepts should regulate life’.
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Looking for the ‘sacred’ everywhere to overcome, he overlooked the material base of society. This led him to believe that it was only necessary to change ideas about the individual’s relationship to the State for it to wither away. He was also guilty of doing precisely what he reproached Feuerbach for in his attack on the ‘holy’, implying that it is only a matter of destroying mental illusions to liberate humanity. Again, while rejecting abstractions, Stirner’s concept of the ‘ego’ is itself an abstraction and he fails to recognize that the individual is a set of relationships. Finally, Stirner does not go far enough in urging the workers merely to strike and claim the product of their labour. But while all this may be true, it is not enough to dismiss Stirner as a ‘petit-bourgeois utopian’ as Marxists have done, or to suggest that he was a harbinger of fascism.

Stirner is an awkward and uncomfortable presence. By stating things in the most extreme way, and taking his arguments to their ultimate conclusions, he jolts his readers out of their philosophical composure and moral smugness. His value lies in his ability to penetrate the mystification and reification of the State and authoritarian society. His criticism of the way communism can crush the individual is apt, and he correctly points out that a workers’ State is unlikely to be any freer than the liberal State. Beyond this, he demonstrates brilliantly the hold ‘wheels in the head’ have upon us: how abstractions and fixed ideas influence the very way we think, and see ourselves, how hierarchy finds its roots in the
‘dominion of thoughts, dominion of mind’.
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He lifts the social veil, undermines the worship of abstractions, and shows how the world is populated with ‘spooks’ of our own making. He offers a powerful defence of individuality in an alienated world, and places subjectivity at the centre of any revolutionary project. While his call for self-assertion could lead to violence and the oppression of the weak, and his conscious egoism is ultimately too limited to embrace the whole of human experience, he reminds us splendidly that a free society must exist in the interest of all individuals and it should aim at complete self-fulfilment and enjoyment. The timid and nondescript teacher at a girls’ academy turned out to be one of the most enduringly unsettling thinkers in the Western tradition.

P
IERRE
-J
OSEPH
P
ROUDHON
WAS
the first self-styled anarchist, deliberately adopting the label in order to provoke his opponents, who saw anarchy as synonymous with disorder. In
What is Property?
(1840), his first work to bring him notoriety, he presented his paradoxical position in the eloquent and classical French prose which earned him the admiration of Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert:

As his famous maxims ‘Property is Theft’, ‘Anarchy is Order’, and ‘God is Evil’ imply, Proudhon gloried in paradox. He is one of the most contradictory thinkers in the history of political thought, and his work has given rise to a wide range of conflicting interpretations. He is also one of the most diffuse writers: he published over forty works and left fourteen volumes of correspondence, eleven volumes of notebooks and a large number of unpublished manuscripts.

To have a clear understanding of Proudhon is no easy task. He did not always digest his learning and he made no attempt to be systematic or consistent in the presentation of his arguments. He could appreciate both sides of any question but was often uncertain which side to adopt: truth for
him tended to be the movement between two opposites. The exact meaning of his work is further obscured by the fact that he changed his mind several times throughout his career.

His style did not help matters either. At its best, it can be clear and eloquent, but it too often becomes diffuse and turbid. He was given to polemical exaggeration, and did not know when to stop. Much to the bemusement of his opponents and the confusion of his critics, he was a self-conscious ironist.

Like many social thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century, Proudhon combined social theory with philosophical speculation. He dived boldly into almost every sphere of human knowledge: philosophy, economics, politics, ethics and art were all grist to his mill. He held outrageous views on government, property, sexuality, race, and war. Yet behind his voluminous and varied output there was an overriding drive for justice and freedom.

He shared his century’s confidence that reason and science would bring about social progress and expand human freedom. He saw nature and society governed by laws of development and believed that if human beings lived in harmony with them they could become free. Freedom thus becomes a recognition of necessity: only if man knows his natural and social limits can he become free to realize his full potential. From this perspective Proudhon considered himself to be a ‘scientific’ thinker and wanted to turn politics into a science. But although he liked to think that his ‘whole philosophy is one of perpetual reconciliation’, the dialectical method he adopted often failed to reach a satisfactory resolution of its contradictory ideas.
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Proudhon would often present himself as an isolated and eccentric iconoclast. In 1848, he wrote: ‘My body is physically among the people, but my mind is elsewhere. My thinking has led me to the point where I have almost nothing in common with my contemporaries by way of ideas.’ He liked to think of himself as the ‘excommunicated of the epoch’ and was proud of the fact that he did not belong to any sect or party.
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In fact, this was more a pose than a correct assessment.

After the publication of
What is Property?
in 1840, Proudhon soon began to wield considerable influence. Marx hailed it as a ‘penetrating work’ and called it ‘the first decisive, vigorous and scientific examination of property’.
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Proudhon began to haunt the imagination of the French bourgeoisie as
l’homme de la terreur
who embodied all the dangers of proletarian revolution.

As the French labour movement began to develop, his influence grew considerably. His ideas dominated those sections of the French working class who helped form the First International and the largest single group in the Paris Commune of 1871 were Proudhonians. After Bakunin’s rupture with Marx, which marked the parting of the ways of the libertarian and
statist socialists, the organ of the first militant anarchist group based in Switzerland asserted: ‘Anarchy is not an invention of Bakunin … Proudhon is the real father of anarchy’.
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And Bakunin himself was the first to admit that ‘Proudhon is the master of us all’.
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Proudhon’s stress on economic before political struggle and his call for the working class to emancipate themselves by their own hands also made him the father of anarcho-syndicalism. Proudhon’s disciples not only founded the Confédération Générale du Travail, the French trade union movement, but Fernand Pelloutier in his Fédération des Bourses du Travail tried to educate the working class along mutualist lines as laid out by Proudhon.

Proudhon’s influence was not only restricted to France. During the 1870s, his ideas inspired Pi y Margall and the federalists in Spain, and the
narodniks
in Russia. The great Russian socialist Alexander Herzen became a close friend. Tolstoy was struck by his ideas on property and government, sought him out, and borrowed the title of Proudhon’s
War and Peace
(1861) for his great novel. In Germany, he had an enormous influence on the early socialist movement; in the 1840s, Lassalle was regarded as the greatest hope of Proudhonism in the country. In America, his views were given wide publicity, especially by Charles Dana of the Fourierist Brook Farm, and William B. Greene. Benjamin R. Tucker – ‘always a Proudhonian without knowing it’ – took Proudhon’s
bon mot
‘Liberty is not the Daughter but the Mother of Order’ as the masthead of his journal
Liberty.
In Britain, his ideas pervaded the syndicalist movement before the First World War, and even G. D. H. Cole’s version of guild socialism closely resembled his proposals.
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This century Proudhon has remained as controversial as ever. His attempt to discover the laws which govern society has earned him the reputation as a founding father of sociology. His ideas have been adopted by socialist writers as applicable to developing countries in the Third World.
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He has also been taken up by the nationalists on the Right for his defence of small-property owners and French interests. He has not only been hailed as one of the ‘masters of the counter-revolution of the nineteenth century’, but as a ‘harbinger of fascism’.
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He continues to be most remembered, however, as the father of the historic anarchist movement.

Proudhon was born the son a tavern-keeper and cooper in Besançon in the department of Franche-Comté near the Swiss border. His family had been rugged and independent peasants in the mountainous region for generations and he boasted that he was ‘moulded with the pure limestone of the Jura’.
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He looked back to his early childhood as a lost golden age. From five to ten, he spent much of his time on his family’s farm in the country, a life which gave a realistic base to his thinking. It probably encouraged
his fiery individuality which led him later to declare: ‘Whoever lays his hands on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: and I declare him my enemy.’
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It may also have fostered the puritanical and patriarchal attitudes which made him insist on chastity and see women primarily as subservient handmaids. What is certain is that the experience of growing up in the country left him with lifelong roots in the land and a powerful mystique of the earth. It fostered an ecological sensibility which led him to lament later the loss of ‘the deep feeling of nature’ that only country life can give:

At the age of twelve, the young Pierre-Joseph started work as a cellar-boy in his father’s business in Besançon. He managed however to get a scholarship to the Collège de Besançon, the best school in town with a fine academic reputation. Unfortunately, his father, better at brewing beer than doing business, was declared bankrupt when Pierre-Joseph was eighteen. He had to drop out of school and earn a living; in 1827 he decided to become a printer’s apprentice. Proudhon’s subsequent life as a craftsman gave him an independent view of society, while the personal control he exercised over his work only highlighted by contrast the alienation of the new factory system. It also gave him time and space to continue his studies. By 1838 he had not only developed a new typographical process but published an essay on general grammar.

Proudhon’s workshop printed the publications for the local diocese and they inspired his own religious speculation. Not content to proof-read and set the writings of others, he started composing his own. He contributed to an edition of Bible notes in Hebrew (learning the language in the process) and later wrote for a Catholic encyclopaedia. The Bible became his principal authority for his socialist ideas. At the same time, his extensive knowledge of Christian doctrine did not deepen his faith but had the reverse effect and made him staunchly anti-clerical. He went on to reject God’s providential rule and to conclude that ‘God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil.’
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