Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  However, between the self and the non-self, and vice versa, there is an infinity of relations are possible. Among so many relations furnished to us by philosophical observation, which will we choose to serve as standard and yardstick to the others? Which will form the first basis of our knowledge, the point of departure for our civilisation, the pivot of our social constitution? For it is a question of nothing more or less than that.

  To this point we have considered the self and what we call the non-self as two antithetical natures, the one spiritual, simple, active, and thinking, the other material, composite and consequently divisible, inert or passive, and non-thinking, serving simply as a target, occasion and matter for the meditations of the self. In order to not juggle too many ideas at once, we are carried to the observation of that elementary fact, intelligible even to the children to whom one teaches the grammar of Lhomond, namely, that philosophical observation implies two terms or actors, the one which observes, the other which is observed. It is the relation of active to passive, such as is shown by the conjugation of the verb in every language.

  But the passive does not exclude the reciprocal. What we have said of the role of the self and of the non-self in the formation of the idea by no means proves that the one that observes cannot be observed itself, and precisely by the object that it observed. Locke said, and no one has known how to respond to him: How do we know if the non-self is necessarily non-thinking?... In every case, we know, and cannot doubt, that our observations bear very often on selves like our own, but who, in this case and in so many that furnish us with the facts, observations, and impressions on which our mind then acts, are considered by us as nonselves. In love, for example, there are also two agents, one who loves, the other who is loved; this does not prevent us from reversing the proposition and saying that the person who loves is loved by the one that she loves, and that the one who is loved loves the one by whom she is loved. It is even only under these conditions that love exists in its fullness. Who, then, once more, would guarantee that we alone have thought, and that, when we describe this plant, when we analyse that rock, there is not in them something that looks at us?

  One says to me that this implies a contradiction. Why?… As thought can only result from an organic centralisation; as, thus, while I look at my hand, I am quite sure that my hand does not look at me, because my hand is only a part of the organism that produces thought in me, which includes all of my parts; so it is the same in plants and rocks, which are, like the hairs and the bones of my body, parts of the great organism (which perhaps thinks, if it does not sleep, though we know nothing of it), but which by themselves do not think.

  There we are. The analogies of existence induce us to suppose that, as there is in the organised being a common sensorium, an interdependent life, an intelligence in the service of all the members of which it is the resultant and which all express it; just as there is in nature a universal life, a soul of the world, which, if it is not acted on from outside, in the manner of our own, because there is no outside for it and because everything is in it, acts within, on itself, contrary to ours, and which is manifested by creating, as a mollusc creates its shell, that great organism of which we ourselves make part, poor individual selves that we are!

  This is only an induction, doubtless, a hypothesis, a utopia, that I do not intend to offer for more than it is worth. If I cannot swear that the world, that alleged non-self, does not think, then I can no more swear that it thinks: that would surpass my means of observation. All that I can say is that mind is prodigiously expended in this non-self, and that I am not the only self who admires it.

  Here, then, is what my conclusion will be.

  Instead of seeking the law of my philosophy in a relation between myself, which I consider as the summit of being, and that which is the most inferior in creation and that I take to be non-thinking, I will seek that law in a relation between myself and another self which is not me, between man and man. For I know that every man, my fellow, is the organic manifestation of a mind, is a self; I judge equally that animals, endowed with sensibility, instinct, even intelligence, although to a lesser degree, are also selves, of a lesser dignity, it is true, and placed at a lower degree on the scale, but created according to the same plan; and as I no more know of a manifest demarcation between the animals and the plants, or between those and the minerals, I ask myself if the inorganic beings are not still minds which sleep, selves in the embryonic state, or at least the members of a self of which I ignore the life and operations?

  Supposed every being thus to be both self and non-self, what can I do better, in this ontological ambiguity, than to take for the point of departure of my philosophy the relation, not of me to myself, in the manner of Fichte,589 as if I wanted to make the equation of my mind, simple, indivisible, incomprehensible being; but of myself to another which is my equal and is not me, which constitutes a dualism no longer metaphysical or antinomic, but a real duality, living and sovereign?

  By acting thus I do not court the risk of doing injury or grief to anyone; I have more the advantage, in descending from Humanity towards things, of never losing sight of the legitimate ensemble; finally, whatever the difference of natures which makes the object of my exploration, I am so much less exposed to being mistaken, that in the last analysis every being which is not equal to me, is dominated by me, makes a part of me, or else belongs to other selves like me, so that the law which governs the subjects between them is rationally presumed to govern the objects as well, since apart from that the subordination of the ones to the others would be impossible, and there would be contradiction between Nature and Humanity.

  Let us further observe that by that unassailable transaction, philosophy becomes entirely practical instead of speculative, or to put it better, the two points of view merge: the rule of my actions and the guarantee of my judgements is identical.

  What now is that ruling Idea, at once objective and subjective, real and formal, of nature and humanity, of speculation and sentiment, of logic and art, of politics and economics; practical reason and pure reason, which govern at once the world of creation and the world of philosophy, and which both are constructed; the idea finally which, dualistic by its formula, excludes nonetheless all anteriority and all superiority, and embraces in its synthesis the real and the ideal?

  It is the idea of Right, Justice.

  §VIII: JUSTICE, THE UNIVERSAL REASON OF THINGS—SCIENCE AND CONSCIENCE

  The people, in their laborious existence, even more than the philosophers in their speculations, have need of a guide: they need, we have said, a guide for their reason, a rule for their conscience, a superior point of view from which they may embrace their knowledge and their destiny. All this they found in religion.

  God, the eternal Word, had created man from clay and had animated him with his breath; God had taught how to him to speak; God had imprinted in his heart the ideas of the infinite, the eternal, the Just and the ideal; God had taught him religion, worship, and the mysteries; God had delivered to him the elements of all sciences by revealing the history of creation to him, making the animals appear before him and inviting him to name them, showing him the common origin of all peoples and the cause of their dispersion. It was God who had imposed on man the law of labour, created and sanctified the family, founded society, and separated the States, which he governed by his providence. God, finally, living and seeing, principle and goal, all-powerful, just and truthful, guaranteed man’s faith, and promised, after a time of trials on this earth, to reward him for his piety with a limitless happiness.

  Philosophy, which is the search for the reason of things, lost God in the process of seeking God’s reason; at the same time, a dispersion took hold of knowledge, doubt gripped men’s souls, and they became unable to think of anything but the origin of man and his final end. But this state of anguish could only be momentary: under better conditions, reason will render us what revelation had given us; and although this legitimate hope has not yet been f
ulfilled, we can judge, by a simple outline of the state of human knowledge, as to its conditions and its totality, as to how close it may be to that fulfilment. Is it so bad, after all, that something has always been lacking in our knowledge? Isn’t it enough for our security, for our dignity, that we see our intellectual wealth increase indefinitely?

  It thus is a question of assuring ourselves that Justice, the principle and the source of which we will from now on locate within ourselves, fulfils, as a critical and organic principle, the object of philosophy, and that consequently it can replace religion for us, to our advantage. Deprived of the support of heaven, man remains himself. Like Medea, he will say: “Myself, myself alone, and is that not enough?”590 Philosophy is for the affirmative: it awaits the certainty of its principles, the justification of its hopes. Let us see now.

  Since philosophy is the search for the reason of things, by including under the word things all the manifestations of the human being, and since, according to this definition, any search for the nature or the in-itself of things, for their substance and materiality, just as for any kind of absolute, is excluded from philosophy, it readily follows that the principle of certainty, the archetypal idea to which all our knowledge must be referred, must be, above all, a rational principle, that which is most frankly rational, that which is most eminently intelligible, that which is least a thing, if one can put it thus.

  The idea of Justice satisfies this first condition. Its most apparent character is to express a relationship that is all the more rational, one might say, to the extent that it is formed voluntarily, in full knowledge of the cause, by two reasonable beings, two persons. Justice is synallagmatic: it produces not merely the impression of the not-self upon the self and the action of the one upon the other, but an exchange between two selves who know one another as they each know themselves, and who swear, on their mutually guaranteed honour, an alliance in perpetuity. One will not find, in all the encyclopaedia of knowledge, an idea of this stature.

  But it is not enough for Justice to be the relation of two wills: it would not fulfil its office if it were that alone. It is equally necessary that it be reality and ideality; moreover, that it should preserve, with the power of synthesis that we have just recognised in it, a character of sufficient primordiality to serve simultaneously as the summit of the philosophical pyramid and as the principle of all knowledge. Again, Justice combines these advantages: it is the point of transition between the sensory and the intelligible, the real and the ideal, the concepts of metaphysics and the perceptions of experience.591

  It would be, indeed, a narrow understanding of Justice to imagine that it intervenes only in the fabrication of laws, that it has a place only in national assemblies and courts. Undoubtedly it is under this aspect of political sovereignty that it enters our thought and dominates mankind. But this Justice, with respect to which, in our relationship with our neighbours, we are especially preoccupied with enforcement, imposes itself with no less authority on the understanding and the imagination than it does on the conscience; its formula governs the whole world, and everywhere, if it is allowed to express itself in this way, it preaches to us by precept and example.

  Justice thus takes various names, according to the faculties to which it is addressed. Within the order of the conscience, the highest of all, it is JUSTICE properly speaking, ruler our rights and our duties; in the order of intelligence, logic, mathematics, etc, it is equality or equation; in the sphere of imagination, it is called ideal; in nature, it is balance. Justice is essential to each one of these categories of ideas or facts under a particular name and as an indispensable condition; to man alone, a complex being, whose spirit embraces in its unity the acts of freedom and the operations of intelligence, the things of nature and creations of the ideal, impose themselves synthetically with an authority that is always the same; and therefore the individual who, in his relationships to his fellows, neglects the laws of nature or mind, lacks Justice.

  A man asks: why? Because human society, different from the animal communities, is established on a constantly changing totality of synallagmatic relationships, and because, without speech, the determination of these relationships, and consequently legislation and Justice, would be impossible. Therefore, the solemn formula of speech is the sermon, the imprecation and the anathema; the liar is everywhere considered infamous, and among civilised people, the man who respects himself, according to the precept of the Gospel, eschews swearing: he gives his word. How many centuries will pass before we abolish this feudal shame, the legal oath?… It is through the influence of the same juridical sentiment and its dualistic formula that language tends to become more and more adequate to the idea, and that one notices there these innumerable dual forms (rhymes, parallelisms, agreements in kind, number and case, distiches, oppositions, antonymies, etc), which make grammar a system of couples, I would say almost transactions.

  Man reasons, and his logic is only a development of his grammar, of which it retains the copulative paces: however, as it occupies itself less with form than content, it more closely approaches Justice, of which it is, if you will allow me this expression, the secretary. Tell me, is it by chance that what is in grammar only a phrase, becomes in logic a judgement? And if grammar is the preparation for logic, is it less true to say that logic, having for its goal to teach us how to write the judgements of Justice correctly, is the preparation for jurisprudence?

  At the same time as he receives impressions and images of external objects, man, we have said, ascends, by virtue of the identity of his thought, to those higher concepts that are called transcendental, because they exceed the range of the senses, or metaphysical, as if they were a revelation of supernatural things. Here, once again, the dualism of Justice appears. While Kant, after having made the enumeration of his categories, distributed them into four groups, each one formed of a thesis and of an antithesis, balanced by a synthesis; Hegel, following this example, built his entire philosophy on a system of antinomies that produce one another, while being mistaken as to the role and value of the synthesis, revealed to us that great law which dominated his entire critique, namely that Justice, a pure concept as much as it is a fact of experience, is the muse of metaphysics.

  It was Plato, if I am not mistaken, who said that the beautiful is the splendour of the truth. This definition may please the artist, who asks only to be impressed; it is not enough for the philosopher, who wants to feel and to understand at the same time. It is certain that the ideal is a transcendent conception of reason, which elevates art, like religion and Justice, above real things and simple utility. But how is this idea of beauty formed in us? By what transition does our spirit rise from the imperfect and miserable aspects of reality to this divine contemplation of the ideal? It is an artist who teaches it to us: through Justice. The goal of art, said Raphael, is to render things, not absolutely such as nature presents them to us, but such as it should have made them, and such as we discover, in studying nature, that nature tends to make them without ever arriving at it. Being, reduced to its pure and just form, without excess or defect, without violence or softness: that is art. Anytime being, in its reality, approximates its idea in some thing, it becomes beautiful, it sparkles, and, without exceeding its limitations, it takes on the character of the infinite. Justness in form and expression, Justice in social life: the law is always the same. It is thereby that the man of genius and the man of property glorify themselves; this is the secret of the mysterious bond that links art with morality.

  Shall we speak of politics and its balances? Of political economy, of the endless division of functions, the balance of values, the relation of supply to demand, trade and its balance? Just as the concept of accuracy, i.e. of Justice applied to the shape of things, is the transition between the real and the ideal, so the notion of value is at once subjective and objective, and all of Justice is the transition between the world of nature and the world of society. Will we say, finally, that war, excessive, is only one investigatio
n, through the struggle of forces, of Justice?… But what good is it to insist on things that it is enough to name in order to see at once appear the principle which governs them and constitutes them, right? It is by his conscience, much more than by his understanding and his imagination, that man embraces God, the Universe and Humanity; it is that conscience, for any statement, which creates in him reason, of which even the name, according to etymology, means nothing but the justification of the fact by its causes, its circumstances, its medium, its elements, its time, its end, in word its idea, always Justice.

  Each one knows what satisfaction seizes the soul upon the clear apperception of a truth, upon the regular conclusion of a reasoning, the demonstrated certainty of an hypothesis. There is something emotional in this pleasure caused by the possession of truth, which is not pure intelligence, which is not impassioned, and that one can compare only with the joy of the triumph gained by virtue over vice. One also knows what heated controversy can exist between men of the most peaceful character with regard to questions in which their interests are by no means engaged. In all of this, I repeat, we can sense an element of will intricately mixed with the operations of understanding, and which, in my opinion, is nothing other than Justice intervening in the philosopher’s investigation and rejoicing in his success. Just so, the pure form or beauty, exact knowledge or truth, is still Justice.

  Conscience and science would thus be, at base, identical. What gives the sanction to the one is the other. What makes us exclaim, in a tone of satisfied pride or rather of satisfied conscience: It is obvious, is that the obviousness is not only in us an act of judgement, but an act of the conscience, a kind of stop in the last resort which defies the lie: It is obvious!

  The separation of science and conscience, like that of logic and right, is only a scholastic abstraction. In our soul, things do not occur thus: the certainty of knowledge is something more intimate to us, more emotional, more vital, than the logicians and the psychologists say. Also, as one said of the good man, that he could be eloquent, vir bonus dicendi peritus,592 because he had a conscience, pectus est quod disertos facit,593 one could also say that the wise man is incompatible with the dishonest man, and that which science builds in us is the conscience.