Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  To sum up, the federative system is the opposite of administrative and governmental hierarchy or centralisation by which one distinguished, ex oequo, imperial democracies, constitutional monarchies and unitary republics. Its fundamental, characteristic, law is as follows: In the federation, the attributes of the central authority become specialised and limited, decrease in number, in immediacy, and, if I dare to say, in intensity as the Confederation grows by the addition of new [member] States. In centralised governments on the contrary, the attributes of the supreme power increase, expand and immediately draw into the domain of the prince the affairs of provinces, communes, corporations and individuals, in direct proportion to the territorial area and to the size of the population. Hence under this crushing [weight] all liberty, not only communal and provincial but also individual and national, disappears.

  One consequence of this fact, by which I will end this chapter, is that since the unitary system is the opposite of the federative system, a confederation between big monarchies, all the more so between imperial democracies, is an impossible thing. States like France, Austria, England, Russia, Prussia, can make alliances or commercial treaties amongst themselves; they are reluctant to federate, firstly because their [organising] principle is against it and would put them in opposition to the federal pact; because, secondly, they would have to give up some of their sovereignty, and to recognise above them, at least for some cases, a referee. Their nature is to command, not to compromise or to obey. The Princes who, in 1813 were supported by the insurrection of the masses, were fighting for the liberties of Europe against Napoléon, and who later formed the Holy-Alliance,634 were not confederated: the absolutism of their power forbade them to take that title. They were, as in ’92, allied; history will not give them any other name. It is not the same for the Germanic Confederation presently in the middle being reformed, whose character of liberty and nationality threatens to erase one day the dynasties that hinder it.635

  CHAPTER VIII

  Progressive Constitution

  History and analysis, theory and empiricism, have led us, through the agitations of Liberty and Power, to the idea of political contract.

  Implementing this idea straightaway and trying to give an account of it, we recognised that the social contract par excellence was a contract of federation, that we have defined in these terms: A synallagmatic and commutative contract, for one or several determined objects, but whose essential condition is that the contracting parties always keep for themselves a greater amount of sovereignty and action than they give up.

  This is just the opposite of what happened in the old systems, monarchist, democratic and constitutional, where, by force of circumstances and the driving of principles, individuals and groups are supposed to abdicate their whole sovereignty into the hands of an imposed or elected authority, and yet keep less rights, keep less guarantees and initiative, than the burdens and duties that fall on them.

  This definition of the contract of federation is a huge step [forward], one which is going to give us the solution we have longed for.

  The political problem, as we said in the first Chapter, reduced to its simplest expression consists in finding the balance between two opposite elements, Authority and Liberty. Any false balance is immediately translated into disorder and ruin for the State, into oppression and misery for the citizens. In other words, anomalies or disruptions of the social order result from the antagonism of its principles; they will disappear when the principles are co-ordinated in such a way that they will no longer be able to do harm.

  To balance the two forces is to submit them to a law which, by keeping them at bay from one another, gets them to come to an agreement. What shall provide us with this new element, superior to Authority and Liberty, and render it by their mutual consent the dominant characteristic of the system? —The contract, whose terms make RIGHT and [which] imposes itself equally on the two rival powers.636

  But in a concrete and lively nature, such as society, Right cannot be reduced to a purely abstract notion, an indefinite aspiration of conscience, which would be to drag us back into fictions and myths. It is necessary, to establish society, to pose not simply an idea but a juridical act, to form a true contract. The men of ’89 sensed it, when they gave France a Constitution, and all the Powers that followed them felt the same. Unfortunately, if the will was good, the enlightenment was insufficient; until now the notary has failed to draw up the contract. We know what the spirit of it must be: let us try now to draft its terms.

  All the articles of a constitution can be reduced to a single article, the one that concerns the role and the competence of this great civil servant which has State as its name. Our national assemblies have dealt over and over again with the division and separation of powers, i.e., of the State’s faculties of action; as for the jurisdiction of the State itself, its size, its object, one can see that nobody was very worried about it. One thought about sharing, as was naively said by a minister in 1848; as for the thing to be shared, it generally appeared that the more there would be of it, the more beautiful the feast would be. And yet the definition of the role of the State is a matter of life or death for liberty, collective and individual.

  The contract of federation, whose essence is to always reserve more to the citizens than to the State, more to the municipal and provincial authorities than to the central authority, is the only thing that can put us on the path to truth.

  In a free society, the role of the State or Government is par excellence a role of legislation, of institution, of creation, of inauguration, of installation; its role as executive should be the minimum possible. In this respect, the name of executive power, by which we designate one of the aspects of the sovereign power, has oddly contributed to distorting ideas. The State is not an entrepreneur of public services, which would be to compare it to the companies that undertake the works of a city for a fixed price. The State, whether it enacts, acts or supervises, is the generator and the supreme director of the activity; if it sometimes gets [directly] involved, it is by way of first demonstration, to give impetus and set an example. The creation carried out, the installation or inauguration having been made, the State withdraws, relinquishing the operation of the new service to local authorities and citizens.

  It is the State that sets the weights and measures, that gives the units, the value and the divisions of monies. The examples provided, the first issue finished, the manufacturing of gold, silver and copper coin ceases to be a public function, a job for the State, a ministerial attribute; it is an industry left to towns, and there is nothing that would prevent it, just like the manufacturing of scales, weighting-machines, barrels and bottles, from being entirely free. The best market is the only law here. What is needed, in France, for gold and silver currency to be reputable of honest worth? A tenth of alloy and nine tenth of base metal. I want an inspector to watch and supervise the manufacturing: the role of the State goes no further.

  What I say about money, I repeat for a host of services, improperly left in the hands of the government: roads, canals, tobacco,637 posts, telegraphs, railways, etc. I understand, I admit, I call for the intervention of the State, when necessary, in all these great creations of public utility; I do not see the need to leave them in its hands once they have been delivered to the public. Such a concentration, according to me, constitutes a real excess of prerogatives. I asked in 1848 for State intervention in the founding of national banks, institutions of credit, of savings, of insurance, as with the railways: never has it crossed my mind that the State, having accomplished its work of creation, should forever remain a banker, an insurer, a transporter, etc. Indeed, I do not believe in the possibility of organising the education of the people without a great effort from the central authority, but I remain no less a partisan of the freedom of teaching,638 as I am of all liberties.639 I want the school to be as completely separated from the State as from the Church. If there is a Cour des comptes,640 formed as a statistics office to gather, check a
nd generalise all data, all transactions, all financial deals across the Republic, that is fine. But why should all the expenditures and takings go through the hands of a treasurer, unique collector or paymaster, ministry of State, when the State, by the nature of its function, must have only little or no service to render, and so little or no expenditures ?641 … Is it also really necessary that tribunals be dependent on the central authority? To dispense justice has been the highest attribute of the prince, I know it: but this attribute is a leftover of divine right; it would not be claimed by a constitutional king, with less reason by the head of an empire established on universal suffrage. Since the idea of Right, becoming human again, gets, as such, preponderance in the political system, the independence of the magistracy would be the necessary consequence of it. It is distasteful that Justice be considered as an attribute of central or federal authority; it can only be a delegation carried out by citizens to municipal authority, at the most provincial. Justice is the attribute of man that no raison d’État must deprive him of.—I do not even except the service of war from this rule: militias, armouries, fortresses, [should] go into the hands of federal authorities only in cases of war and for the special purpose of war; apart from that, soldiers and armaments remain in the hands of local authorities.642

  In a regularly organised society, all must be in continuous growth, science, industry, work, wealth, public health; liberty and morality must go at the same pace. There, movement, life does not stop for a minute. The main organ of this movement, the State, is always in action, because it continually has new needs to satisfy, new issues to solve. If its function of prime driving force and of high director is ceaseless, its works, on the other hand, do not repeat themselves. It is the highest expression of progress. But, what happens when, as we see it almost everywhere, as we almost always have seen it, it dwells on the services that it created itself and gives in to the temptation of monopolising? From founder, it makes itself worker; it no longer is the spirit of the collectivity, who creates it, directs it and enriches it, without imposing on it any trouble: it becomes a vast anonymous company, with six hundred thousand employees and with six hundred thousand soldiers, organised to do everything, and who, instead of helping the nation, instead of serving the citizens and the communes, dispossesses and pressurises them. Soon, corruption, embezzlement, slackening enter this system; busy supporting itself, increasing its prerogatives, multiplying its services and enlarging its budget, Power loses sight of its true role, falls into autocracy and failure to act, the social body suffers, and the nation, against historical law, starts to decline.

  Did we not point out, in Chapter VI, that in the evolution of States, Authority and Liberty are in a chronological and logical succession; that, moreover, the first is in continuous decline, the second is in accession, that the Government, expression of authority, is imperceptibly made subordinate by its representatives or organs of liberty, namely: the central Power by the deputies of the departments or provinces; the provincial authority by the delegates of the communes, and the municipal authority by the inhabitants; thus liberty aspires to make itself preponderant, authority to become servant to liberty, and the contractual principle to substitute itself everywhere, in public affairs, for the authoritarian principle?

  If these facts are true, the consequence cannot be doubted: it is that, according to the nature of things and the play of principles, Authority retreats and Liberty replaces it, but in a way that both follow each other without ever hurting one another, the constitution of society is essentially progressive, which means more and more liberal, and that this fate can only be fulfilled in a system where governmental hierarchy, instead of being put at its summit, is established right at its base, I mean in the federative system.

  The whole constitutional science is there: I summarise it in three proposals:1. Form groups of average size, each sovereign, and unite them by a pact of federation;

  2. Organise in each federated State government according to law of separation of organs; I mean: separate everything in the power that can be separated, define everything that can be defined, distribute between different organs or civil servants everything that can be separated and defined; leave nothing undivided; surround the public administration by all conditions of publicity and control;

  3. Instead of absorbing the federated States or provincial and municipal authorities into a central authority, reduce its attributes to a simple rule of general initiative, mutual guarantee and supervision, whose decrees receive their execution only on the approval [visa] of the confederated governments and by agents under their orders, like, in a constitutional monarchy, every order emanating from the king must, to be implemented, be countersigned by a minister.

  Most certainly, the separation of powers, such as it was practised under the 1830 Charter, is a beautiful institution and of a high level, but which is puerile to restrict to the members of a cabinet. It is not between seven or eight elected people, emerging from a parliamentary majority and criticised by an opposing minority, that the government of a country must be shared, it is between the provinces and the communes: otherwise political life is abandoned in the peripheries for the centre, and stagnation overcomes the nation which has become hydrocephalic.643

  The federative system is applicable to all nations and eras, since humanity is progressive in all generations and all races, and the politics of federation, which is par excellence the politics of progress, consists in calling each population, at any given time, to follow a regime of decreasing authority and centralisation, corresponding to their state of consciousness and morals.

  CHAPTER X

  Political Idealism: Efficiency Of The Federal Guarantee

  An observation to be made in general on moral and political sciences is that the difficulty of their problem comes above all from the figurative way basic reason designed their elements. In the popular imagination politics, as well as morals, is a mythology. There all becomes fiction, symbol, mystery, idol. And it is this idealism which, adopted with confidence by philosophers as an expression of reality, causes them so much embarrassment later.

  The People, in the vagueness of its thought, sees itself as a gigantic and mysterious being, and everything in its language seems to keep it thinking of its indivisible unity. It is called the People, the Nation, i.e. the Multitude, the Mass; it is the true Sovereign, the Lawmaker, the Power, the Ruler, the Homeland, the State; it has its Conventions, its Ballot, its Conferences, its Demonstrations, its Pronouncements, its Plebiscites, its Direct Legislation, sometimes its Judgements and its Executions, its Oracles, its Voice, like thunder, the grand voice of God. It feels as vast, irresistible, tremendous as it loathes divisions, scissions, minorities. Its ideal, its most delectable dream, is unity, identity, uniformity, concentration; it curses as injurious to its Majesty all that would divide its will, break up its mass, create in it diversity, plurality, divergence.

  All mythology presupposes idols, and the People never lacks them. Like the Israelites in the desert, it improvises gods when nobody cares to give it any; it has its incarnations, its messiah, its messengers sent by God [Dieudonnés ]. It is the celebrated military leader,644 it is the glorious king, conquering and magnificent, like to the sun, or even the revolutionary tribune: Clovis, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, Napoléon, Victor-Emmanuel, Garibaldi. How many, to get on the pedestal, are only waiting for a change of opinion, a passing fancy of fortune! For these idols, most of them also empty of ideas, as devoid of conscience as itself, the People is zealous and jealous; it does not suffer itself to be disputed, to be contradicted, above all to be haggled with over power. Do not touch its anointed ones or it will treat you as sacrilegious.

  Full of its myths, and considering itself as a mainly undivided collectivity, how would the People understand in one leap the relationship of the citizen to society? How, under its inspiration, would the men of State who represent it produce the true conceptions of government? Wherever unive
rsal suffrage reigns in its naivety, one can predict in advance that everything will be done in the sense of indivisibility. Since the People are the collectivity that holds all authority and all right, universal suffrage, to be sincere in its expression, will have to be itself undivided, i.e. elections will have to be carried out by the list system: there even were in 1848 some unitarists who were asking for a single list for the 86 departments. From this undivided ballot sprung up an undivided assembly, deliberating and legislating like a single man. In the case of a division in the vote, it is the majority that represents, without any reduction, national unity. From this majority will emerge in its turn an undivided Government which, taking its powers from the indivisible Nation, is appointed to collectively and jointly govern and manage without [regard for] local feelings or parochial interests. This is how centralisation, imperialism, communism, the absolutist system,—all these words are synonyms,—ensue from popular idealism; that is how in the social pact, conceived after the manner of the Jacobins and Rousseau, the citizens resign their sovereignty, and how the commune, [and] above the commune the department and the province, are absorbed into the central authority, becoming mere agencies under the immediate direction of the ministry.