Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Un Proudhon certes foncierement anarchiste, federaliste, anti-etatiste pour tout dire, mais parfois plus proche d'etre un liberal anticapitaliste et antibourgeois qu'un socialiste et dont le combat constant pour l'emancipation de la classe ouvriere va de pair avec une rude opposition au communisme. Voici le Proudhon (1809-1865) que ce volume devoile en bousculant nombre d'idees convenues a son sujet: entre autres, que la propriete est loin d'etre forcement un vol . Ces textes selectionnes, ordonnes et presentes par Vincent Valentin, maitre de conferences a l'universite Paris-I, soulignent le caractere complexe, souvent paradoxal et evolutif, d'une ?uvre foisonnante a laquelle le lecteur contemporain n'a plus directement acces depuis longtemps. Et dont la conception vive de la liberte individuelle qui l'irrigue donne toujours a penser.

This is a new 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.