Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic.
Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property. Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange.
Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even proposed to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected--only two votes were recorded for it--he tried to establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed.
Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy."