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Thinkers

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Anarchist · Europe · 1809 to 1865

French thinker who said property is theft, and who was the first to call himself an anarchist.

What it is

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 to 1865) was a French socialist, writer and thinker, often counted among the founders of anarchism. He is known for the slogan "property is theft" and gave the name mutualism to his own form of anarchism, the idea that workers should organise their own production through free associations.

He was born in Besançon, the son of a cooper. He worked in printing, taught himself languages, and met the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. His first major book, What Is Property?, appeared in 1840 and contains his best-known line. In it he called himself an anarchist and used the word for the absence of a master or sovereign. He died in 1865.

The main ideas

  • Property is theft. The famous line is a charge against property that lets one person profit from another's labour. He also spoke of property as liberty, and said these two sayings did not contradict each other. The farmer's or craftsman's hold on the land and tools he works, he thought, protects freedom.
  • Mutualism. Instead of employers and wages, he proposed workers' associations and cooperatives, exchanging with one another on fair terms.
  • Federalism. He described his politics as federal. In The General Idea of the Revolution (1851) he describes a society without central authority, made of local associations that deal with each other by free agreement.
  • Against rulers and against authoritarian socialism. He rejected the centralised state, and he also rejected authoritarian forms of socialism.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a group of weavers who own their looms together, decide their own hours, and sell their cloth to other workers' groups at a fair price, with nobody outside the group taking a share. Proudhon would call this mutualism at work. This is an illustration of the kind of arrangement he proposed, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • What Is Property? (1840) is his first major book, with the line that made him known.
  • Warning to Proprietors (1842) led to his trial. He was acquitted, because the jury said it could not understand his arguments.
  • The System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty (1846) drew a book-length reply from Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. The quarrel is counted among the sources of the later split between anarchists and Marxists.
  • Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849) and The General Idea of the Revolution (1851) set out his picture of a revolution without a new ruler.

Questions and criticism

  • How to read the slogan. It is fair to ask how much of his case rests on the line and how much on his distinction between property that exploits and the possession of the land and tools one works.
  • Small producers in a large world. His picture centres on independent artisans, farmers and small cooperatives. It is fair to ask how it would work for large factories.
  • Anarchist and conservative. It is fair to ask how his defence of liberty fits with his other positions, and which of his sayings best sums him up.

Close neighbours

The pages on Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Stirner sit near this one. Bakunin and Kropotkin were later anarchists he influenced, and Marx wrote a book-length reply to one of his books.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Mikhail Bakunin · He was inspired by Proudhon's ideas of free federation and mutual exchange.
  • Peter Kropotkin · He took up the anarchist tradition that Proudhon began.

Reacted against by

  • Karl Marx · Marx answered his book on poverty with a sharp reply and broke with him.

Other Anarchist thinkers

Sources we used

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