Ideas from What Is Property?
410 ideas
Sample Ideas
- Despite officially condemning the doctrine of equality of fortunes, the economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, in Proudhon’s view, shares the same egalitarian principles: Blanqui’s lectures and investigations are 'a perpetual war upon property and inequality of fortunes' and culminate in formulas of progress and equality that inspire the people and alarm the wicked.
- Despite his tactical accommodation to monarchy, Proudhon confesses his personal republican simplicity and criticizes the French as a vain, distinction‑seeking people whose democratic leaders often harbor monarchical ambitions and aristocratic manners.
- Communism, far from abolishing property, simply transfers it to the community or State, which becomes absolute proprietor of goods, persons, and wills; this leads to the exploitation of the strong by the weak, suppression of individuality and free association, violation of conscience, and a new form of slavery and inequality.
- Proudhon denies any real hierarchy of human worth based on talents, arguing that individuals possess only partial, specialized aptitudes, while true human value lies in 'heart, courage, will, virtue'; since we are equal in what makes us human, differences in secondary faculties cannot justify privilege or claims of superiority over the proletariat.
- Human sociability is structurally more difficult than animal sociability because the infinite variety of human talents generates an infinite variety of wills and characters, so that while man is instinctively destined for society, his ever‑varying personality continually resists and complicates association.
- There is a profound psychological antagonism in us: we hate property, which he has argued is impossible, yet still want to possess it; and we are obsessed with equality, which does not exist, yet we do not know how to attain it.
- The conflict between colonial cane sugar and domestic beet sugar shows that protecting one form of property invariably violates another, so any attempt by the state to regulate or equalize market conditions ends up attacking property rights somewhere, confirming the impossibility of property.
- State conversion of public bonds and the civil‑law doctrine that perpetual annuities are redeemable demonstrate that, under a regime that proclaims property as its principle, the State nevertheless violates property rights, behaving like a bankrupt and betraying its role as insurer and guardian of property.
- Proudhon draws a sharp juridical and conceptual distinction between 'possession' (natural, individual right of use) and 'property' (a later, complex right to draw income from others’ labor), and argues that defenders like Cousin commit a verbal sophism when they infer the legitimacy of property from the natural necessity of possession.
- Proudhon explains Lamennais’s philosophical weakness by arguing that nature never makes a complete man: Lamennais is primarily a poet whose exuberant, vehement style and powerful imagination exclude the analytic rigor required of a true metaphysician, illustrating how certain faculties develop at the expense of their opposites.