Key Arguments

• He questions whether property can be grounded in universal consent and answers categorically in the negative: "However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I say, no."
• He insists that even if a contract in favor of property were drafted by the greatest jurists and signed by all humanity, it would have no validity in justice or law: "Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J. J. Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal."
• He argues that certain rights are inalienable: "Man can no more give up labor than liberty." Labor is treated as a natural right of the same order as liberty.
• Recognizing territorial property is defined as a renunciation of this inalienable right, because it is a renunciation of access to the means of labor: "Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood."
• Since a contract that traffics in an inalienable natural right is intrinsically unjust, any attempt to base property on consent is void; thus, universal consent cannot constitute a legitimate juridical cause of property.

Source Quotes

His language is such that it may mean either of these things, or both at once; which entitles us to assume that the author intended to say, “The right of property resulting originally from the exercise of the will, the stability of the soil permitted it to be applied to the land, and universal consent has since sanctioned this application.” However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I say, no. Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J. J.

However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I say, no. Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J. J. Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal. Man can no more give up labor than liberty.

Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal. Man can no more give up labor than liberty. Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood.

Man can no more give up labor than liberty. Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood. But I wish that this consent, of which so much is made, had been given, either tacitly or formally.

Key Concepts

• However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I say, no.
• Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J. J. Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal.
• Man can no more give up labor than liberty.
• Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood.

Context

Beginning of § 2, where Proudhon examines J.-B. Say’s ambiguous grounding of property and directly attacks the notion that even unanimous, formal social consent could justly establish a right of property in land.