The Nature and Destination of
Government

There must, says holy Scripture, be factions [partis] [1]: For
there must be heresies [Oportet enim hoereses esse]. –
Terrible. There must! writes Bossuet [2] in profound
adoration, without daring to search for the reason behind
this There must!

A little reflection has revealed to us the principle and the
significance of factions: the point is to know their goal and
their end.

All men are equal and free: society, by nature and
destination, is thus autonomous, one might say,
ungovernable. If the sphere of activity of each citizen is
determined by the natural division of labor and the choice
one makes of a profession, social functions are combined
so as to produce an effect of harmony, and the order
results from the free action of all; there is no government.
Whosoever lays a hand on me in order to govern me is a
usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy.

But social physiology does not at first contain this
egalitarian organization: the idea of Providence, among
the first to appear in society, is repugnant to it. Equality
happens to us by a succession of tyrannies and
governments, in which Freedom is continually in a
struggle with absolutism, like Israel with Jehovah.
Equality is thus born, for us, continually out of inequality.
Freedom's father is Government.
Once the first men assembled on the edges of the forests to
found the first societies, they did not say to one another,
as shareholders of a company [commandite]: “Let us
organize our rights and our duties in such a way as to
provide each of us with the greatest amount of well-being,
and to bring along our equality and our independence as
well.” So much reason was beyond the grasp of the first
men, and in contradiction with the theory of those
preaching revelation. The language we used was quite
different: “Let us constitute among ourselves an authority
that will watch over and govern us, Constituamus super nos
regem! It is in this way that our peasants heard it, on
December 10, 1848, when they gave their votes to Louis
Bonaparte. The voice of the people is the voice of power,
while waiting for it to become the voice of liberty. Also, all
authority is by divine right, Omnis potestas à Deo, says
Saint Paul.

Authority, then, behold that which was the first social
idea of human kind. And the second was to work
immediately for the abolition of authority, each
person wanting to make it an instrument to his or her
own freedom against the freedom of others: such is
the work and the destiny of Factions.

Authority was not long inaugurated in the world, when it
became the object of universal competition. Authority,
Government, Power, State, – these words all designate the
same thing; – each sees in them the means to oppress and
exploit his fellows. Absolutists, doctrinaires, demagogues
and socialists, all incessantly turn their regard to authority,
as if towards their shared magnetic pole.
From this comes the aphorism of the radical faction,
which the doctrinaires and absolutists assuredly
would not disavow: *The social revolution is the goal; the
political revolution* (that is to say, the change of
authority) *is the means*. This means: "Give us the right
of life and death over your persons and your
belongings, and we will make you free!"..For more
than six thousand years the kings and priests have
been repeating that line!

Thus the Government and the factions, are, reciprocally
one to the other, Cause, End and Means. They exist for
each other; they have a common destiny: it is to call the
populace to emancipation each day; it is to energetically
solicit their initiative at the expense of their faculties; it is
to mold [façonner] their minds and push them continually
towards progress by prejudice, by restrictions, and with a
calculated resistance to all their ideas, to all their needs.
You will not do this; you will abstain from that: the
Government, no matter which faction reigns, has never
known how to say anything else. *Interdiction* has been,
since Eden, the educational system of humanity. But, once
man reaches the age of majority, the Government and the
Factions must disappear. This conclusion arrives with the
same logical force, the same necessary tendency as we saw
socialism come out of absolutism, philosophy be born of
religion, and equality find purchase [se poser] on
inequality itself.

When, by philosophical analysis, one wants to take
account of authority, of its principle, its forms, its effects,
one recognizes quickly enough that the constitution of
authority, spiritually and temporally, is nothing other
than a preliminary organism [organisme préparatoire], in
essence parasitic and corruptible, incapable of producing
anything by itself but tyranny and misery, whatever form
it takes, whatever ideas it represents. Philosophy affirms
in consequence that, contrary to faith, the constitution of
authority over the people is but a transitional
establishment, that power not being a conclusion of
science, but a product of spontaneity, disintegrates as
soon as it is discussed, that, far from strengthening and
growing with time, as suppose the rival factions that
besiege it, it must be reduced indefinitely and be absorbed
into the organization of industry. In consequence, it must
not be placed on, but under society; and, turning the
aphorism of the radicals on its head, it concludes: *The
political revolution, the abolition of authority among men, is
the goal, the social revolution is the means.*

It is for this reason, adds the philosopher, that all factions,
without exception, as much as they affect power, are
variations of absolutism, and that there will not be
freedom for citizens, order for societies, unity among
workers, until the renunciation of authority has replaced
the political catechism of faith in authority.

No more factions;

No more authority;

Absolute freedom for man and citizen.

In three phrases, I have made my political and social
profession of faith.
It is in this spirit of governmental negation that one day I
spoke thus to a man who, though he was of rare
intelligence, had the weakness of wanting to be a minister:

"Conspire with us for the demolition of the
government. Make yourself a revolutionary for the
transformation of Europe and the world, and remain
a journalist. (*Représentant du Peuple*, June 5, 1848)

He replied:

"There are two ways of being a revolutionary: *from above*, which is to say the revolution by initiative, by intelligence, by progress, by ideas; – *from below*, which is to say the revolution by insurrection, by force, by desperation, by throwing cobble stones.

"I was, I still am a revolutionary *from above*, I have never been, I never will be a revolutionary *from below*.

"Do not count on me to ever conspire for the demolition of any government, my spirit [esprit] would refuse. It is open to but one thought: improve the government." (*Presse*, June 6, 1848).

There is in this distinction, *from above, from below*, much rattling and very little truth. Mr. de Girardin, in expressing himself thus, thought he was saying something as new as it was profound. He has only reproduced the eternal illusion of demagogues who, thinking that they were advancing revolutions, with the help of those in
power, have only ever managed to push them back. Let us
examine Mr. de Girardin's thought more closely.

It pleases this ingenious publicist to call a revolution by
initiative, intelligence, progress and ideas, *a revolution from
above*; it pleases him to call a revolution by insurrection
and despair, *a revolution from below*. It is precisely the
opposite which is true.

*From above*, in the thought of the author that I cite, is
evidently the power; *from below* means the people. On one
side, the action of the government, on the other, the
initiative of the masses. What is at issue, then, is which of
these two initiatives, that of the government and that of
the people, is more intelligent, more progressive, more
peaceful.

But, the revolution from above is inevitably – I will say the
reason why later – a revolution by the capricious pleasure
[bon plaisir] of the prince, by the arbitrariness of a minister,
by the tentative groping [tâtonnements] of an assembly, by
the violence of a club; it is revolution by dictatorship and
despotism.

Louis XIV, Napoleon, Charles X practiced it thus; so Mr.
Guizot, Louis Blanc, Leon Faucher want it. The whites, the
blues, the reds, they are all in agreement on this point.

The revolution by the initiative of the masses is a
revolution by concerted citizens, by the experience of
workers, by the diffusion of enlightenment – a revolution
by freedom. Condorcet, Turgot, Robespierre sought the
revolution from below, real democracy. One of the men
who revolutionized the most, and who governed the least was Saint Louis. France, at the time of Saint Louis, made herself what she is: like a grapevine grows its buds, she produced her lords and her vassals: When the king published his famous rules, he was nothing but the recorder of the public wills.

Socialism has given in completely to the illusion of
radicalism. The divine Plato, over two thousand years ago,
is a sobering [triste] example. Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen,
Cabet, Louis Blanc, all partizans of the organization of
work by the State, by capital, by any authority, call for,
like my Mr. de Girardin, the revolution from above.
Instead of teaching the people how to organize themselves,
to appeal to their experience and their reason, they
demand power from them. In what way do they differ
from the despots? They are also utopian, like all despots:
the latter cannot last, the former cannot take root.

The implication is that the Government can never be
revolutionary, and for the very simple reason that it is
government. Only society, the mass of the people
penetrated by intelligence, can revolutionize itself,
because only it can rationally deploy its spontaneity,
analyze its situation, explain the mystery of its destiny
and its origin, change its faith and its philosophy; because
it alone, ultimately, is capable of struggling against its
author, to produce its fruit. Governments are the scourges
of God, established to discipline the world; and you want
them to destroy themselves, to create freedom, to make
revolutions!
It cannot be that way. All revolutions from the coronation of the first king to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were accomplished by the spontaneity of the people. Governments have always impeded [empêché], always suppressed [comprimé], always struck with force [frappé], never have they revolutionized anything. Their role is not to bring about movement, but to hold it back. Even if they were to have the revolutionary science, social science, to which they are averse, they could not apply it, they would not have the right. It would first be necessary to disseminate their science among the people, so that they could obtain the consent of the citizens; to expect this is to misunderstand the nature of authority and power.

The facts come to confirm the theory here. The nations which are most free are those where the power has the least initiative, where its role is the most restrained: let us cite only the United States of America, Switzerland, England, Holland. On the contrary, the most subjugated nations are those where the power is the best organized and the strongest, we can witness. And yet we complain ceaselessly about not being governed, we demand always a stronger power, always stronger!

Long ago the church said, speaking like a tender mother: Everything for the people, but everything by the priests.

The monarchy came after the church: Everything for the people, but everything by the prince.

The doctrinaires : Everything for the people, but everything by the bourgeoisie.
The radicals have not changed the principles for having
changed the formula: Everything for the people, but
everything by the state.

It's always the same governmentalism, the same
communism.

Who would dare say finally: All for the people, even the
government? – All for the people: Agriculture, commerce,
industry, philosophy, religion, police, etc. All by the
people: the government, religion, just as much as
agriculture and commerce.

Democracy is the abolition of all powers, spiritual and
temporal, legislative, executive, judiciary, proprietary.
Doubtless it is not the Bible that reveals it, but the logic of
societies, the chain reaction of revolutionary acts; it is all
modern philosophy.

Following Mr. de Lamartine, agreeing on this with Mr. de
Genoude, it is for the government to say *I want*. The
country has but to respond *I consent*.

And centuries of experience answers them, saying that the
best governments are those which are most successful at
rendering themselves useless. Do we need parasites to
work and priests to speak to God? We have no more need
of the elected officials who govern us.

The exploitation of man by man, someone said, is theft.
Well, then! The government of man by man is servitude.
And all positive religion, finding its end point in the
dogma of papal infallibility, is nothing other than the
worship of man by man – idolatry.

Absolutism, founding, all at once, the power of the altar,
the throne, and the bank, has multiplied the network of
chains on humanity. After the exploitation of man by man,
after the government of man by man, after the worship of
man by man, we have yet still:

The judgment of man by man,

The condemnation of man by man,

And to finish the series, the punishment of man by
man.

These religious, political, and judiciary institutions, of
which we are so proud, we must respect and obey until,
by the progress of time, they wither and fall, like fruit falls
during its season. They are the instruments of our
apprenticeship, visible signs of the governance of Instinct
over humanity, the weakened, but not disfigured
remnants of the bloody customs that signal our base age.
Anthropophagy has long since disappeared, but not
without the resistance of authority, with its atrocious rites:
anthropophagy subsists everywhere in the spirit of our
institutions, I attest it in the sacrament of the Eucharist
and the penal code.

Philosophical reason repudiates this symbolism of savages.
It proscribes these exaggerated forms of *human respect*.
And yet it does not claim, with the radicals and the
doctrinaires, that we can undertake this reform by
legislative authority; it does not concede that anyone has
the right to prosecute the good of the people, in spite of
the people, or that it be lawful to liberate a nation that
wants to be governed. Philosophy only puts its trust in
reforms coming out of the free will of societies: the only
revolutions that it admits are those which precede from
the initiative of the masses: it denies, in the most absolute
manner, the revolutionary competency of governments.

In summary:

If we consult only faith, the schism [scission] of society
appears as the terrible effect of the original fall of man.
That is what Greek mythology expressed by the fable of
the warriors born of snake's teeth who all killed each
other at birth. God, according to this myth, left the
government of humanity in the hands of antagonistic
factions, such that discord establish its reign on earth, and
that man learn, under perpetual tyranny, how to turn his
thought towards another plane of existence [séjor].

Before reason, governments and factions are naught but
the staging of the fundamental concepts of society, a
realization of abstractions, a metaphysical pantomime
whose meaning is FREEDOM.

I have made my profession of faith. You know the
characters who, in this account of my political life, must
play the principal roles. You know what subject they
represent. Be attentive to what I will now recount to you.
# The State: Its Nature, Object, and Destiny

Translated by Benjamin R. Tucker

The Revolution of February raised two leading questions: one economic, the question of labor and property; the other political, the question of government or the State.

On the first of these questions the socialistic democracy is substantially in accord. They admit that it is not a question of the seizure and division of property, or even of its repurchase. Neither is it a question of dishonorably levying additional taxes on the wealthy and property-holding classes, which, while violating the principle of property recognized in the constitution, would serve only to overturn the general economy and aggravate the situation of the proletariat. The economic reform consists, on the one hand, in opening usurious credit to competition and thereby causing capital to lose its income,—in other words, in identifying, in every citizen to the same degree, the capacity of the laborer and that of the capitalist; on the other hand, in abolishing the whole system of existing taxes, which fall only on the laborer and the poor man, and replacing them all by a single tax on capital, as an insurance premium.

By these two great reforms social economy is reconstructed from top to bottom, commercial and industrial relations are inverted, and the profits, now assured to the capitalist, return to the laborer. Competition, now anarchical and subversive, becomes emulative and fruitful; markets no longer being wanting,
the workingman and employer, intimately connected,
have nothing more to fear from stagnation or suspension.
A new order is established upon the old institutions
abolished or regenerated.

On this point the revolutionary course is laid out; the
meaning of the movement is known. Whatever
modification may appear in practice, the reform will be
effected according to these principles and on these bases;
the Revolution has no other issue. The economic problem,
then, may be considered solved.

It is far from being the same with the political
problem,—that is, with the disposal to be made in the
future, of government and the State. On this point the
question is not even stated; it has not been recognized by
the public conscience and the intelligence of the masses.
The economic Revolution being accomplished, as we have
just seen, can government, the State, continue to exist?
Ought it to continue to exist? This no one, either in
democracy or out of it, dares to call in question; and yet it
is the problem which, if we would escape new
catastrophes, must next be solved.

We affirm, then, and as yet we are alone in affirming, that
with the economic Revolution, no longer in dispute, the
State must entirely disappear; that this disappearance of
the State is the necessary consequence of the organization
of credit and the reform of taxation; that, as an effect of
this double innovation government becomes first useless
and then impossible; that in this respect it is in the same
category with feudal property, lending at interest,
absolute and constitutional monarchy, judicial institutions,
etc., all of which have served in the education of liberty, but which fall and vanish when liberty has arrived at its fullness. Others, on the contrary, in the front ranks of whom we distinguish Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux, maintain that, after the economic revolution, it is necessary to continue the State, but in an organized form, furnishing however, as yet no principle or plan for its organization. For them the political question, instead of being annihilated by identification with the economic question always subsists, they favor an extension of the prerogatives of the State, of power, of authority, of government. They change names only; for example, instead of master-State they say servant-State, as if a change of words sufficed to transform things! Above this system of government, about which nothing is known, hovers a system of religion whose dogma is equally unknown, whose ritual is unknown, whose object, on earth and in heaven, is unknown.

This, then, is the question which at present divides the socialistic democracy, now in accord, or nearly so, on other matters: Must the State continue to exist after the question of labor and capital shall be practically solved? In other words, shall we always have, as we have had hitherto, a political constitution apart from the social constitution?

We reply in the negative. We maintain that, capital and labor once identified, society exists by itself, and has no further need of government. We are, therefore, as we have more than once announced, anarchists. Anarchy is the condition of existence of adult society, as hierarchy is the
condition of primitive society. There is a continual
progress in human society from hierarchy to anarchy.

Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux affirm the contrary. In
addition to their capacity of socialists they retain that of
politicians; they are men of government and authority,
statesmen.

To settle the difference, we have, then, to consider the
State, no longer from the point of view of the old society,
which naturally and necessarily produced it, and which
approaches its end, but from the point of view of the new
society, which is, or must be, the result of the two
fundamental and correlative reforms of credit and
taxation.

Now if we prove that, from this last point of view, the
State, considered in its nature rests on a thoroughly false
hypothesis; that, in the second place, considered in its
object, the State finds no excuse for its existence save in a
second hypothesis, equally false; that, finally, considered
in the reasons for its continuance, the State again can
appeal only to an hypothesis as false as the two
others,—these three points cleared up, the question will be
settled, the State will be regarded as a superfluous, and
consequently harmful and impossible, thing; government
will be a contradiction.

Let us proceed at once with the analysis:—

# I. Of the nature of the State
"What is the State?" asks Louis Blanc.

And he replies: —

"The State, under monarchical rule, is the power of one man, the tyranny of a single individual.

"The State, under oligarchical rule, is the power of a small number of men, the tyranny of a few.

"The State, under aristocratic rule, is the power of a class, the tyranny of many.

"The State, under anarchical rule is the power of the first comer who happens to be the most intelligent and the strongest; it is the tyranny of chaos.

"The State, under democratic rule, is the power of all the people, served by their elect, it is the reign of liberty."

Of the twenty-five or thirty thousand readers of Louis Blanc, perhaps there are not ten to whom this definition of the State did not seem conclusive, and who do not repeat, after the master: The State is the power of one, of a few, of many, of all, or of the first comer, according as the word State is prefaced by one of these other adjectives,—monarchical, oligarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or anarchical. The delegates of the Luxembourg—who think themselves robbed, it seems, when any one allows himself to hold an opinion different from theirs on the meaning and tendencies of the Revolution of February—in a letter that has been made public, have done me the honor to inform me that they
regard Louis Blanc's answer as quite triumphant, and that I can say nothing in reply. It would seem that none of the citizen-delegates ever have studied Greek. Otherwise, they would have seen that their master and friend, Louis Blanc, instead of defining the State, has only translated into French the Greek words monos, one; aligoï, a few; aristoi, the great; démos, the people; and the privative a, which means no. It is by the use of these qualifying terms that Aristotle has distinguished the various forms of the State, which is designated by the word archê, authority, government, State. We ask pardon of our readers, but it is not our fault if the political science of the Luxembourg does not go beyond etymology.

And mark the artifice! Louis Blanc, in his translation, only had to use the word tyranny four times, tyranny of one, tyranny of many, etc., and to avoid it once, power of the people, served by their elect, to win applause. Every state save the democratic, according to Louis Blanc, is tyranny. Anarchy especially receives a peculiar treatment; it is the power of the first comer who happens to be the most intelligent and the strongest; it is the tyranny of chaos. What a monster must be this first comer, who, first comer that he is, nevertheless happens to be the most intelligent and the strongest, and who exercises his tyranny in chaos! After that who could prefer anarchy to this charming government of all the people, served so well, as we know, by their elect? How overwhelming it is, to be sure! at the first blow we find ourselves flat on the ground. O rhetorician! thank God for having created for your express benefit, in the nineteenth century, such stupidity as that of your so-called delegates of the working classes; otherwise
you would have perished under a storm of hisses the first
time you touched a pen.

What is the State? This question must be answered. The
list of the various forms of the State, which Louis Blanc,
after Aristotle, has prepared, has taught us nothing. As for
Pierre Leroux, it is not worth while to interrogate him; he
would tell us that the question is inconsiderate; that the
State has always existed; that it always will exist,—the
final reason of conservatives and old women.

The State is the EXTERNAL constitution of the social
power.

By this external constitution of its power and sovereignty,
the people does not govern itself; now one individual,
now several, by a title either elective or hereditary, are
charged with governing it, with managing it affairs, with
negotiating and compromising in its name; in a word,
with performing all the acts of a father of a family, a
guardian, a manager, or a proxy, furnished with a general,
absolute, and irrevocable power of attorney.

This external constitution of the collective power, to which
the Greeks gave the name archê, sovereignty, authority,
government, rests then on this hypothesis: that a people,
that the collective being which we call society, cannot
govern itself, think, act, express itself, unaided, like beings
endowed with individual personality; that, to do these
things, it must be represented by one or more individuals,
who, by any title whatever, are regarded as custodians of
the will of the people, and its agents. According to this
hypothesis, it is impossible for the collective power, which
belongs essentially to the mass, to express itself and act
directly, without the mediation of organs expressly
established and, so to speak, posted ad hoc. It seems, we
say,—and this is the explanation of the constitution of the
State in all its varieties and forms,—that the collective
being, society, existing only in the mind, cannot make
itself felt save through monarchical incarnation,
aristocratic usurpation, or democratic mandate;
consequently, that all special and personal manifestation
is forbidden it.

Now it is precisely this conception of the collective being,
of it life, its action, its unity, its individuality, its
personality,—for society is a person, understand! just as
entire humanity is a person,—it is this conception of the
collective human being that we deny today; and it is for
that reason that we deny the State also, that we deny
government, that we exclude from society, when
economically revolutionized, every constitution of the
popular power, either without or within the mass, by
hereditary royalty, feudal institution, or democratic
delegation.

We affirm, on the contrary, that the people, that society,
that the mass, can and ought to govern itself by itself; to
thing, act, rise, and halt, like a man; to manifest itself, in
fine, in its physical, intellectual, and moral individuality,
without the aid of all these spokesmen, who formerly
were despots, who now are aristocrats, who from time to
time have been pretended delegates, fawners on or
servants of the crowd, and whom we call plainly and
simply popular agitators, demagogues.
In short:

We deny government and the State, because we affirm
that which the founders of States have never believed in,
the personality and autonomy of the masses.

We affirm further that every constitution of the State has
no other object than to lead society to this condition of
autonomy; that the different forms of the State, from
absolute monarchy to representative democracy, are all
only middle terms, illogical and unstable positions,
serving one after another as transitions or steps to liberty,
and forming the rounds of the political ladder upon which
societies mount to self-consciousness and self-possession.

We affirm, finally, that this anarchy, which expresses, as
we now see, the highest degree of liberty and order at
which humanity can arrive, is the true formula of the
Republic, the goal towards with the Revolution or
February urges us; so that between the Republic and the
government, between universal suffrage and the State,
there is a contradiction.

These systematic affirmations we establish in two ways:
first, by the historical and negative method,
demonstrating that no establishment of authority, no
organization of the collective force from without, is
henceforth possible for us. This demonstration we
commenced in the "Confessions of a Revolutionist," in
reciting the fall of all the governments which have
succeeded one another in France for sixty years,
discovering the cause of their abolition, and in the last
place signalizing the exhaustion and death of authority in
the corrupted reign of Louis Philippe, in the inert
dictatorship of the provisional government, and in the
insignificant presidency of General Cavignac and Louis
Bonaparte.

We prove our thesis, in the second place, by explaining
how, through the economic reform, through industrial
solidarity and the organization of universal suffrage, the
people passes from spontaneity to reflection and
consciousness; act, no longer from impulse and
enthusiasm, but with design; maintains itself without
masters and servants, without delegates as without
aristocrats, absolutely as would an individual. Thus, the
conception of person, the idea of the me, becomes
extended and generalized; as there is an individual person
or me, so there is a collective person or me; in the one case
as in the other will, actions, soul, spirit, life, unknown in
their principle, inconceivable in their essence, result from
the animating and vital fact of organization. The
psychology of nations and of humanity, like the
psychology of man, becomes a possible science. It was this
demonstration that we referred to in our publications on
circulation and credit as well as in the fourteenth chapter
of the manifesto of "La Voix du Peuple" relative to the
constitution.

So, when Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux assume the
position of defenders of the State,—that is, of the external
constitution of the public power,—they only reproduce, in
a varied form peculiar to themselves which they have not
yet made known, that old fiction of representative
government, whose integral formula, whose completest
expression, is still the constitutional monarchy. Did we,
then, accomplish the Revolution of February in order to
attain this retrogressive contradiction?

It seems to us—what do you say, readers?—that the
question begins to exhibit itself in a somewhat clearer
light; that the weak-minded, after what we have just said,
will be able to form an idea of the State; that they will
understand how republicans can inquire if it is
indispensable, after an economic revolution which
changes all social relations, to maintain, to please the
vanity of pretended statesmen, and at a cost of two
thousand millions per annum, this parasitic organ called
government. And the honorable delegates of the
Luxembourg, who, being seated in the arm-chairs of the
peerage, therefore think themselves politicians, and claim
so courageously an exclusive understanding of the
Revolution, doubtless will fear no longer that we, in our
capacity of the most intelligent and the strongest, after
having abolished government, as useless and too costly,
may establish the tyranny of chaos. We deny the State and
the government; we affirm in the same breath the
autonomy of the people and its majority. How can we be
upholders of tyranny, aspirants for the ministry,
competitors of Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux?

In truth, we do not understand the logic of our adversaries.
They accept a principle without troubling themselves
about its consequences; they approve, for example, the
equality of taxation which the tax on capital realizes; they
adopt popular, mutual, and gratuitous credit, for all these
terms are synonymous; they cheer at the dethronement of
capital and the emancipation of labor; then, when it
remains to draw the anti-governmental conclusions from
these premises, they protest, they continue to talk of
politics and government, without inquiring whether
government is compatible with industrial liberty and
equality; whether there is a possibility of a political
science, when there is a necessity for an economic science!
Property they attack without scruple, in spite of its
venerable antiquity; but they bow before power like
church-wardens before the holy sacrament. Government
is to them the necessary and immutable a priori, the
principle of principles, the eternal archeus.

Certainly, we do not offer our affirmations as proofs; we
know, as well as any one, on what conditions a
proposition is demonstrated. We only say that, before
proceeding to a new constitution of the State, we must
inquire whether, in view of the economic reforms which
the Revolution imposes upon us, the State itself should
not be abolished; whether this end of political institutions
does not result from the meaning and bearing of economic
reform. We ask whether, in fact, after the explosion of
February, after the establishment of universal suffrage, the
declaration of the omnipotence of the masses, and the
henceforth inevitable subordination of power to the
popular will, any government whatever is still possible,
whether a government would not be placed perpetually in
the alternative either of submissively following the blind
and contradictory injunctions of the multitude, or of
intentionally deceiving it, as the provisional government
has done, as demagogues in all ages have done. We ask, at
least, which of the various attributes of the State should be
retained and strengthened, which abolished. For, should
we find, as may still be expected, that, of all the present
attributes of the State, not one can survive the economic
reform, it would be quite necessary to admit, on the
strength of this negative demonstration that, in the new
condition of society, the State is nothing, can be nothing;
in short, that the only way to organize democratic
government is to abolish government.

Instead of this positive, practical, realistic analysis of the
revolutionary movement, what course do our pretended
apostles take? They go to consult Lycurgus, Plato,
Orpheus, and all the mythological oracles; they
interrogate the ancient legends; they appeal to remotest
antiquity for the solution of problems exclusively modern,
and then give us for answer the whimsical illuminations
of their brain.

Once more: is this the science of society and of the
Revolution which must, at first sight, solve all problems; a
science essentially practical and immediately applicable; a
science eminently traditional doubtless, but above all
thoroughly progressive, in which progress takes place
through the systematic negation of tradition itself?

II. Of the end or object of the State

We have just seen that the idea of the State, considered in
its nature, rests entirely on an hypothesis which is at least
doubtful,—that of the impersonality and the physical,
intellectual, and moral inertia of the masses. We shall now
prove that this same idea of the State, considered in its
object, rests on another hypothesis, still more improbable
than the first,—that of the permanence of antagonism in
humanity, an hypothesis which is itself a consequence of
the primitive dogma of the fall or of original sin.

We continue to quote “Le Nouveau Monde:”

"What would happen," asks Louis Blanc, "if we should leave the most intelligent or the strongest to place obstacles in the way of the development of the faculties of one who is less strong or less intelligent? Liberty would be destroyed."

"How prevent this crime? By interposing between oppressor and oppressed the whole power of the people."

"If James oppresses Peter, shall the thirty-four millions of men of whom French society is composed run all at once to protect Peter, to maintain liberty? To pretend such a thing would be buffoonery."

"How then shall society intervene?

"Through those whom it has chosen to REPRESENT it for this purpose."

"But these REPRESENTATIVES of society, these servants of the people, who are they? The State."

"Then the State is only society itself, acting as society, to prevent—what?—oppression; to maintain—what?—liberty."

That is clear. The State is a REPRESENTATION of society, externally organized to protect the weak against the
strong; in other words, to preserve peace between
disputants and maintain order. Louis Blanc has not gone,
far, as we see, to find the object of the State. It can be
traced from Grotius, Justinian, Cicero, etc., in all the
authors who ever have written on public right. It is the
Orphic tradition related by Horace:—

Sylvestres homines sacer interpresque deorum.

Cædibus et victu fœdo deterruit Orpheus,

Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres rabidosque leones,

Dictus et Amphion, Thebanæ conditor arcis,

Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blanda

Ducere quo vellet...

"The divine Orpheus, the interpreter of the gods, called men from the depths of the forests and filled them with a horror of murder and of human flesh. Consequently it was said of him that he tamed lions and tigers, as later it was said of Amphion, founder of Thebes, that he moved the stones by the sound of his lyre, and led them whither he wished by the charm of his prayer."

Socialism, we know, does not require with certain people
great efforts of the imagination. They imitate, flatly
enough, the old mythologies; they copy Catholicism,
while declaiming against it; they ape power, which they
lust after; then they shout with all their strength: Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity; and the circle is complete. One passes
for a revelator, a reformer, a democratic and social
restorer, one is named as a candidate for the ministry of
progress,—nay, even for the dictatorship of the Republic!

So, by the confession of Louis Blanc, power is born of
barbarism; its organization bears witness to a state of
ferocity and violence among primitive men,—an effect of
the utter absence of commerce and industry. To this
savagism the State had to put an end by opposing to the
force of each individual a superior force capable, in the
absence of any other argument, of restraining his will. The
constitution of the State supposes, then, as we have just
said, a profound social antagonism, homo homini lupus.
Louis Blanc himself says this when, after having divided
men into the strong and the weak, disputing with each
other like wild beasts for their food, he interposes between
them, as a mediator, the State.

Then the State would be useless; the State would lack an
object as well as a motive; the State would have to take
itself away,—if there should come a day when, from any
cause whatever, society should contain neither strong nor
weak,— that is, when the inequality of physical and
intellectual powers could not be a cause of robbery and
oppression, independently of the protection, more
fictitious than real by the way, of the State.

Now, this is precisely the thesis that we maintain today.

The power that tempers morals, that gradually substitutes
the rule of right for the rule of force, that establishes
security, that creates step by step liberty and equality, is,
in a much higher degree than religion and the State, labor;
first, the labor of commerce and industry; next, science,
which spiritualizes it; in the last analysis, art, its immortal
flower. Religion by its promises and its threats, the State
by its tribunals and its armies, gave to the sentiment of
justice, which was too weak among primitive men, the
only sanction intelligible to savage minds. For us, whom
industry, science, literature, art, have corrupted, as Jean
Jacques said, this sanction lies elsewhere; we find it in the
division of property, in the machinery of industry, in the
growth of luxury, in the overruling desire for
well-being,—a desire which imposes upon all a necessity
of labor. After the barbarism of the early ages, after the
price of caste and the feudal constitution of primitive
society, a last element of slavery still remained,—capital.
Capital having lost its way, the laborer—that is, the
merchant, the mechanic, the farmer, the savant, the
artist—no longer needs protection; his protection is his
talent, his knowledge is his industry. After the
dethronement of capital, the continuance of the State, far
from protecting liberty, can only compromise liberty.

He has a sorry idea of the human race—of its essence, its
perfectibility, its destiny—who conceive it as an
agglomeration of individuals necessarily exposed, by the
inequality of physical and intellectual forces, to the
constant danger of reciprocal spoliation or the tyranny of
a few. Such an idea is a proof of the most retrogressive
philosophy; it belongs to those days of barbarism when
the absence of the true elements of social order left to the
genius of the legislator no method of action save that of
force; when the supremacy of a pacifying and avenging
power appeared to all as the just consequence of a
previous degradation and an original stain. To give our
whole thought, we regard political and judicial
institutions as the exoteric and concrete formula of the
myth of the fall, the mystery of redemption, and the
sacrament of penitence. It is curious to see pretended
socialists, enemies or rivals of Church and State, copying
all that they blaspheme,—the representative system in
politics, the dogma of the fall in religion.

Since they talk so much of doctrine, we frankly declare
that such is not ours.

In our view, the moral condition of society is modified
and ameliorated at the same rate as its economic condition.
The morality of a wild, ignorant, and idle people is one
thing; that of an industrious and artistic people another:
consequently, the social guarantees that prevail among the
former are quite different from those that prevail among
the latter. In a society transformed, almost unconsciously,
by its economic development, there is no longer either
strong or weak; there are only laborers whose faculties
and means incessantly tend, through industrial solidarity
and the guarantee of circulation, to become equalized. In
vain, to assure the right and the duty of each, does the
imagination go back to that idea of authority and
government which attests the profound despair of souls
long terrified by the police and the priesthood: the
simplest examination of the attributes of the State suffices
to demonstrate that, if inequality of fortunes, oppression,
robbery, and misery are not our eternal inheritance, the
first leprosy to be eradicated, after capitalistic exploitation,
the first plague to be wiped out, is the State.

See, in fact, budget in hand, what the State is.
The State is the army. Reformer, do you need an army to
defend you? If so, your idea of public security is Cæsar's
and Napoleon's. You are not a republican; you are a
despot.

The State is the police; city police, rural police, police of
the waters and forests. Reformer, do you need police?
Then your idea of order is Fouché's, Gisquet's,
Carussidière's, and M. Carlier's. You are not a democrat,
you are a spy.

The State is the whole judicial system; justices of the peace,
tribunals of first instance, courts of appeal, court of
cassation, high court, tribunals of experts, commercial
tribunals, council of prefects, State council, councils of war.
Reformer, do you need all this judiciary? Then your idea
of justice is M. Baroche's, M. Dupin's, and Perrin Dandin's.
You are not a socialist; you are a red-tapist.

The State is the treasury, the budget. Reformer, you do not
desire the abolition of taxation? Then your idea of public
wealth is M. Thiers's who thinks that the largest budgets
are the best. You are not an organizer of labor; you are an
exciseman.

The State is the custom-house. Reformer, do you need, for
the protection of national labor, differential duties and
toll-houses? Then your idea of commerce and circulation
is M. Fould's and M. Rothschild's. You are not an apostle
of fraternity; you are a Jew.
The State is the public debt, the mint, the sinking fund, the savings-banks, etc. Reformer, are these the foundation of your science? Then your idea of social economy is that of MM. Humann, Lacave-Laplagne, Garnier-Pagès, Passy, Duclerc, and the “Man with Forty Crowns.” You are a Turcaret.

The State—but we must stop. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the State, from the top of the hierarchy to its foot, which is not an abuse to be reformed, a parasite to be exterminated, an instrument of tyranny to be destroyed. And you talk to us of maintaining the State, of extending the functions or the State, of increasing the power of the State! Go to, you are not a revolutionist; for the true revolutionist is essentially a simplifier and a liberal. You are a mystifier, a juggler; you are a marplot.

### III. Of an ulterior destiny of the State

There arises in favor of the State a last hypothesis. The fact that the State, say the pseudo-democrats, hitherto has performed only a rôle of parasitism and tyranny is no reason for denying it a nobler and more humane destiny. The State is destined to become the principal organ of production, consumption, and circulation; the initiator of liberty and equality.

For liberty and equality are the State.

Credit is the State.

Commerce, agriculture, and manufactures are the State.
Canals, railroads, mines, insurance companies, as well as tobacco-shops and post-offices, are the State.

Public education is the State.

The State, in fine, dropping its negative attributes to clothe
itself with positive ones, must change from the oppressor,
parasite, and conservative it ever has been into an
organizer, producer, and servant. That would be
feudalism regenerated, the hierarchy of industrial
associations, organized and graded according to a potent
formula the secret of which Pierre Leroux still hides from
our sight.

Thus, the organizers of the State suppose—for in all this
they only go from supposition to supposition—that the
State can change its nature, turn itself around, so to speak;
from Satan become an archangel; and, after having lived
for centuries by blood and slaughter like a wild beast, feed
upon plants with the deer, and give suck to the lambs.
Such is the teaching of Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux;
such, as we said long ago, is the whole secret of socialism.

"We love the tutelary, generous, devoted government,
taking as its motto those profound words of the gospel,
'Whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be the servant
of all;' and we hate the deprived, corrupting, oppressive
government, making the people its prey. We admire it
representing the generous and living portion of humanity;
we abhor it when it represents the cadaverous portion. We
revolt against the insolence, usurpation, and robbery
involved in the idea of the MASTER-STATE; and we
applaud that which is touching, fruitful, and noble in the idea of the SERVANT-STATE. Or better: there is a belief which we hold a thousand times dearer than life,—our belief in the approaching and final TRANSFORMATION of power. That is the triumphant passage from the old world to the new. All the government of Europe rest today on the idea of the MASTER-STATE; but they are dancing desperately the dance of the dead.”—“Le Nouveau Monde,” November 16, 1849.

Pierre Leroux is a thorough believer in these ideas. What he wishes, what he teaches, and what he calls for is a regeneration of the State,—he has not told us yet whereby and by whom this regeneration should be effected,—just as he wishes and calls for a regeneration of Christianity without, as yet, having stated his dogma and given his credo.

We believe, in opposition to Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc, that the theory of the tutelary, generous, devoted, productive, initiative, organizing, liberal and progressive State is an utopia, a pure illusion of their intellectual vision. Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc seem to us like a man who, standing above a mirror and seeing his image reversed, should pretend that this image must become a reality some day and replace (pardon us the expression) his natural person.

This is what separates us from these two men, whose talents and services, whatever they may say, we have never dreamed of denying, but whose stubborn hallucination we deplore. We do not believe in the SERVANT-STATE: to us it is a flat contradiction.
Servant and master, when applied to the State, are synonymous terms; just as more and less, when applied to equality, are identical terms. The proprietor, by interest on capital, demands more than equality; communism, by the formula, to each according to his needs, allows less than equality: always inequality; and that is why we are neither a communist nor a proprietor. Likewise, whoever says master-State says usurpation of the public power; whoever says servant-State says delegation of the public power: always an alienation of this power, always a power, always an external, arbitrary authority instead of the immanent, inalienable, untransferable authority of citizens; always more or less than liberty. It is for this reason that we are opposed to the State.

Further, to leave metaphysics and return to the field of experience, here is what we have to say to Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux.

You pretend and affirm that the State, that the government, can, and ought to be, wholly changed in its principle, in its essence, in its action, in its relations with citizens, as well as in its results that thus the State, a bankrupt and a counterfeiter, should be the sole source of credit; that for so many centuries an enemy of knowledge, and at the present moment still hostile to primary instruction and the liberty of the press, it is its business to officially provide for the instruction of citizens; that, after having left commerce, industry, agriculture, and all the machinery of wealth to develop themselves without its aid, often even in spite of its resistance, it belongs to it to take the initiative in the whole field of labor as in the world of
ideas, that, in fine, the eternal enemy of liberty, it yet
ought, not to leave liberty to itself, but to create and direct
liberty. It is this marvelous transformation of the State that
constitutes, in your opinion, the present Revolution.

There lies upon you, then, the twofold obligation: first, of
establishing the truth of your hypothesis by showing its
traditional legitimacy, exhibiting its historical titles, and
developing its philosophy; in the second place, of
applying it in practice.

Now, it appears already that both theory and practice, in
your hypothesis, formally contradict the idea itself, and
the facts of the past, and the most authentic tendencies of
humanity.

Your theory, we say, involves a contradiction in its terms,
since it pretends to make liberty a creation of the State,
while the State, on the contrary, is to be a creation of
liberty. In fact, if the State imposes itself upon my will, the
State is master; I am not free; the theory is undermined.

It contradicts the facts of the past, since it is certain, as you
yourselves admit, that everything that has been produced
within the sphere of human activity of a positive, good,
and beautiful character, was the product of liberty
exclusively, acting independently of the State, and almost
always in opposition to the State; which leads directly to
this proposition, which ruins your system, that liberty is
sufficient unto itself and does not need the State.

Finally, your theory contradicts the manifest tendencies of
civilization; since, instead of continually adding to
individual liberty and dignity by making every human
soul, according to Kant's precept, a pattern of entire
humanity, one face of the collective soul, you subordinate
the private person to the public person; you submit the
individual to the group; you absorb the citizen in the
State.

It is for you to remove all these contradictions by a
principle superior to liberty and to the State. We, who
simply deny the State; who, resolutely, following the line
of liberty, remain faithful to the revolutionary practice,—it
is not for us to demonstrate to you the falsity of your
hypothesis; we await your proofs. The master-State is lost;
you are with us in admitting it. As for the servant-State,
we do not know what it may be; we distrust it as supreme
hypocrisy. The servant-State seems to us quite the same
thing as a servant-mistress; we do not wish it; with our
present light, we prefer to espouse Liberty in legitimate
marriage. Explain, then, if you can, why, after having
demolished the State through love of this adored liberty,
we must now, in consequence of the same love, return to
the State. Until you have solved this problem, we shall
continue to protest against all government, all authority,
all power; we shall maintain, through all and against all,
the prerogative of liberty. We shall say to you: Liberty is,
for us, a thing gained; now, you know the rule of law:
Melior est conditio possidentis. Produce your titles to the
reorganization of government; otherwise, no government!

To sum up:

The State is the external constitution of the social power.
The constitution supposes, in principle, that society is a creature of the mind, destitute of spontaneity, providence, unity, needing for its action to be fictitiously represented by one or more elected or hereditary commissioners: an hypothesis the falsity of which the economic development of society and the organization of universal suffrage agree in demonstrating.

The constitution of the State supposes further, as to its object, that antagonism or a state of war is the essential and irrevocable condition of humanity, a condition which necessitates, between the weak and the strong, the intervention of a coercive power to put an end to their struggles by universal oppression. We maintain that, in this respect, the mission of the State is ended; that, by the division of labor, industrial solidarity, the desire for well-being, and the equal distribution of capital and taxation, liberty and justice obtain surer guarantees than any that ever were afforded them by religion and the State.

As for utilitarian transformation of the State, we consider it as a utopia contradicted at once by governmental tradition, and the revolutionary tendency, and the spirit of the henceforth admitted economic reforms. In any case, we say that to liberty alone it would belong to reorganize power, which is equivalent at present to the complete exclusion of power.

As a result, either no social revolution, or no more government; such is our solution of the political problem.
What is Government? What is God?

What is Government? What is its principle, its object, its
right? -- This is incontestably the first question that the
political man poses to himself.

Now, this question, which appears so simple and the
solution of which seems so easy, we find that faith alone
can answer. Philosophy is as incapable of demonstrating
Government as it is of proving God. Authority, like
Divinity, is not a matter of knowing; it is, I repeat, a matter
of faith.

That insight, so paradoxical at first glance, and yet so true,
merits some development. We are going to try, without
any significant scientific apparatus, to make ourselves
understood.

The principal attribute, the signal trait of our species, after
THOUGHT, is belief, and above all things, the belief in
God. Among the philosophers, some saw in that faith in a
superior Being a prerogative of humanity, while others
discovered there only its weakness. Whatever there is of
merit or demerit in the belief in the idea of God, it is
certain that the beginning of all metaphysical speculation
is an act of worship of the Creator: it is that which the
human mind, among all the Peoples, records in an
invariable manner.

But what is God? That is what the philosopher and the
believer immediately, and with an irresistible movement,
demand. And, as a corollary to that first interrogation, this
one arises immediately: What, of all the religions, is the
best? Indeed, if there exists a Being superior to Humanity,
there must also exist a system of relations between that
Being and Humanity: what then is that system? The
search for the best religion is the second step that the
human mind makes in Reason and Faith.

To this double question, no response is possible. The
definition of Divinity escapes the intelligence. Humanity
has been by turns fetishist, idolater, Christian and
Buddhist, Jew and Mohammedan, deist and pantheist: it
has worshiped in turn plants, animals, stars, the heavens,
the soul of the world, and, finally, itself: it has wandered
from superstition to superstition, without managing to
determine its God. The problem of the attributes and
essence of God and of the worship that is proper to him,
like a trap set for his ignorance, torments Humanity from
its origin. The Peoples are sacrificed for their idols, society
is exhausted by the elaboration of its beliefs, without the
solution being advanced a step.

The deist and the pantheist, like the Christian and the
idolater, is reduced to pure faith. One could even say, and
it is the only progress we have made in this study, that it
is repugnant to reason to know and understand God: it is
only given to us to believe. And this is why in all eras, and
under all religions, we encounter a small number of men,
bolder in appearance than the others, who, not
understanding God, have taken the part of denying him:
we have given them the name of free spirits or atheists.
But it is clear that atheism is still less logical than faith.
The basic, conclusive fact of the spontaneous belief in the
supreme Being remaining always, and the problem
implied by that fact inevitably posing itself, atheism could
not be accepted as a solution. Far from testifying to the
strength of the mind, it would only prove its desperation.
It is with atheism as it is with suicide: it has only been
embraced by the smallest number. The People have
always had a horror of it!

Things were thus. Humanity seemed eternally placed
between an insoluble question and an impossible negation,
when, at the end of the last century, a philosopher, Kant,
as remarkable for his profound piety, as for the
incomparable power of his reflection, realized how to
attack the theological problem in an entirely new manner.

He no longer asked himself, as everyone had before him:
What is God? and what is the true religion? From a
question of fact he made a question of form, and he said to
himself: Why does it happen that I believe in God? How,
by virtue of what is that idea produced in my mind? What
is its point of departure and its development? What are its
transformations, and, if need be, its decline? How, finally,
is it that, in the religious soul, the things, the ideas, come
to be?

Such was the course of studies proposed, on God and
Religion, by the philosopher of Kœnigsberg. Renouncing
further pursuit of the content, or the reality of the idea of
God, he set himself to writing, if I dare put it in this way,
the biography of that idea. Instead of taking, like an
anchorite, the idea of God for the object of his meditations,
he analyzed the faith in God, as a religious period of six thousand years presented it to him. In short, he considered in religion, not an external and supernatural revelation of the infinite Being, but a phenomenon of our understanding.

From this moment the spell was broken: the mystery of religion was revealed to philosophy. What we seek and what we see in God, as Malebranche said, is not at all that being, or to speak more fairly, that chimerical entity, that our imagination constantly enlarges, and that, by the very fact that it must be after all the notion that our mind makes of it, cannot in reality be anything: it is our own ideal, the pure essence of Humanity.

What the theologian pursues, without knowing it, in the dogma that he teaches, is not the mysteries of the infinite: it is the laws of our collective and individual spontaneity. The human soul does not perceive itself at first by reflective contemplation on itself, as the psychologist believes; it perceives itself outside itself, as if it was a different being placed in front of it: it is that mirror image that it calls God.

Thus, morals, justice, order, laws, are no longer things revealed from on high, imposed on our free will by a so-called creator, unknown, unintelligible; they are things that are as proper and essential as our faculties and organs, as our flesh and blood. In short: Religion and Society are synonymous terms; Man is sacred pour himself as if he was God. Catholicism and Socialism, identical at base, differ only in form: in this was we explain faith, and the
primitive face of the belief in God, and the indisputable
progress of the religions.

Now, what Kant did nearly sixty years ago for Religion;
what he had previously done for Certainty; what others
before him had attempted for Happiness or the Sovereign
Good, the Voix du Peuple proposes to undertake for
Government.

After the belief in God, that which occupies the most
prominent place in the general thought is the belief in
Authority. Everywhere that there are men grouped in
society, we encounter, with the rudiments of a religion,
the rudiments of power, the embryo of a government.
That fact is as basic, as universal, as indisputable as that of
the religions.

But what is Power, and what is the best form of
Government? for it is clear that if we manage to
understand the essence and attributes of power, we will
know at the same time the best form to give to it, what is,
of all the constitutions, the most perfect. We would have,
in this way, resolved one of the two great problems posed
by the February Revolution: we would have resolved the
political problem, principle, means and end, — we do not
prejudge anything, — of economic reform.

Well! On Government, as on Religion, the controversy has
endured since the origin of societies, and with as little
success. It is for governments as for religions, for political
theories as for systems of philosophy: that is to say, there
is no solution. More than two thousand years before
Montesquieu and Machiavelli, Aristotle gathered the
various definitions of government, distinguishing them
according to their forms: patriarchies, democracies,
oligarchies, aristocracies, absolute monarchies,
constitutional monarchies, theocracies, federative
republics, etc. He declared, in short, that the problem was
insoluble. Aristotle, with regard to government, as with
regard to religion, was a skeptic. He had faith neither in
God nor in the State.

And we who, in sixty years, have gone through seven or
eight kinds of governments; who, hardly entered into the
Republic, are already weary of our Constitution; we, for
whom the exercise of power has only been, from the
conquest of the Gauls by Julius Cesar until the ministry of
the brothers Barrot, the practice of oppression and tyranny;
we, finally, who witness in this moment the saturnalia of
the governments of Europe, do we then have more faith
than Aristotle? Isn't it time that we get out of this unhappy
rut, and instead of exhausting ourselves any more in the
search for the best government, the best organization to
make of the political idea, we should pose the question, no
longer of the reality, but of the legitimacy of that idea?

Why do we believe in Government? From where, in
human society, comes that idea of Authority, of Power;
that fiction of a superior Person, called the State?

How is that fiction produced? How is it developed? What
is its law of evolution, its economy?

Won't it be with Government as with God and the
Absolute, which have so long and so fruitlessly occupied
the philosophers? Would this not still be on of the
first-born conceptions of our understanding, which we wrongly give the name of ideas, and that, without reality, without possibility of realization, expresses only something indefinite, which only has tyranny for its essence?

And then, relative to God and Religion, we have already found, by philosophical analysis, that beneath the allegories of its religious myths, Humanity pursues nothing other than its own ideal, could we still seek what we want beneath the allegory of its political myths? For in the end, the political institutions, so different, so contradictory, exist neither for themselves, nor by themselves; like the cults, they are not essential to society, they are hypothetical formulas or combinations, by means of which civilization maintains an appearance of order, or to put it better, seeks order. What then, once again, is the secret meaning of these institutions, the real reason why the political concept, the notion of government, comes to nothing?

In short, instead of seeing in government, with the absolutists, the organ and expression of society; with the doctrinaires, an instrument of order, or rather of policy; with the radicals, a means of revolution: let us try to see simply a phenomenon of the collective life, the external representation of our right, the education of some one of our faculties. Who knows if we could not discover then that all these governmental formulas, for which the Peoples and citizens have slit each others' throats for sixty centuries, are only a phantasmagoria of our mind, that the first duty of a free reason is to return to the museums and libraries?
Such is the question posed and resolved in the Confessions of a Revolutionary, and of which the Voix du Peuple proposes, with the aid of facts furnished to it by the power and the parties who dispute it, to give daily commentary.

Just like Religion, Government is a manifestation of social spontaneity, a preparation of Humanity for a higher state.

What Humanity seeks in Religion, and calls God, is itself.

What the citizen seeks in Government and names King, Emperor or President, is also himself, it is Liberty.

Without Humanity, no God; the theological concept makes no sense: — Without Liberty, no Government; the political concept is without value.

The best form of Government, like the most perfect of religions, taken in the literal sense, is a contradictory idea. The problem is not to know how we will be governed best, but how we will be the most free. Liberty suitable and identical to order, that is all that power and politics really contain. How is that absolute liberty, synonym of ordered, constituted? that is what the analysis of the different formulas of authority will teach us. For all the rest, we do not accept the government of man by man, any more than the exploitation of man by man...

Thus, the march that we propose to follow, in treating the political question and in preparing the materials for a constitutional revision, will be the same that we have
followed up to this day in treating the social question. La Voix du Peuple, in completing the work of the two journals that preceded it, will be faithful to their wanderings.

What should we say, in these two papers, fallen one after
the other under the blows of the reaction and the state of
siege?

We should not as, as our predecessors and associates have
thus far:

What is the best system of community? the best
organization of property? Or better still: Is property or
community worth more? the theory of Saint-Simon or that
of Fourier? the system of Louis Blanc or that of Cabet?

Following the example of Kant, who should pose the
question in this way:

How does man possess? How does he acquire property?
How is it lost? What is the law of its evolution and
transformation? Where is it going? What does it want?
What, finally, does it represent? For it appears sufficiently,
by the indissoluble mixture of good and evil that
accompanies it, by the tyranny that is its essence (jus
utendi et abutendi) and which is the condition sine quâ
non of its wholeness, that it is still, just like Religion and
Government, only a hypothesis, or rather, a hypotyposis
of Society, that is to say, an allegorical representation of a
conception of our intelligence.
How, next, does man labor? How do we establish the
comparison of products? How will circulation take place
in society? On what conditions? According to what laws?

And the conclusion of all these monographs on property
has been this:

Property indicates a function or allocation; community,
reciprocity of action: usury, always decreasing, identity of
labor and capital.

In order to bring about the disengagement and realization
of all these terms, until now shrouded beneath the old
proprietary symbols, what must we do? Let the workers
guarantee work and outlets to one another; to that end, let
them accept, as currency, their reciprocal obligations.

Well! today we say:

Political liberty will result for us, like industrial liberty,
from our mutual guarantee. It is by guaranteeing liberty to
one another, that we will pass from this government,
whose purpose is to symbolize the republican motto:
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, leaving to our intelligence
the care to find its realization. Now, what is the formula of
that political and liberal guarantee? presently, universal
suffrage, later, free contract...

Economic and social reform, by the mutual guarantee of
credit;

Political reform, by the commerce of individual liberties;
Such is the program of the Voix du Peuple.

The Revolution advances, cried an absolutist paper yesterday, with regard to the message of Louis Bonaparte. Those people see the Revolution only in catastrophes and coups d'état. We say in our turn: Yes, the Revolution advance, for it has found interpreters. Our strength may fall short of the task; our devotion, never!
1850
Dilemma: Red or White

A captain of the line assures me—the papers friendly to the government will say tomorrow if the information is exact—that on the occasion of the next elections, the order has been given to prevent, by all possible means, the gentlemen of the military from attending the electoral gatherings. Any disobedience in this regard will be punished by eight days in jail.

The government is right. It is consistent with itself. It follows, imperturbably, like Mr. Cabet, its straight line. For sixty years, the French people, leading the rest of the world behind it, has descended the path of the Revolution; Mr. Louis Bonaparte has sworn to make us turn back up the path of the Revolution. That is why Mr. Louis Bonaparte has been made President of the Republic:—ask the legitimists; ask the doctrinaires or the Jesuits.

Now, whoever desires the ends desires the means; to make the army vote as a municipal guard and forbid it from political discussions: such is, with regard to the army, the means that the government proposes to use. And I repeat that the government, from its own point of view, has it right. Follow this reasoning, I beg you: it is as demonstrative as the history.

The Revolution of 89, by abolishing the old despotism and feudalism, led us to the Constitutional Monarchy.
The Constitutional Monarchy, after thirty years of
parliamentary evolutions, led to the Republic.

The Republic established universal suffrage.

Universal suffrage make the soldiers eligible voters, make them, in fact, with the other citizens, arbiters of peace and war, judges of the politics of the government, inspector of the acts and opinions of their leaders—all things incompatible with the spirit of hierarchy and the feudal discipline of the army.

So there is an incompatibility between the current regime of the army, which costs us 400 million per year, and the exercise of political rights. And to conclude, either no republic or no army: that is the dilemma.

But what is true today of the army is true of all the rest. It is everywhere the same antagonism, the same incompatibilities. The government has seen it very well; by its propositions, its nominations, its communications, each day it reproduces the same alternative; and if we do not understand it, it is because we do not wish to hear it.

Red or White, it says to us,

Republican or Cossack,

Socialist or Jesuit,

Voltaire or de Maistre,

The Revolution or the Holy Alliance,
Labor or Capital,

Association or Statute Labor,

Free Credit or Usury,

The Bank of the People or Malthus,

The citizen army or the pretorian army.

There is no middle ground: it is necessary to choose. The question is precisely the same for the bourgeois, the peasant, the soldier, the philosopher and the statesman, for France and for Europe. Every other party is committed to the happy medium, to hypocrisy. Now, the experiment of the happy medium has been made, and the world does not want it. So it is a question of knowing if the people will be red or white, if the army will be for Christ or for Belial. We are happy to agree with the government, if not with regard to the goal, at least regarding the logic; and we support its dilemma with all our strength.

The government is white; we are red. It no longer wants the tricolor; neither do we. That is clear.

The Revolution of February was made by the red flag, which became from then on the symbol of the right to work and the beacon of Humanity. The tricolored flag has only ever been, despite all its glory, the flag of the happy medium, the flag of the doctrinaires. In 1804, not daring to restore the monarchy, it created an emperor. Forced in 1815 to hide itself, it returned in 1830 to give us
Louis-Philippe; after February, Mr. de Lamartine took it
for the lightning-rod of socialism; and it is thanks to this
that we had had, in a democratic Republic, along with the
exclusion of the right to work, the presidency of a
Bonaparte. Since then, the tricolored flag has no longer
been anything but the flag of reaction and calumny.
Moreover, it showed this very well in June when it bathed
with so much delight in the blood of the workers. And we
wrote from the mouth of March 1848, as if we could have
foreseen those odious days.

"Red is the color of justice and sovereignty. And since all men love and seek the red, is not red the symbol of human fraternity?... Deny the red flag, dye the purple, but that is to eliminate the social question, the right to work. Every time that the people, defeated by suffering, has wanted to express, outside of that juridical legality that murders it, its wishes and complaints, it has marched under a red banner. The red flag, it is true, has still not made the tour of the world, like its fortunate rival, the tricolor. Justice has spoken very well; Mr. de Lamartine has not gone farther than the camp of Mars. It is so terrible, Justice, that one could not hide it too much. Poor red flag! Everyone abandons you! Well! I embrace you. I clutch you to my breast. Cheers to fraternity! The red flag is the sign of a revolution that will be the last. The red flag! It is the shroud of Christ, the federal standard of the human race."

Honest souls, who only see in the red flag the sign of
vengeance, and for whom a bunch of peasants will suffice
to make you afraid: do you want to abolish the scaffold
once and for all? Plant a red flag atop it.
The red flag is the sign of the democratic reality, just as the white flag is the sign of the sign of feudal suzerainty. The tricolor is that of the politics of the seesaw and the presidency. Napoleon and Louise-Philippe, illegitimate monarchs, would adopt it. The reactionaries no longer want to, and you know why. No truck, they say, with the republican principle. And we respond, we socialists, no truck with the feudal principle!

As at all the times that the throne and altar have been united against liberty, the white flag is the banner of Catholicism in France as well as the monarchy: the red flag, on the contrary, is the symbol of the democratic and social philosophy. The Jansenists and Gallicans, false royalists and false Christians, ground around the tricolored flag.

That is why, from one side, the whites demand that the Church be richly endowed, and work with all their strength to render it its goods and its tithes; from the other, the reds want the clergy, like the laborers, subject to the law of free commerce and, as a consequence, only those who have need of the priest's services will pay him. The tricolors, who neither want to render the goods of the clergy nor abolish the parasitism of the Church, resist both; they have invented the budget of the cults and the salary of the priests, in order to declaim at once against the Socialist and against the Pope.

We do not want the Church to be salaried, say the whites. We do not want it to be endowed, respond the reds. And all shout at the same time: Down with the tricolors!
In the past, the magistracy was like property, hereditary
and venal. Justice was given at a price in cash: that was
the white justice. The judge lived on his spices, as the
bailiff lives on his exploits. Under the general designation
of *Parliaments*, the people of the courts and tribunals
formed one caste. What we call the ministerial offices are a
remnant of that old institution.

After 89, the venality of the offices should have been
entirely abolished, and justice elective and free. This was
the generalization of the just, the red justice. Instead of
that, we have the salaried, tenured magistracy, a judicial
order marching in connivance with the executive power.
Part of the officers have, in addition, preserved their venal
privileges. That is the system of the Héberts, the Dupins,
the Lehons; the tricolored justice.

It is with the army as with justice, as with the Church, and
with the government.

In the past, the grades higher than noncommissioned
officer were reserved for the nobles, inaccessible to the
commoners. Discipline by baton blows...
# Letter to A. M. Boutteville

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

Sainte-Pélagie, December 17, 1851.

A. M. BOUTTEVILLE

My dear Boutteville, the more I advance in my individual labors, the more I realize that the work that we make in common must be conceived and, as much as possible, written according the plan of mine, and in a manner so as to serve it as continuation and conclusion. The history of democracy is nothing other than the history of the emancipation of the human spirit in all spheres, and, and without counting the disadvantages for us to publish a book soon described as *demagogic*, it is clear that by taking the word *democracy* in a sense too close to that of jacobinism, we make quite uselessly the monograph of a hypothesis rejected for the moment, and perhaps for many years.

Thus, it is necessary to enlarge further our views and our plan, and to make ourselves more generalizing, more profound, by sacrificing something of the epic interest.

I have decided to give my book the title Kronos (or whatever you please), to match the *Cosmos* of A. de Humboldt.
It will include, from the origin of things, the creation, as they say, up to Luther, the moment where our history begins, and will be divided into sixteen periods.

From Luther's time until our own requires four others (twenty altogether), divided thus:

17th – From Luther to the Treaty of Westphalia (1517–1648)

18th – From the Treaty of Westphalia to the French Revolution (1648–1789)

19th – The French Revolution (1789–1848)

20th – Socialism (1848–****)

We will preserve that distribution; the last period will serve as the historic and prophetic *conclusion* of the nineteen preceding.

It is necessary then for you to attach to this summary all the facts relating to Christian-Muslim-European civilization, including America (excluding China, India, Mongolia, the Asiatic archipelago, the Burmas, Siam, Japan, etc., with the exception of that which concerns the affairs of Europe), and take for a superior principle of historical direction the movement of nations towards an order of things which must realize at once *liberty* (individual, locale, etc.) in its highest expression, and the *unity* of the human race.

Thus, *my* work and *yours* will form a continuous series, without crossed purposes or repetitions. By conserving
more space in the treatment of my first sixteen periods, I
could give more scope, interest and evidence to the
demonstration of recent times, as also, in condensing more
the manner of the first part of Bossuet's *Discours sur
l'Histoire universelle*, and including only that table of facts,
citations, reflections of major interests, we will have made
a work of sound philosophy, instead of a masterpiece of
literature.

It is understood that in the *Histoire de la Démocratie moderne*, the exposition in order of dates, as I employ it in *Kronos*, will not be followed; in this regard, the two works, though forming a continuous whole, will differ noticeably. It will be necessary to follow the method of Poinson, du Rozier and Des Michels in their very substantial, conscientious and exact, but insufficiently philosophical summaries of the Greek, Latin and Medieval history.

In a word, let us not loose sight of the fact that we must
not aim to render useless the works made before us, or
those that will be made after, but to make a treatise which
throws light on the whole history of humanity and
establishes its philosophy.

At our next meeting, I will speak at more length of all
these things, and, in making you a part of my own work, I
will convince you of the ease with which I group in a
single narrative, a single idea, and single general
evolution, all the history for example of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, which includes as you know
besides:
The empire of Charlemagne and all its divisions;

The Greek empire of the Orient;

The papacy and the schism of Photios;

The Angles, Saxons, Normans, Slavs, etc.

Islam, subdivided in three or four independent caliphates
and in two great parties;

The war of Spain against the Moors, etc.

All of that, and it is the whole world (minus the Far East,
the evolution of which separate, but always on the same
plan and by virtue of the same laws), all that, I say, so
complicated moments, can only be one, absolutely one,
and it is as easy to recount that universal history, by
stating at once all the contemporary facts, as it is to
describe a session of the Convention.

So group, research, accumulate the facts, and limit
yourself to giving them the most faithful expression; do
not manage the dates and the facts. We must raise a
monument which overshadows Catholicism and tyranny,
and which is as precious and as accessible to the ignorant
as to the wise.

My firm conviction is that we can do this if we wish to,
and that this double labor must cast on the destinies of the
species an as yet unknown and inextinguishable light.
The *Kronos* alone will form two large volumes, as much as the *Histoire de la Démocratie moderne*. By abridging from it the whole space of time that the other includes, I will give it more lucidity, firmness and scope, and make our labor more complete, easier to make and to understand, and more conclusive. It will always be the same work, published in two forms and by two different publishers.

I hope, my dear friend, that instead of becoming impatient with my reshufflings, you understand as I do that it is not possible to make a special history or any monograph without knowing as a basis universal history, and that you will be grateful to me for contributing thus, although indirectly, to the composition of a work which, without that contribution would, I warn you, have run the risk of being only a plea for the good of the cause.

Besides, you understand that the plan that I have marked for you has no need of modifications. The large divisions and the general sense I have indicated are already the consequence of my own studies; I ask of you only more generality still, more universality, conciseness and fullness.

The century has enough literature: let us give it facts and truths. One is always eloquent enough when one is Newton, Cuvier or Jussieu; let us try to be something like those gentlemen. If they are justly admired, they are not, after all, gods.

I extend my hand to you.

P.-J. Proudhon.
# Letter to Langlois

To Mr. [Amédée Jérôme] LANGLOIS

My dear Langlois, all your criticisms are fair, and I would
have to write ten volumes to clarify the points that appear
obscure to me in your brochure, but they would still be so.

Society, it is infinite, and it is certain that there
are millions of cases to resolve of which those who pose as
reformers will never think. All that one can do, in the time
of revolution, is to strongly deny the past, and, up to a
certain point, the present, then to note the aim—an
Ideal!—and to plant, in the direction of that ideal, some
markers. The strongest of men will never do more than
that, and barely that. Did Jesus Christ make Christianity?
Though we worship him as its author, he did not know
the hundredth part of it! Did Romulus or Numa make
Rome? Was it Charlemagne who made feudalism? Was it
Turgot, who only know what the men of 89 knew, who
invented the constitutional system?...

A man never knows, can never express but a very small
portion of the Truth. Truth, whether social or human, is a
product of time...

Thus, in my last book, I made a critique; deduce from that
critique the indication of an aim; I have posted some
markers. Do not expect me to give you a system. My
system is Progress, the necessity of working ceaselessly to
discover the unknown, bit by bit, as the past is exhausted...
next year, that aspect, the most important of our work,
will be brought to light in a manner to quickly seize minds;
then one will understand that free credit and other
formulas are for us only the first step out of the past; but
that the future, in its fullness, evades us, and that it is
hardly possible to imagine it except through a symbol,
more or less mythical, that I call Anarchy, as others call
it Fraternity. Then, also, one will see why and how sects
and systems are nothing; why the true revolutionary only
labors from day to day; why the destiny of man is a void,
a gap placed before us. It is children that are amused by
systematic perspectives. It is still the People, incapable of
understanding that it must always go on, like the
Wandering Jew, who love to rest with Cabet, Fourier, etc.,
under the shades of Community and Association. The
People, like the reaction, would like to be done with it;
now, I repeat, there is no end; and if history teaches us
anything of the curve that we describe, we remain almost
entirely ignorant of the future. Our forecast does not go
beyond the antithesis that the present suggests to us.

That largely developed theory of Progress, a theory that
posits the exclusion to all absolute notions, all the
so-called definitive hypotheses, is that which, in my
opinion, must furnish the solid, but always mobile basis of
the future. It is that which shelters society from
conservative idleness and from false revolutionary
enterprises.

What does it matter, after that, that we are harassed every
day by some new difficulty of details and application?
Some difficulties? Can that one be regarded as a flat
refusal when one exists in an *impossible* present? Would
they hope to prevail against us, who cross their arms heroically and sleep soundly, awaiting the occasion of rushing forward to the rudder, without having the least knowledge of the Pole?...

You see, my dear friend, that far from concealing the objections that could be made, I am instead inclined to exacerbate them myself, but to refer them to those who propose them; for I don't know anyone who is not held to resolve them, unless they have decided, with the Jesuits and the big *rentiers*, that all is well.

I have written, in my latest work, five or six propositions that I regard as essential, and that is for the moment all that I wanted:

1. The government, at its highest point de perfection, is organized for the subjection and dispossession of the greatest number;

2. To the system of political powers, we have to substitute a system of economic forces;

3. Association, in the precise and legal sense of the word, is not an economic force; it is of the government;—nevertheless, there are cases where that modification of individual liberty appeared indispensable;

4. That system, or rather than equilibrium of economic forces, cannot be created by means of
authority; it must result from the tacit or expressed
consent of the citizens, namely from *free contract*...

What I then add on the *liquidation*, the *organization of the
economic forces*, the *dissolution of the political powers* are only
general views, too condensed, I know, for the
understanding of the details, still too rigorous in its
formulas for the multiplicity of cases. I know all these
things. But is it fair for me to object to them? In physics,
are the most general laws anything but simple
abstractions that, in individual cases, receive thousands of
different modifications? Just so, the truest, most general
laws of society are also only some abstract notions, which
practice modifies infinitely. But we must have these
notions, or else we can do nothing: we must post them, or
perish on the road.

I believe, my dear friend, that these reflections, instead of
leaving you idle and indifferent, under the pretext that I
do not respond to everything, that [elements] remain
unintelligible in my work, will urge you to seek yourself...,
since, at this moment, I am nearly the only man who
works seriously on these questions. What, in truth, do our
fellows do? Each of them, convinced that they possess the
key to the future, the formula of the absolute, remains
tranquil and waits for the world to come and ask for its
salvation. As for the need of *investigators* of the truth, we
only find revelators. And I tell you that if we let ourselves
go on in this way, we are lost.

P.-J. PROUDHON.
1852
The Extremes

*Avoid the extremes, and seek the happy medium, says the Wisdom of the Nations.*

That aphorism, of course, is very true: but it must be well understood.

It is up to philosophy to look into it and demonstrate it.

I say that every extreme, in itself, is false and implies a contradiction; but by extreme I mean the element constitutive of every synthesis, an element to which it does not [ ], which constitutes it [i.e. synthesis] that much better as it is found employed more energetically.

Thus, the proprietor is a constitutive element of the social order, necessary, indispensable.

To deny it implies a contradiction.

In the common language we say: Property must be curbed, not pushed to the extreme.

I will correct that language, which lacks scientific exactitude, and say: property, in itself, strong or weak, powerful or controlled, as you like, is exclusive, fraudulent, sinful, selfish, and wrong; it contains within it, theft.
However, that same property, such as it is, is indispensable to human order; and it is even because of this that it is necessary. Remove that individualist character, and [ ] you render it powerless....

It is not the extreme, [ ] property, that is to be avoided: that extreme always exists, since it is the very principle....

Here, all the happy mediums in the world are lies, pure arbitrariness.

It is necessary to balance property with a contrary principle, which is, as you prefer, collectivity or community.

(There is no moderate community: community in itself is as bad as property.... It calls, not for a corrective, shears, a gardener to fight it, a [ ] to geld it: it needs a balance.)

The two principles must be joined, married, mutually penetrating, in a manner to form a [ ].... *Thus*:

> Theory: *Everything that can be appropriated must be appropriated; everything that can be grouped, even among the things appropriated, must be grouped.*

(Similarly with *Competition, Credit, Government, etc.; division of labor, collectivity*.)

Other antinomies are subject to a different law, for example, that of *Dead weight—live weight*. It is certain that we tend, and will constantly tend, to reduce one and
increase the other: that is the law of Progress. Cf. [] *Dead weight, live weight*, pages 11–12.
# The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

## Note by Shawn P. Wilbur

One of the things that ought to be clear from recent developments here is that sometimes the most interesting, and also the most unexpected, insights into Proudhon's work come from double-checking those things that "everyone knows" about his work. It was, after all, in the context of tracking down how close he came to saying "anarchy is order" that I ran across the dubious translations in *The General Idea of the Revolution*, and that has led to a general scouring of his work for discussions of "anarchy" and "anarchism," which keeps raising interesting points about the early uses of that term.

When I started working through what I was finding, I was reminded that some of Proudhon's discussion of anarchy occurred in a work which has, in fact, been partially translated, but which is very seldom consulted, probably because of its unsavory reputation. Proudhon's 1852 work, *The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851* was partially published in a 1972 book, *December 2, 1851*, edited by John Halstead, collecting contemporary writings on the *coup*. The collection is a bit scarce now, and often not cheap if you can find a copy, but given the very small number of Proudhon translations available, its obscurity is fairly remarkable. It does not
appear to be, as it might be under other circumstances,
one of the "grails" of the literature. Much of the reason for
that is undoubtedly that the work has been treated as one
of the great missteps of Proudhon's career, with the
common claim being that it was written in support of
Louis Napoleon's coup and regime. That's probably a
fairly poor reading.

I think the simplest way to approach the work is to think
about what Proudhon had already said about the nature
of "the Revolution" and the workings of historical change,
and to compare the common understanding of this work,
which was addressed in some sense to the Emperor, with
the widespread enthusiasm for *The General Idea of the
Revolution*, which called upon the *bourgeoisie* to continue
their own revolution. I'm sure for some, these questions of
address are sufficient to banish both works, but nobody
will be surprised if I'm not convinced. And those who find
inspiration in the work that gave us the famous and
beloved "to be governed" rant might perhaps find reasons
to take a look at the more audacious later work.

*The Social Revolution* develops as I think a careful reader of Proudhon might expect. He had been predicting something very much like the coup for some time, and had ended up in prison precisely because he had missed very few chances to oppose Louis Napoleon. For him to argue then that the events of December 1851 had as much to do with broader historical movements than they did with the newly minted Emperor might be easily taken as a new affront, rather than any sort of support. In *The General Idea of the Revolution* he had spoken of the indifference of the people to governmental forms, so long as their
interests were served, and he had called that indifference
revolutionary, even while he was attempting to infuse
"the Revolution in the 19th century" with an idea (justice,
ultimately) which would both serve the interests of the
people and avoid the pitfalls of false solutions like the
coup. The more familiar you are with Proudhon's
conception of progress the fewer surprises there are in the
work, I think, but I suspect that for many readers the
conclusion, "Anarchy or Caesarism," would come as a
pleasant surprise, as he addressed in it, quite directly,
whether or not he was, as is sometimes claimed, "rallying"
to the new regime. I'm posting here the conclusion of that
concluding chapter, which shows off some of Proudhon's
infamous "patriotism" (in, I think, a not terribly
unpleasant light) but also clarifies not just his posture
towards Louis Napoleon, but to government and rulers in
general.

The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d'Etat
of December 2, 1851

Do you believe, I am asked at this moment, by an
indiscreet, perhaps malicious curiosity, that the December
2 accepts the revolutionary role in which you confine it, as
in the circle of Popilius? Would you have faith in its
liberal inclinations? And based on this inevitability, so
well demonstrated by you, of the mandate of
Louis-Napoléon, would you rally to his government, as to
the best or least worst of transitions? That is what we
want to know, and where we await you!...

— I will respond to that question, which is a bit suggestive,
with another:
Do I have a right to suppose, when the ideas that I have
defended for four years have obtained so little success,
that the head of the new government will adopt them
straightaway and make them his own! Have the taken on,
in the eyes of opinion, that character of impersonality,
reality, and universality, which would impose them on
the State? And if these ideas, all still young, are still hardly
anything but the ideas of one man, from whence would
come the hope that the December 2, who is also a man,
will prefer them to his own ideas!...

I write so that others will reflect in their turn and, if there
is cause, so they will contradict me. I write so that truth
being manifested, and elaborated by opinion, the
revolution, with the government, with the government, or
even against government, can be accomplished. As for
men, I readily believe their good intentions, but even more
in the misfortune of their judgment. It is said in the book
of Psalms: *Put not your trust in prince, or in the children of
Adam, that is to say in those who thought is
subjective, because salvation is not in them!* So I believe, and
unfortunately for us all, that the revolutionary idea, ill
defined in the minds of the masses, poorly served by its
popularizers, still leaves to the government the full choice
of its politics; I believe that power is surrounded with
impossibilities that it does not see, contradictions that it
does not known, traps that the universal ignorance
conceals from it; I believe that any government can endure,
if it wishes, by affirming its historical reasons, and placing
itself under the direction of the interests that it is called to
serve, but I also believe that men change little, and that if
Louis XVI, after having launched the revolution, had
wanted to withdraw it, if the Emperor, or if Charles X and
Louis-Philippe had preferred to be lost [doom it?] than to
continue it, it is improbable that those who succeeded
them would have made themselves straightaway, and
spontaneously, its promoters.

That is why I hold myself apart from government, more
inclined to pity it that to make war against it, devoted
solely to the homeland, and I join myself body and soul
with that elite of workers, head of the proletariat and
middle class, the party of labor and progress, of liberty
and the idea, which, understanding that authority is
nothing, that popular spontaneity is of no use; that liberty
which does not act is lost, and that the interests that need
to put themselves in relation with an intermediary which
represents them are interests sacrificed, accepts for its goal
and motto *the Education of the People*.

O homeland, French homeland, homeland of the bards of
the eternal revolution! homeland of liberty, for, despite all
your servitudes, in no place on the earth, neither in
Europe, nor in America, is the mind, which is all of man,
so free as it is with you! homeland that I love with that
accumulated love that the growing son bears for his
mother, that the father feels grow along with his children!
I will see you suffer for a long time yet, suffer not for
yourself alone, but for the world which rewards you with
its envy and its insults; to suffer innocent, only because
you do not know yourself?... It seems to me at every
instant that you are at your last ordeal! Awaken, mother:
neither can your princes, your barons and your counts do
anything for your salvation, nor can your prelates no how
to comfort you with their benedictions. Guard, if you wish,
the memory of those who have done well, and go
sometimes to pray at their monuments: but do not seek
their successors. They are finished! Commence your new
life, O first of immortals; show yourself in your beauty,
Venus Urania; spread your perfumes, flower of humanity!

And humanity will be rejuvenated, and its unity will be
created by you: for the unity of the human race is the
unity of my homeland, as the spirit of the human race is
nothing but the spirit of my homeland.
Unanimity: Universal Consent

There are things, in the moral order, about which the human race is unanimous; there are even many of them.

So isn't it possible that all the questions of politics, economics and morals could be simplified or clarified in such a way that the response to them would be unanimous?

In this way, the *direct* government of the people would be possible.

It is according to that idea, confirmed by the testimony of the sciences, that [Pierre-Napoléon] Domenjarie [1852] has written his pamphlet, *La loi morale, loi d'unanimité*, which we have read in prison.

That philosophical thesis [reveals] the ignorance of the author, but it is nonetheless useful to clarify it.

The things about which there can be unanimity (it is not a question of *facts/deeds*) are all *definite* abstractions, whatever order of ideas they may belong to.

Thus, *is it not permitted to kill a man*: Non occides.

But the disagreements begin when it is a question of *practical* cases:

Is it permitted to kill in legitimate defense?
Is it permitted to kill in war?

Is it permitted to kill judicially?

Is it permitted to kill deserters?

Is it permitted to kill a man or woman caught in flagrante delicto in the act of adultery?

Is it permitted to kill a tyrant?

Is it permitted to kill the abductor of a minor child? etc.

Now, on the practical cases, there is necessary flexibility, and as the circumstances alone make the *law* or *non-law*, it follows that one cannot posit an absolute principle, and that unanimity is impossible.

Thus, on a principle of abstract mathematics, there will be unanimity.—But if it is a question of assessing the results of a business, of an enterprise, of an experiment, etc., opinions can vary infinitely.

Similarly, in the moral realm, there is unanimity on principles, because the principle expresses an ideality, an abstraction. Only do to others what you would like others to do to you: everyone is unanimous on this precept, which we find expressed spontaneously everywhere.

It is an abstract, ideal formula.
But what should I want for myself? What can I demand?
What is my right? That is where unanimity ceases to exist,
and it is necessarily replaced by free debate, which ends in
the transaction or the Contract.

The value of a product is a common example: it
summarizes all cases.

---

Now, Reason asks itself:

Is there a science for undefinable things, on which
unanimity will never practically exist, as there is one for
definite things?...

It is this question to which the economic science responds.

---

From this previous explanation, it is easy to deduce and a
priori judgment that declares void the so-called science of
Fourier, which aspires to [resolve] everything, mathematically, that is to say abstractly, and by
means of definitions.

From this as well, the elimination of the Communist
thought, which, supposing unanimity, suppresses debate,
competition, contract; the very principle of conventional
right!....

It is time to open the eyes of the public in that regard and
especially to repress the [ ] presumption of these poor
Devils who believe they have found the secret of the
world when they have produced a [] gross naïveté.

What then is the science of indefinable things, of things on
which there remains unnecessary doubt, and where
unanimity is impossible?

It is the science that teaches us to know the [causes], the
reason, the *laws* that rule this very variability: and how
bye judicious and equitable convention, we arrest that
variability, and convert into something definite a thing
that is not of that nature.

Sic Notion of dead weight [*poids mort*];—variable.

Notion of maximum load [*poids utile*];—variable.

Relation between one and the other;—variable.

What are the causes of these *variations*?—How do they
come about?—What is their mode, their character?—What
utility [can we] draw from them for the conduct of life?
etc., etc. How to behave with them? etc.
1855
New Propositions Demonstrated in the
Practice of Revolutions

1. The interests established by society are mobile, subject to a constant and fundamentally unstable shifting.

2. Fixity, permanence or perpetuity in the relations of interests is a chimera.

3. That mobility of interests is the primary source of revolutions.

4. An interest, however unjust it may be, can only be abolished on the condition of being replaced by another, which itself could appear every bit as unjust later.

5. The human mind has a horror of the void; it does not accept pure negation, even if it is the negation of the greatest of crimes.

6. Nations do nothing from pure love or pure justice; there is always a self-serving motive for every reform.

7. The worship of truth for its own sake is pure nonsense in revolution.

8. All religion, every political institution, all the economy of society are successive modifications of cannibalism.

9. The ideas that govern society, with the interests, are mobile like those interests themselves, liable to increase
and decrease, subject by nature to conflict and contradiction, perpetually changed.

10. Consistency in ideas is the opposite of the social Mind; the immutability of symbols and professions of faith, in Society, is a chimera.

11. That fundamental oscillation of ideas is the second cause of revolutions.

12. An idea, however absurd it may be, can never be entirely abolished, except when it is replaced by another, which could appear as absurd later.

13. The mobility of ideas and interests is not sufficient to explain Revolutions.

14. Human Nature remains the same, with regard to worthiness and unworthiness;—well-being increases, the sum of knowledge is multiplied: the quantity of virtue remains the same.

15. *Evil, vice, selfishness and sadness* are essential elements of humanity.

16. The antagonism of powers creates all of our life: the status quo, bread, the absolute, happiness, sanctity, perfection is nothingness, death.

17. The intimate knowledge of that truth is the principle of resistance to revolutions.
18. The feeling of the beautiful and the sublime, the fascination with the absolute, is the cause that tips the balance and incites revolutions.

19. The beautiful, the sublime, the absolute, the perfect, the true and the ideal are the infinite in thought.

20. This feeling produces the marvelous in Humanity; it is the supreme cause, the *ultima ratio* of revolutions.

21. The idea of God is not the conception of a *Supreme Being*, but of a *Supreme Ideal*.

22. The supreme ideal is without reality: *there is no God*.

23. A society cannot exist without a transcendent ideal: without religion, modern society is in danger of dying.

24. Every ideal has a real and intelligible basis: every reality and every idea is susceptible to idealization.

25. The mind inevitably tend to realize its ideal, in nature, in labor, in person, in government, in religion: that is why it decides to make a revolution.

26. Society needing an ideal, and that ideal needing to belong to a real being, we must seek a supplement to the idea of God.

27. Truth, as well as Justice, is essentially mobile and historical; there is nothing absolute or eternal about it.
28. Only the laws of movement are absolutely and eternally true.

29. The state of revolution is the normal state of societies.

30. Every manifestation supposes a subject: thus, the series of revolutions leads us to suppose a revolutionary subject.

31. *Revolutions* are the *Transitions* [Passages] of Humanity

32. There have been some presentiments of that idea; the Peoples, the Poets, the Writers have had an intuition of it.

33. The phenomena of revolution can only be explained and understood with the aid of this hypothesis

34. The hypothesis of a revolutionary subject is as rational and more legitimate than that of God and that of Providence.

35. A being is not a simple thing, but a group.

36. All beings, living and unorganized, are groups.

37. Everything that forms a group is a reality or has the power of realization.

38. The old ontology went astray which it defined the *Being* as a simple substance.

39. Simple substance, *mind* or *matter*, is a chimera.
40. A man is an organized group, in which the mind arises from the organization.

41. The People are an organized group: thus, the People are a real being, endowed with Life, Personality, Will, Intelligence and prescience.

42. The definition of man by Bonald is the same, at base, as that of Cabanis: — a simple transposition of terms has made all the difference.

43. The family, the familial group, is a *Complex Being*, which has its Self, like the People and the Individual.

44. The old ontology, in its materialist form, leads to this proposition: Matter does not exist.

45. In its spiritualist form it leads to this other proposition: Mind does not exist.

46. To set aside the notion of *substance* and *Cause*, and move onto the terrain of *Phenomena* and *Law*, or of the Group.
# Propositions: To Leave Behind Abstractions, Utopias, Systems, Doctrines, Theories and Empiricisms of the Parties Schools and Sects

## I

1. There exists between men a tendency or attraction that pushes them to group and act for their greatest interests and the most complete scope of their liberty, collectively and en masse.

2. From that tendency in the group results, for the human mass, a new and incalculable power, which can be considered as the proper and unique force of Society, commonly known as the Sovereignty of the People.

3. That force is manifested in all the labors that demand an energy out of proportion with the means of the individual; in the large workshops and factories, in the armies, but especially in the political organization of Government.

4. The importance of that force is such that we can affirm boldly, without fear of being refuted, as the most distinguished fact of the history of the nations, that there is no civilization for the people, no progress, not morality for individuals, no liberty or well being, apart from the legitimate exercise and the rational application of that force.
5. Royalty is the symbolization of the social force: the socialist utopias are its mythology.

6. The social force is the property of all: it tends to divide it equally in all.

7. The guarantees of liberty and well-being, the stability of States, the order of nations are on account of the number of Rulers, of the of those sharing the social force.

8. The social order will be perfect, equilibrium unassailable and stability absolute if all those who contribute to the formation of the collective force are, at the same time and in proportion to their faculties, sharers in the social force, constituent parts of the sovereigns.

9. Now, governmental practice is far from having reached that degree of perfection: we have never even seen an example where the number of the governors was only half plus one of the individuals contributing to the collective force: that proposition has even appeared absurd to all the publicists.

10. The social force has been constantly usurped from the profit of a small number against the majority, delivered to the whims of one party and more often still of one individual.

11. That alienation of the collective power constitutes, ipso facto, the political organism called monarchic; it gives rise to dynasties, aristocracies, nobilities, patriciates, bourgeoisies and, on the other hand, serfs, slaves, helots, pariahs and proletarians.
12. Democracy is the protest of the oppressed people against the alienation of the social force. Powerlessness of that protest, caused by the ignorance of the facts, by political ideology and verbiage.

The powerlessness of the democracy comes from the fact that it has always wanted to make the governmental organism, as tyranny had created it, serve the emancipation of the people, but it has not has been able to create itself a property in it.

The true cause of the alienation of the social force is the poverty, original or [ ] organic or fortuitous, of the majority of the people.

## II

1. In fact, if we study history, we see that in general, when all differences are deducted, the enjoyment of the benefits created by the social force is, for each individual, in direct proportion to their fortune.

2. As a result, the poverty, first cause of that alienation, is aggravated and by it, and that here the two terms Alienation of the social force and Poverty are reciprocally Cause and effect of one another.

3. Analogy and correlation between Property and Government. For the exercise and enjoyment of the collective force to be without reproach, the public power to which all contribute must be possessed by all, like the soul, industry, commerce and knowledge.
4. Thus the problem of the Emancipation of the people is
double:

To create in the disinherited masses a real patrimony,
effective, useful, susceptible to appropriation and yet
inalienable.

To give to the people, to each citizen, their effective,
complete, inalienable sovereignty, susceptible to
distribution and yet sheltered from all usurpation.

III

1. Again—In order to do that, to study asceticism, absolutist organism, and instead of wanting to employ it in the service of the people, to disorganize it and create one that will be the counterweight of the first.

2. The Sovereignty that is exercised only by mandate is fictive and vain.

3. Sovereignty is reciprocal.

4. The Sovereignty in each locality and each individuals is proportional to the interests that the individual or locality represent.

5. Sovereignty increases by its exercise, as Wealth increases by Labor.

6. Government is identical in all times and places
7. Paris, seat of the French government. Its predominance deduced from the order of things.

8. Assembly of the sections.

Government Commission.

Government Committee.

Functions.

9. Renewal of the representatives. Sovereignty is mobile: it cannot be exercised by all, to the same degree, at the same moment.

10. Relation of the Commune of Paris with the Communes of France. The Commune, original, natural, traditional, imperishable seat of Government.

11. National assembly. Its functions.

12. The national assembly oversees and verifies the acts of the Government Commission and Committee.

13. Case of conflict. Solution.

14. The tyranny of a million men is impossible, when the sovereignty is not long the patrimony of one party or one caste. The [] of Paris gives meaning to that of Charles X, Louise-Philippe or Napoleon III.

15. Revolutionary operations.
Formation of the patrimony of the people.

## IV

1. Bis. Distribution of the social force by groups and sub-groups: autonomous. It is not enough to raise the wages of the worker, to reduce the hours; he must be made master of the thing.

2. Demolition of tyranny: elimination of parasitism.

3. Commonplace, organic affaires, etc... All of that remains the same.

4. Revolutionary justice.

5. How the social force, or sovereignty of the people, is found divided. Each enjoys two things that they did not have previously:

A complete individual liberty.

Something that surpasses the scope of individual activity: that something is the portion of sovereignty. Participation in all deliberations, elections, jurisdictions; certainty of being heard in all their demands; all things that engender glory, security, wealth, consideration and virtue in the individual.

6. The functionary, in this system, truly becomes a civil servant; he is no longer a master. Illusion of the ambitions in this regard soon set straight.
7. End of controversies: pointless, interminable, innumerable disputes brought to naught.

8. Immediate application in the overthrowing of tyranny:

Form sections.

Insure propaganda.

Establish the authority of the Commission and the Committee.

See the right of Justice bestowed.

Organize the vindicte of the people.

Gather in the face of the power.

Strike the tyranny [in a preemptive manner]

Finally, proceed against the [ ]. their henchmen, dictators and satellites by all means of extermination.
1857
Letter to Villiaumé

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

My dear Villiaumé, it is too warm for me to venture, with
my sick head, all the way to Rue Marsollier. I am thinking
instead of fleeing for ten or twelve days to some hole in
Franche-Comté, where the devil may perhaps not come to
torment me with his pomps and work.

But you, who are spry, come some evening after your
dinner and we will have a mug at the local cabaret, which
will do you as much good as an ample banquet.
Friendship, and understanding as well, is surely found in
a modest to your health.

I regret to learn of the illness of Béranger, whom I have
not seen.

I had intended to pay tribute to him this year with a copy
of my next book: it is an honor that will be denied me.

It occurs to me that I have known hardly any of the
distinguished men of the century: Châteaubriant, P.-L.
Courier, Jouffroy, Cousin, Nodier, E. Burnouf, Guizot,
Thiers, Barrot, Royer-Collard, Lamartine, A. de Musset, A.
de Vigny, Béranger, Lamennais, Arago, etc., etc.

With those few that I have encountered, I have had to do
battle: P. Leroux, L. Blanc, V. Considérant; there will be
others.
Am I not the excommunicated of the era!

Of course I will have no one at my burial. There is a
proverb that says: *Væ soli!... Woe to the loner!... thinking
of it, I ask myself if I do not drag along the chains of some
great culprit condemned in a former existence, as J.
Reynaud teaches?

I begin to be very weary of life and seek only to speak my
piece before I die. That done, I say: *To hell with me and the
human race!* Regards.

P.-J. Proudhon
# Relation of the State and Liberty,
According to Modern Right

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

Modern right, by introducing itself in the place of the
ancient right, has done one new thing: it has put in the
presence of one another, on the same line, two powers
which until now had been in a relation of subordination.
These two powers are the *State* and the *Individual*, in other
words *Government* and *Liberty*.

The Revolution, indeed, has not suppressed that occult,
mystical presence, that one called the sovereign, and that
we name more willingly the State; it has not reduced
society to lone individuals, compromising, contracting
between them, and of their free transaction making for
themselves a common law, as the Social Contract of J.-J.
Rousseau gave us to understand.

No, Government, Power, State, as on wishes to call it, is
found again, under the ruins of the *ancien régime*, complete,
perfectly intact, and stronger than before. What is new
since the Revolution, is Liberty, I mean the condition
made of Liberty, its civil and political state.

Let us note, besides, that the State, as the Revolution
conceived it, is not a purely abstract thing, as some,
Rousseau among others, have supposed, a sort of legal
fiction; it is a reality as positive as society itself, as the
individual even. The State is the power of collectivity
which results, in every agglomeration of human beings,
from their mutual relations, from the solidarity of their
interests, from their community of action, from the
practice of their opinions and passions. The State does not
exist without the citizens, doubtless; it is not prior nor
superior to them; but it exists for the very reason that they
exist, distinguishing itself from each and all by special
faculties and attributes. And liberty is no longer a fictive
power, consisting of a simple faculty to choose between
doing and not doing: it is a positive faculty, *sui generis*,
which is to the individual, assemblage of diverse passions
and faculties, what the State is to the collectivity of
citizens, the highest power of conception and of creation
of being.<fnref n="25" />

<footnote n="25">25 Liberty and the State. — The antithesis of the State and of Liberty, presented here as the foundation and principle of modern society, by replacement of the supremacy of the State and the subordination of Liberty, which made the base of ancient society, that antithesis, eminently organic, will not be admitted by the publicists and partisans of the principle of authority, of the eminent domain of the State, of governmental initiative and of the subordination of the citizen or rather subject; it will not be understood by those who, formed by the lessons of the old scholasticism, are accustomed to see in the State and free will only abstractions. Those, just like the old partisans of divine right, are born enemies of self-government, invariable adversaries of true democracy, and condemned to the eternal arbitrariness of the reason of State and of taxation. For them the State is a mystical entity, before which every individuality must bow; Liberty is not a power, and taxation is not an exchange; principles are fictions of which the man of State makes what he wants, justice a convention and politics a bascule. These doctrinaires, as they are called, the skepticism and misanthropy of which today governs Europe, are as far beneath the ancient monarchs and feudalists, as arbitrary will is beneath faith, Machiavelli beneath the Bible. Europe owes to this school of pestilence the confusion of ideas</footnote>
This is why the reason of the State is not the same thing as
individual reason; why the interest of the State is not the
same as private interest, even if that was identical in the
majority or the totality of citizens; why the acts of
government are of a different nature than the acts of the
simple individual. The faculties, attributes, interests, differ
between the citizen and the State as the individual and the
collective differ between them: we have seen a beautiful
example of it, when we have posed that principle that the
law of exchange is not the same for the individual and for
the State.

Under the regime of divine right, the reason of State being
confused with the dynastic, aristocratic or clerical reason,
could not always be in conformity with justice; that is
what has cause the banishment, by modern right, of the
abusive principle of the reason of State. Just so, the
interest of the State, being confused with the interest of
dynasty or of caste, was not in complete conformity with
Justice; and it is that which makes every society
transformed by the Revolution tend to republican
government.

Under the new regime, on the contrary, the reason of State
must in complete conformity with Justice, the true

and the dissolution of morals by which it is beset: the slack maxims
Jesuits could produce nothing comparable.

This is not the place to open a discussion of the actuality of the State
and of Liberty: I will content myself with referring provisionally to
my work Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, Fourth and
Eighth Studies of the Belgian edition.
expression of right, reason essentially general and synthetic, distinct consequently from the reason of the citizen, always more or less specialized and individual.<fnref n="26" /> Similarly, the interest of the State is purged of all aristocratic and dynastic pretension; the interest of the State is above all an interest of noble right, which implies that its nature is other than that of individual interest.

The author of the Social Contract claimed, and those who follow him have repeated after him, that the true sovereign is the citizen; that the prince, organ of the State, is only the agent of the citizen; consequently that the State is the choice of the citizen: all that would be bon à dire while it was a question of claiming the rights of man and of the citizen and of inaugurating liberty against despotism. Presently the Revolution no longer encounters obstacles, at least from the side of the *ancien régime*: it is a question of rightly knowing its thought and of putting it into execution. From this point of view the language of Rousseau has become incorrect, I would even say that it is false and dangerous.

## Determination of the functions, attributes and prerogatives of the State, according to modern right

The State, a power of collectivity, having its own and specific reason, its eminent interest, its outstanding functions, the State, as such, has *rights* too, rights that it is impossible to misunderstand without putting

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Opposition of collective and individual reason. See, on this curious subject, the work indicated in the preceding note, Sixth Study of the Belgian edition.</footnote>
immediately in peril the right, the fortune and the liberty
of the citizens themselves.

The State is the protector of the liberty and property of the
citizens, not only of those who are born, but of those who
are to be born. Its guardianship embraces the present and
future, and extends to the future generations: thus the
State has rights proportionate to its obligations; without
that, what would its foresight serve?

The state oversees the execution of the laws; it is the
guardian of the public faith and the guarantor of the
observation of contracts. These attributions imply new
rights in the State, as much over persons as things, that
one could not deny it without destroying it, without
breaking the social bond.

The State is the justice-bringer par excellence; it alone is
charged with the execution of judgments. On this account
as well, the State has its rights, without which its own
guarantee, its justice, would become null.

All of that, you say, existed before in the State. The
principle then and its corollaries, the theory and the
application remain at base the same, nothing has changed?
The Revolution has been a useless work.

This has changed between the ancient and the new regime,
the in the past the State was incarnated in a man: "L'État
c'est moi;" while today it finds its reality in itself, as a
power of collectivity; — that in the past, that State made
man, that State-King was absolute, while now it is subject
to justice, and subject as a consequence to the control of
the citizens; — that in the past the reason of the State was
infected by aristocratic and princely reason, while today,
exposed to all the critiques, to all the protests, it has
strength only from Right and Truth; — that in the past, the
interest of the State was confused with the interest of the
princes, which distorted the administration and caused
justice to stumble, which today a similar confusion of
interests establishes the crime of misappropriation and
prevarication; — that finally, in the past, the subject only
appeared on its knees before it sovereign, as we saw it in
the Estates General, while since the Revolution the citizen
deals with the State as equal to equal, which is precisely
what allows us to define tax as an exchange, and to
consider the State, in the administration of the public
funds, as a simple trader.

The State has preserved its power, its strength, which
alone renders it respectable, constitutes its credit, creates
awards and prerogatives for it, but it has lost
its *authority*. It no longer has anything but Rights,
guaranteed by the rights and interests of the citizens
themselves. It is itself, if we can put it this way, a species
of citizen; it is a civil person, like families, commercial
societies, corporations, and communes. Just as it is not
sovereign, neither is it a servant. As has already been said,
that would be to remake the tyrant: it is the first among
his peers.

Thus liberty, which counts for nothing in the State,
subordinated, absorbed was it was by the good pleasure
of the sovereign, liberty has become a power equal in
dignity to the State. Its definition with regard to the State
is the same as with regard to the citizens: *Liberty, in the*
man, is the power to create, innovate, reform, modify, in a word
to do everything that exceeds the power of nature and that of the
State, and which does no harm to the rights of others, whether
that other is a simple citizen or the State. It is according to
this principle that the State must abstain from everything
that does not absolutely require its initiative, in order to
leave a vaster field to individual liberty.

Ancient society, established on absolutism, thus tended to
concentration and immobility.

The new society, established on the dualism of liberty and
the State, tends to decentralization and movement. The
idea of human perfectibility, or progress, has revealed
itself in humanity at the same time as the new right.
# The Theory of Taxation

Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur

## Relation of the State and Liberty, according to modern right

Modern right, by introducing itself in the place of the ancient right, has done one new thing: it has put in the presence of one another, on the same line, two powers which until now had been in a relation of subordination. These two powers are the *State* and the *Individual*, in other words *Government* and *Liberty*.

The Revolution, indeed, has not suppressed that occult, mystical presence, that one called the sovereign, and that we name more willingly the State; it has not reduced society to lone individuals, compromising, contracting between them, and of their free transaction making for themselves a common law, as the *Social Contract* of J.-J. Rousseau gave us to understand.

No, Government, Power, State, as on wishes to call it, is found again, under the ruins of the *ancien régime*, complete, perfectly intact, and stronger than before. What is new since the Revolution, is Liberty, I mean the condition made of Liberty, its civil and political state.

Let us note, besides, that the State, as the Revolution conceived it, is not a purely abstract thing, as some, Rousseau among others, have supposed, a sort of legal fiction; it is a reality as positive as society itself, as the
individual even. The State is the power of collectivity
which results, in every agglomeration of human beings,
from their mutual relations, from the solidarity of their
interests, from their community of action, from the
practice of their opinions and passions. The State does not
exist without the citizens, doubtless; it is not prior nor
superior to them; but it exists for the very reason that they
exist, distinguishing itself from each and all by special
faculties and attributes. And liberty is no longer a fictive
power, consisting of a simple faculty to choose between
doing and not doing: it is a positive faculty, *sui generis*,
which is to the individual, assemblage of diverse passions
and faculties, what the State is to the collectivity of
citizens, the highest power of conception and of creation
of being (D).

This is why the reason of the State is not the same thing as
individual reason; why the interest of the State is not the
same as private interest, even if that was identical in the
majority or the totality of citizens; why the acts of
government are of a different nature than the acts of the
simple individual. The faculties, attributes, interests, differ
between the citizen and the State as the individual and the
collective differ between them: we have seen a beautiful
example of it, when we have posed that principle that the
law of exchange is not the same for the individual and for
the State.

Under the regime of divine right, the reason of State being
confused with the dynastic, aristocratic or clerical reason,
could not always be in conformity with justice; that is
what has cause the banishment, by modern right, of the
abusive principle of the reason of State. Just so, the
interest of the State, being confused with the interest of
dynasty or of caste, was not in complete conformity with
Justice; and it is that which makes every society
transformed by the Revolution tend to republican
government.

Under the new regime, on the contrary, the reason of State
must in complete conformity with Justice, the true
expression of right, reason essentially general and
synthetic, distinct consequently from the reason of the
citizen, always more or less specialized and individual (E).
Similarly, the interest of the State is purged of all
aristocratic and dynastic pretension; the interest of the
State is above all an interest of noble right, which implies
that its nature is other than that of individual interest.

The author of the *Social Contract* a claimed, and those who
follow him have repeated after him, that the true
sovereign is the citizen; that the prince, organ of the State,
is only the agent of the citizen; consequently that the State
is the chose of the citizen: all that would be bon à dire
while it was a question of claiming the rights of man and
of the citizen and of inaugurating liberty against
despotism. Presently the Revolution no longer encounters
obstacles, at least from the side of the *ancien régime*: it is a
question of rightly knowing its thought and of putting it
into execution. From this point of view the language of
Rousseau has become incorrect, I would even say that it is
false and dangerous.

Determination of the functions, attributes and
prerogatives of the State, according to modern right
The State, a power of collectivity, having its own and
specific reason, its eminent interest, its outstanding
functions, the State, as such, has rights too, rights that it is
impossible to misunderstand without putting
immediately in peril the right, the fortune and the liberty
of the citizens themselves.

The State is the protector of the liberty and property of the
citizens, not only of those who are born, but of those who
are to be born. Its guardianship embraces the present and
future, and extends to the future generations: thus the
State has rights proportionate to its obligations; without
that, what would its foresight serve?

The state oversees the execution of the laws; it is the
guardian of the public faith and the guarantor of the
observation of contracts. These attributions imply new
rights in the State, as much over persons as things, that
one could not deny it without destroying it, without
breaking the social bond.

The State is the justice-bringer par excellence; it alone is
charged with the execution of judgments. De ce chef
encore, the State has its rights, without which its own
guarantee, its justice, would become null.

All of that, you say, existed before in the State. The
principle then and its corollaries, the theory and the
application remain at base the same, nothing has changed?
The Revolution has been a useless work.

This has changed between the ancient and the new regime,
the in the past the State was incarnated in a man: "L'État
c'est moi;" while today it finds its reality in itself, as a power of collectivity; — that in the past, that State made man, that State-King was absolute, while now it is subject to justice, and subject as a consequence to the control of the citizens; — that in the past the reason of the State was infected by aristocratic and princely reason, while today, exposed to all the critiques, to all the protests, it has strength only from Right and Truth; — that in the past, the interest of the State was confused with the interest of the princes, which distorted the administration and caused justice to stumble, which today a similar confusion of interests establishes the crime of misappropriation and prevarication; — that finally, in the past, the subject only appeared on its knees before it sovereign, as we saw it in the Estates General, while since the Revolution the citizen deals with the State as equal to equal, which is precisely what allows us to define tax as an exchange, and to consider the State, in the administration of the public funds, as a simple trader.

The State has preserved its power, its strength, which alone renders it respectable, constitutes its credit, creates awards and prerogatives for it, but it has lost its *authority*. It no longer has anything but Rights, guaranteed by the rights and interests of the citizens themselves. It is itself, if we can put it this way, a species of citizen; it is a civil person, like families, commercial societies, corporations, and communes. Just as there is no sovereign, there is no longer a servant, as it has been said, that would be to remake the tyrant: he is the first among his peers.
Thus liberty, which counts for nothing in the State,
subordinated, absorbed was it was by the good pleasure
of the sovereign, liberty has become a power equal in
dignity to the State. Its definition with regard to the State
is the same as with regard to the citizens: Liberty, in the
man, is the power to create, innovate, reform, modify, in a word
to do everything that exceeds the power of nature and that of the
State, and which does no harm to the rights of others, whether
that other is a simple citizen or the State. It is according to
this principle that the State must abstain from everything
that does not absolutely require its initiative, in order to
leave a vaster field to individual liberty.

Ancient society, established on absolutism, thus tended to
concentration and immobility.

The new society, established on the dualism of liberty and
the State, tends to decentralization and movement. The
idea of human perfectibility, or progress, has revealed
itself in humanity at the same time as the new right.

Note D, Page 65

Liberty and the State. — The antithesis of the State and of
Liberty, presented here as the foundation and principle of
modern society, by replacement of the supremacy of the
State and the subordination of Liberty, which made the
base of ancient society, that antithesis, eminently organic,
will not be admitted by the publicists and partisans of the
principle of authority, of the eminent domain of the State,
of governmental initiative and of the subordination of the
citizen or rather subject; it will not be understood by those
who, formed by the lessons of the old scholasticism, are
accustomed to see in the State and free will only
abstractions. Those, just like the old partisans of divine
right, are born enemies of self-government, invariable
adversaries of true democracy, and condemned to the
eternal arbitrariness of the reason of State and of taxation.
For them the State is a mystical entity, before which every
individuality must bow; Liberty is not a power, and
taxation is not an exchange; principles are fictions of
which the man of State makes what he wants, justice a
convention and politics a bascule. These doctrinaires, as
they are called, the skepticism and misanthropy of which
today governs Europe, are as far beneath the ancient
monarchists and feudalists, as arbitrary will is beneath
faith, Machiavelli beneath the Bible. Europe owes to this
school of pestilence the confusion of ideas and the
dissolution of morals by which it is beset: the slack
maxims Jesuits could produce nothing comparable.

This is not the place to open a discussion of the actuality
of the State and of Liberty: I will content myself with
referring provisionally to my work *Justice in the Revolution
and in the Church*, Fourth and Eighth Studies of the Belgian
edition.

Note E, Page 66

Opposition of collective and individual reason. See, on
this curious subject, the work indicated in the preceding
note, Sixth Study of the Belgian edition.

10. General Summary
Such is the ensemble of ideas resulting from my study of
the question raised by the State Council of the canton of
Vaud. To first free these ideas from the mass of facts, from
the chaos of empiricism, and then explain them with
advantage, demanded a profound critique of the fiscal
institutions, a critique that I could have made much more
voluminous, for no cost but the citations, but that, such as
it is, appears to me sufficient for enlightened minds or
administrators versed in practice.

A complete theory of taxation, of its principles, its rules,
its nature, its object, its anomalies, and its function in the
economic system of nations, has never, as far as I know,
been given: thanks to the appeal of the honorable
councilors of the State of Vaud, it will at least have been
sketched, and for the first time.

What is that theory?

Here is no preconceived system, no utopian tendency,
nothing that could appear foreign to even the most
old-fashioned sorts, nothing that the most routine tax
system could by right find paradoxical. We have taken
hold of the facts and we have analyzed them; we have
isolated their principle and put their spirit in relief. In a
rapid review, we have outlined the history of taxation, in
ancient as well as modern society; we have determined its
aim and clarified its contradictions, which means its laws.

Then, with the aid of reductions, transformations,
displacements, applying proportionality here and
progression there; sometimes striking the question of
consumption, sometimes production and circulation, and
making the system pivot on land rent, we have ended—or
at least such is my hope—with a rational, harmonious
ensemble, all the parts of which suppose one another, like
the members of an animal; we have produced an organic
whole, a function of a still larger organism, which is
society and the State.

Let the more experienced rework, now, the plan for
reforms that we have just presented in rough form, taking
the French budget for their topic; let others, applying it to
the various States of Europe, subject it to all the
modifications demanded by local customs and habits; let
them change the proportions proposed in this report; it
will matter little.

Whoever concerns themselves with taxation and seeks, for
any country or society, its normal constitution, must take
into account, above all, the facts and propositions that we
have demonstrated, which can be considered as so many
axioms. These facts and propositions are:

> That taxation, according to ancient law, was first a *tribute*;

> But that, according to modern law and economic science,
> it is nothing other than an exchange;

> That this transformation of taxation, from ancient society
to the new society, is the corollary of the transformation
undergone by the State, once sovereign, but now balanced
by a rival power, *Liberty*;

> That from that fundamental notion, namely, that taxation
> is an exchange, its whole theory is deduced;
That thus, unlike other traders, the State owes its services
at *cost price*;

That it does not *impose* them, but waits for the nation to
demand them;

That as a consequence of that *free* demand of the citizens,
the tax quota could not increase in an indefinite manner,
but must on the contrary decrease endlessly, from which
arises the necessity of assigning *maximum* to taxation;

That the centralization of government in a large country is
incompatible with that unlimited reduction of the general
costs of the State, and consequently with the regularity of
the budget;

That, in a normal state of things, the sum of the
contributions would appear to have to be one *twentieth* of
the total product of the country, and can be reduced
to *thirtieth*;

That, in modern societies, all the citizens
being equal before the law, the expenses of the State must
be settled without distinction by all and in *proportion* to
their abilities;

That all taxation, whatever its form and its base, is
ultimately collected on the collective *product*;

That as a consequence all tax fees are reduced to a tax on
consumption;
That, through the movement of values and the rule that presides over the formation of prices, that tax on consumption finds itself settled, in a very large part, not individually as it seems from the rates of contribution, but by the masses;

> That as a result of this taxation, taken in its general case, is reduced, but for minor details, to a *capitation*;

> That, with regard to the inequality of fortunes, that capitation constitutes a true *progressive tax* in inverse proportion to fortune and direct proportion to indigence;

> That, under the influence of these two causes, the incessant movement of values and the inequality of fortunes, the problem of the *balancing of taxation* is insoluble, and that all that we can obtain in this regard is reduced to an *approximation*;

> That in order to return to Justice in taxation, the true method, the single and unique means is thus to work toward the *equalization of fortunes* themselves, something that does not depend on the initiative of the State, but solely on the intelligence and will of the citizens who consent to the tax;

> That every attempt made in another direction in order to arrive at the equalization of taxation, either by a *progressive tax*, or by a *tax on capital*, or by a *tax on rent or income*, leads to absurdity and brings about enormous perturbations for public economy;
That a single tax, invariably resulting in the concentration
in one single instance of all the fiscal iniquities divided in
a multitude of taxes, would be the most crushing of taxes
and the worst of systems;

That the true march to follow being, in the final account,
to submit to the law, or, to put it more correctly, to the
egalitarian tendency, the whole difficulty consists in
turning taxation in that direction and organizing it in that
spirit;

That the first thing to do in order to arrive at that end is to
constitute an allowance to the State;

That this allowance should be established on the rent of
lands appropriated and in a good state for cultivation
[exploitation];

That on top of that allowance, on which the whole system
of taxation must pivot, the State should establish two
categories of taxes, one on *public services*, directly
reproductive, credit, means of transport, mines, docks,
waters and forests, etc.; the other consisting of a series
of *facultative* contributions, on all the objects of
consumption and use, on transactions, etc.;

That for these various contributions, the State will apply,
according to the circumstances, progression to some,
proportionality to others, in such a way as to promote the
egalitarian movement, the initiative, direction and
acceleration of which will be up to the nation alone.
All of that, I dare say, is simple, clear, natural, logical, and,
for whoever rallies to the new right, conclusive. The
practice finds its explanation there, the historical
movement its justification, the utopia itself its reason. The
transitions can be handled as slowly as you wish.

Now, that legislation of taxation, where we see the ancient
iniquity converted little by little into an instrument of
Justice, is not our invention, and it is that which makes its
triumph. We have deduced it from principles and facts
above all arbitrariness; we have freed it, in short, from the
movements of history and the contradiction of ideas; we
have grasped its vestiges and indicated the organizing
and liberal tendency even in the inventions of the most
tyrannical tax system. So that if our democratic
civilization, victorious over foolish resistances, ever
manages to determine its aspirations and to constitute
itself on a true basis, it would find its most decisive
argument, and its consolidation, in the theory of taxation.

The progressive, indefinite reduction of the costs of the
State;

Some taxes combined in such a way that they serve at
once to pay for the public services, to moderate the
economic movement, to discipline the market, and to
promote the emancipation of the working classes;

The balance of properties;

The inviolability of inheritances;

Thee leveling of fortunes;
Society advancing with an even step in justice, liberty and
wealth:

That is what we mean from now on by this word, odious
and curse for so many centuries, Taxation.
# Letter to Several Workers in Paris and Rouen

Translated by Mitch Abidor

Citizens and friends:

This work was inspired by you and belongs to you.

Ten months ago you asked me what I thought of the electoral manifesto published by sixty workers from the Seine. You especially wanted to know if, after having pronounced yourselves at the elections of 1863 with a negative vote, you should persist in this line or if, because of the circumstances, you were permitted to support with your vote and your influence the candidacy of a comrade worthy of our sympathy.

There can be no doubt concerning my opinion on the thoughts expressed in your manifesto, and I frankly expressed it when I received it. To be sure, I was pleased by this reawakening of socialism: who in France had more right to be pleased than I? And I was in agreement with you and the Sixty that the working class isn't represented and that it has the right to be so; how could I possibly feel otherwise? If such were possible, would not working class representation be today, as it was in 1848, the official affirmation of socialism from the political and economic points of view?
But between this and the participation in elections, which would commit, along with democratic consciousness, its principles and its future, there is an abyss that I did not hide from you, citizens. And I can add that these reservations, welcomed by you, have since then been confirmed by experience.

What then is French democracy up to, once so proud and pure, and which, on the word of a few ambitious ones, imagined that through use of a false oath it could go from victory to victory? What conquests have we gained? Through what new and powerful idea has our policies been revealed? In the last eighteen months what successes have been signaled by the energy of our advocates or have repaid their glibness? Have we not been the witnesses of their perpetual defeats and failures? Duped by their parliamentarianism, haven't we seen them beaten on almost all questions by the government's orators? And when they were taken into court for the crime of having formed associations or met without authorization, when they had to explain themselves before the country and those in power, were they not confounded by that legality they vaunted and whose interpreters they posed as? What pitiful intrigues! And what a pitiful defense! I leave you to judge... After so many noisy debates can we deny that deep down our representatives have no other ideas, tendencies, or policies than the policies, tendencies, and ideas of the government?

Thanks to them it is now the case for young democracy what was once the case for old liberalism, two schools which an effort is being made to pair off: the world is beginning to back away from them. It is said that the truth,
right, and freedom are no longer any more on this side
than on the other.

It is thus a matter of revealing to the world, through
authentic testimony, the ideas, the true ideas of modern
people, to legitimize its reformist aspirations and its right
to sovereignty. Is universal suffrage truth or is it fiction? It
is once again a question of restricting it, and it is certain
that aside from labor very few take it seriously.

It's a matter of demonstrating to working class democracy
what happens when a party enters political life when it
lacks sufficient consciousness of itself and its ideas, and
has given its votes to names that don't represent it. How
when the superior class loses the direction of a movement
it is up to the inferior one to take it. And how a people,
incapable of regenerating itself through this regular
succession, is condemned to perish. Do I dare to say that
it's a matter of making French plebeians understand that if
in 1869 it takes it into its head to yet again win a battle for
the benefit of its bosses as it did in 1863-64, its
emancipation could be put off for a half-century?

Have no doubt, my friends, that protest via the blank
ballot, so little understood, so poorly received... that this
absolute declaration of incompatibility between an
outdated system and our dearest aspirations, this stoical
veto, cast by us against presumptuous candidacies, is
nothing less than the announcement of a new order of
things, our becoming aware that we are the party of right
and of freedom, the solemn act of our entry into political
life and, I daresay, the signaling to the old world of its
oncoming and inevitable fall...
Index

absolutism, 198, 217, 219,
258, 271, 273, 274, 373,
379

army, 31, 53, 146, 147,
300, 320, 321, 322, 325

association, 24, 52, 122,
152, 159, 218, 234, 264,
265, 302, 390

authority, 13, 26, 36, 57,
67, 87, 91, 96, 173, 188,
205, 208, 212, 213, 215,
216, 258, 267, 272, 273,
274, 277, 278, 280, 281,
284, 285, 287, 288, 290,
299, 304, 306, 315, 335,
344, 362, 372, 378, 379

bourgeoisie, 147, 213, 215,
219, 222, 223, 278, 341,
357

capital, 46, 48, 64, 84, 114,
144, 145, 162, 165, 166,
169, 178, 182, 183, 208,
212, 213, 214, 215, 216,
219, 220, 221, 224, 225,
226, 227, 228, 229, 230,

231, 232, 234, 235, 236,
237, 238, 239, 240, 241,
242, 243, 244, 245, 246,
247, 248, 249, 250, 251,
252, 253, 254, 255, 258,
262, 265, 268, 277, 282,
284, 292, 298, 299, 304,
307, 317, 384

Church, 5, 147, 162, 166,
173, 199, 225, 226, 261,
299, 324, 325, 380

class, 4, 10, 17, 33, 35, 46,
63, 75, 88, 98, 107, 112,
132, 143, 146, 168, 171,
181, 212, 215, 217, 219,
220, 222, 229, 231, 237,
247, 248, 253, 282, 286,
287, 344, 386, 389, 391

commune, 32, 129, 372,
378

community, 2, 14, 24, 51,
125, 153, 159, 257, 316,
317, 338, 368, 375

contract, 46, 174, 245, 317,
335, 348, 367, 371, 374,
377
corporation, 74, 141, 372, 378

Council, 134, 381

economic, 15, 90, 104, 120, 124, 129, 131, 136, 141, 142, 147, 148, 151, 152, 168, 169, 177, 182, 185, 212, 214, 215, 217, 221, 226, 228, 230, 231, 236, 253, 254, 258, 260, 262, 265, 282, 283, 289, 291, 292, 293, 299, 307, 312, 334, 335, 346, 348, 381, 382, 386, 389

economy, 8, 35, 79, 103, 108, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120, 129, 138, 148, 162, 163, 182, 199, 207, 219, 224, 225, 228, 231, 232, 233, 236, 239, 251, 252, 253, 255, 260, 282, 301, 313, 351, 384

freedom, 132, 176, 178, 213, 214, 216, 218, 221, 262, 272, 274, 276, 277, 391

French, IV, 90, 115, 128, 129, 130, 155, 194, 247, 287, 295, 320, 328, 344, 360, 382, 390, 391

justice, 22, 35, 44, 49, 51, 77, 92, 105, 127, 141, 171, 173, 174, 181, 190, 192, 202, 207, 225, 231, 246, 255, 268, 270, 298, 300, 307, 311, 323, 325, 342, 351, 361, 369, 371, 375, 377, 378, 380, 387

labor, 3, 8, 9, 16, 17, 24, 25, 26, 29, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 60, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 74, 79, 83, 85, 90, 92, 97, 99, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 142, 148, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 177, 178, 182, 183, 199, 204, 212, 214, 215, 221, 222, 226, 227, 228, 231, 236, 237, 238, 239, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 253, 254, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 268, 271,
282, 284, 292, 297, 299,
300, 304, 307, 309, 317,
324, 327, 330, 331, 333,
338, 343, 344, 353, 356,
391

liberalism, 217, 219, 390

liberty, 16, 19, 26, 48, 51,
52, 53, 77, 81, 88, 96, 97,
103, 130, 131, 132, 146,
148, 151, 153, 159, 173,
174, 175, 176, 181, 189,
190, 192, 194, 195, 197,
199, 200, 201, 206, 207,
214, 233, 244, 248, 250,
255, 262, 272, 284, 286,
290, 293, 295, 297, 301,
304, 305, 306, 307, 315,
317, 324, 328, 334, 344,
356, 357, 361, 368, 370,
371, 372, 373, 375, 376,
377, 379, 387

mass, 17, 21, 37, 39, 40, 46,
73, 74, 80, 99, 122, 127,
141, 143, 147, 248, 267,
270, 276, 277, 281, 283,
289, 290, 293, 294, 343,
356, 359, 381, 384

Monarchy, 320, 321

Parliament, II, 267, 325

participation, 35, 45, 198,
390

political, 5, 15, 16, 18, 20,
26, 33, 37, 38, 79, 82, 92,
103, 107, 108, 112, 113,
116, 120, 121, 122, 123,
135, 138, 141, 146, 147,
148, 156, 162, 163, 172,
174, 177, 178, 198, 212,
213, 214, 217, 219, 221,
224, 225, 228, 232, 233,
239, 253, 255, 258, 260,
262, 269, 273, 274, 280,
281, 282, 283, 284, 287,
290, 293, 299, 307, 308,
312, 313, 314, 315, 317,
320, 321, 334, 335, 351,
356, 357, 358, 367, 374,
389, 391

power, 10, 15, 27, 30, 33,
48, 55, 58, 59, 67, 74, 79,
81, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96,
98, 103, 120, 121, 122, 124,
126, 130, 138, 139, 143,
179, 180, 182, 183, 184,
192, 196, 197, 200, 215,
228, 237, 241, 245, 246,
249, 265, 267, 268, 272,
274, 276, 277, 278, 279,
280, 284, 286, 287, 288,
289, 291, 293, 295, 296,
297, 298, 301, 303, 304,
306, 307, 310, 312, 313,
315, 325, 334, 335, 337,
338, 343, 352, 354, 356,
357, 358, 362, 367, 370,
371, 372, 374, 375, 377,
378, 379, 380, 382, 390

property/properties, 14,
41, 43, 55, 66, 84, 90, 91,
96, 107, 108, 114, 116, 117,
118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
123, 125, 126, 128, 131,
134, 137, 145, 146, 147,
158, 162, 163, 166, 167,
169, 171, 182, 183, 191,
217, 219, 220, 231, 240,
243, 245, 257, 260, 263,
264, 268, 282, 283, 298,
316, 317, 325, 337, 338,
357, 371, 377

regime, 46, 249, 321, 341,
342, 369, 371, 375, 376,
377

Religion, 22, 26, 109, 255,
298, 310, 311, 312, 314,
315, 316

Revolution, I, II, 144, 145,
159, 163, 170, 171, 176,
177, 178, 183, 184, 212,
213, 214, 215, 217, 222,
223, 260, 262, 265, 266,
282, 283, 286, 290, 292,
293, 294, 305, 312, 315,
318, 320, 321, 322, 328,
340, 341, 342, 351, 352,
354, 360, 361, 367, 369,
370, 371, 372, 374, 376,
377, 378, 380

Rousseau, 18, 23, 43, 188,
198, 199, 200, 367, 370,
374, 376

socialism, 166, 178, 191,
194, 197, 201, 208, 218,
219, 257, 261, 263, 273,
302, 323, 389

Society, I, 112, 123, 124,
141, 142, 144, 245, 260,
268, 311, 316, 332, 352,
353, 356, 387
sovereignty, 120, 121, 123,
174, 213, 216, 288, 323,
359, 360, 361, 391

State, I, II, 34, 52, 53, 85,
114, 115, 120, 134, 145,
163, 168, 169, 211, 212,
215, 216, 217, 218, 219,
220, 221, 239, 258, 259,
260, 263, 264, 265, 272,
277, 278, 282, 283, 284,
285, 286, 288, 289, 290,
291, 292, 293, 294, 295,
297, 299, 300, 301, 302,
303, 304, 305, 306, 307,
313, 343, 357, 367, 369,
370, 371, 372, 373, 374,
375, 376, 377, 378, 379,
380, 381, 382, 383, 384,
385, 386

suffrage, 10, 148, 212, 213,
214, 290, 291, 293, 307,
317, 321, 391

tax, 50, 115, 121, 131, 141,
142, 145, 147, 166, 183,
212, 229, 230, 232, 235,
251, 255, 265, 282, 283,
285, 292, 300, 307, 372,
378, 380, 381, 382, 383,
384, 385, 386

utopian, 216, 277, 381

worker, 6, 7, 32, 37, 48, 50,
97, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115,
116, 118, 130, 132, 143,
165, 166, 168, 178, 189,
206, 212, 213, 221, 264,
265, 274, 276, 317, 323,
344, 361, 389

working class, 10, 17, 46,
287, 386, 389, 391
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<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

KARL-MARX
VERLAG