‘To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good.’

Proudhon was not an orderly writer, despite ironically arguing that ‘anarchy is order.’

So what does he mean by that – ‘Anarchy is order’? There are a few themes – orderly ones – found throughout Proudhon work, that began what is now referred to as mutualism – a type of libertarian socialism.

The tension between liberty and order is always at the heart of Proudhon’s politics.

He intended his mutualist philosophy to be an approach to political life that could be a ‘synthesis of the notions of private property and collective ownership,’ a synthesis of liberty and order.

Both private property and collective ownership had major flaws; so what could the solution be?

As we saw in What is Property? Justice is at the heart of the solution.

Fairness, right, morality, should be the premise of economic, social and political arrangements.

But at the same time Proudhon argued that the only law people should follow is the law they choose for themselves. Why would people voluntarily follow any law? And where would it come from?

For Proudhon, ‘justice, equality, equation, equilibrium, and harmony’ are all synonymous terms, they are laws of the universal, laws of humanity.’

Morality is part of the universal order of things. If we work out the correct, the right, the moral way of doing things then there we will achieve a peaceful equilibrium.

Knowing this means using our reason, being rational.

Imagine I’m angry at someone in the street and have an impulse to shout at or even punch them. It’s by using my ability to logically think through the events that might happen afterwards that I know it’s not a good idea.

The reason we don’t steal, fight, murder is not, mostly at least, to do with the threat of arrest, but because we know – through our reason – the repercussions that follow from acting immorally. We’ll be ostracised, disliked, met with retribution, and so on.

This is a moral law. We act in an ‘ethical’ way because we can rationally calculate the consequences. It’s a metaphysical law of order than sort of hangs above us.

I use the same type of reasoning to avoid the impulse of eating cake or getting drunk all the time.

Following the moral law, then, means not being a slave to my immediate passions but following what’s rational, logical, reasonable.

Proudhon says: ‘in society as well as in the individual, reason and reflection always triumph over instinct and spontaneity.’

For Proudhon, it’s not the actual law, the juridical law, that stops us stealing, it’s the moral law, our own reason.

He says: ‘It is by our reflective and reasoning powers, with which we seem to be exclusively endowed, that we know that it is injurious, first to others and then to our­ selves, to resist the social instinct which governs us, and which we call justice. It is our reason which teaches us that the selfish man, the robber, the murderer— in a word, the traitor to society— sins against Nature, and is guilty with respect to others and himself’.

It’s had a number of names: the voice of conscience, enlightened self-interest, the innate love of others. But as societies, individuals, cultures, humans, progress, we will become better at understanding what is right and what is wrong, what’s going to lead to a social equilibrium overall.

He says: ‘In living with their reason, man first follows a chief, the father, the patriarch, the elder – the good and wise.’

The more ignorant we are, the more we rely on obedience to received norms and passed down wisdom, but as we become more educated, have a better understanding of the world, the more we can rely on our own judgement.

Proudhon writes: ‘If he obeys no longer because the king commands, but because the king demonstrates the wisdom of his commands, it may be said that henceforth he will recognize no authority, and that he has become his own king.’

Ultimately, ‘By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas, man finally acquires the idea of science, — that is, of a system of knowledge in harmony with the reality of things, and inferred from observation.’

Now, you can probably see where this is going.

Anarchism is the absence of any authority, any master, any sovereign, that a person chooses to follow themselves through their own reason and calculation, their own volition.

Proudhon writes that anarchism will be: ‘The sovereignty of reason having been substituted for that of revelation; the notion of contract succeeding to that of compulsion; economic critique revealing that political institutions must now be absorbed into the industrial organism: we fearlessly conclude that the revolutionary formula can no longer be direct government or any kind of government, but must be: no more government.’

Anarchism is moral self-direction. This is what he means by ‘anarchy is order.’

‘The freedom of which we have reason to be proud does not consist in liberation from the laws of truth and justice; quite on the contrary, it grows in the measure to which we come closer to justice and truth; on the other hand, it declines in the degree to which we recede from them; so that the greatest amount of freedom coincides with the greatest recognition of right and duty, and the greatest unfreedom with extreme ignorance and corruption’

Now, this all sounds well and good but it’s all very abstract. How would societies organise in a world where individuals only follow their own moral law?

As Proudhon argues in What is Property?, thinking about the logic of property will lead any ‘reasonable’ person to conclude that all possession is, if we are not using it, communal.

So, does communism follow from this realisation?

In short, no. Proudhon thinks communism dictates the moral law to the individual.

He writes: ‘the doctrinaire, authoritarian, dictatorial, governmental, communist system is based on the principle that the individual is essentially subordinate to the collective; that from it alone he has his right and life; that the citizen belongs to the State like a child to the family; that he is in its power and possession, in manu, and that he owes it submission and obedience in all things.’

Instead, Proudhon wishes to preserve the freedom of individualism.

He writes, ‘Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labour when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgement, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings.’

In conclusion he says, ‘Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak.’

But Proudhon thinks that communism does contain the seeds of truth, he says it’s the first basic revolt against rampant individualism. It’s a crude expression of sociability.

This sociability, he says, is what gives rise to our sense of justice – ‘the recognition of the equality between another’s personality and our own.’

Property wishes for ‘independence’ and communism seeks ‘equality and law’. Is there a third way?

Yes, liberty!

Fundamentally, Proudhon argues, politics is a matter of association, of people coming together on an equal footing.

Association leads to equality, he argues. Two men fishing share their catch. Two merchants in business share their profits. Gardeners share their tasks. As we saw in What is Property?, if one hundred people landed on an island they would claim equal occupancy.

This is the core of mutualism: mutual reciprocal association.

A mutualist society would be organised by agreements between individuals and groups.

Each individual has a right to participate in the means of producing, and to the product of their association, their town, their village.

What’s important is the principle of mutual respect, tit for tat, treating others as if you wish to be treated – this is reciprocity, and it should simply be extended to the economic and political spheres of life.

It’s a formula for justice that requires us to ‘promise and guarantee each other service for service, credit for credit, measure for measure, security for security, value for value’, and ‘liberty for liberty.’

In practice, mutual contracts between individuals would build into associations and organisations, and these would contract together into ‘political contracts’. Society would be arranged from the bottom up into communes and federations with the high subordinated to the lower.

Proudhon does then, accept some kind of central federation or government if necessary but it should be minimal and subordinate to the communes, associations and federations within it. Anyone has a right to secede at any time.

But how would justice be assured in an anarchical society? By what measure would contracts and associations be considered just?

For Proudhon, if morality and justice is rational there must be some way to measure whether something is in fact just or not.

The idea of value and justice are interlinked; if things – wages, exchanges, prices – are judged correctly then equilibrium could be found across society.

Everything has its just price, but the wage labourer bargaining to increase wages is not negotiating from a position of fairness, because they’re forced to sell their labour.

Proudhon writes: ‘How many nails is a pair of shoes worth? If we can solve this appalling problem, we shall have the key of the social system for which humanity has been searching for six thousand years. In the presence of this problem, the economist recoils confused; the peasant who can neither read nor write replies without hesitation: “ As many as can be made in the same time, and with the same expense.’

If all were paid depending on how much labour they’ve contributed, then there would be balance.

This is the labour theory of value.

He argues that the value of any thing arises from three contributing factors: land, innovation, and labour. But because both land and innovation are communal and shared by all, value should be measured by how much labour has been contributed, and payments and contracts decided accordingly.

Proudhon says: ‘The price of every product in demand should be its cost in time and outlay’.

I thought I’d conclude this with some personal thoughts. I like Proudhon, a lot. He’s challenging to read because he comments on the politics of his day as much as political philosophy, but you learn a lot from that. I like him because he provides a really important and timely challenge to our view of property today, one that I think needs to be demystified and talked about culturally in an accessible way. I think he was prescient about communism, dictatorship, and authoritarianism.

And while his anarchism relies on a kind of rationalist utopianism – in that he puts utopian hopes on our ability to be rational all the time – I think a return to some kind of utopian thinking is needed, and he paints a picture of  a society – both just and free – that I think is really important we continue to move towards. At the very least, he should challenge your assumptions about what society could look like.