What is property?
P.-J. Proudhon (Author), Donald R. Kelley (Editor), Bonnie G. Smith (Editor)
"This is a 1994 translation of one of the classics of the traditions of anarchism and socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a contemporary of Marx and one of the most acute, influential and subversive critics of modern French and European society. His What is Property? (1840) produced the answer 'Property is theft'; the book itself has become a classic of political thought through its wide-ranging and deep-reaching critique of private property as at once the essential institution of Western culture and the root cause of greed, corruption, political tyranny, social division and violation of natural law. A critical and historical introduction situates Proudhon's 'diabolical work' (as he called it) in the context of nineteenth-century social and legal controversy and of the history of political thought in general."--Publisher description
Print Book, English, 1994
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1994
xxxvii, 225 pages ; 23 cm
9780521405553, 9780521405560, 0521405556, 0521405564
27430141
Preface
1. Method followed in this work : idea of a revolution
2. Property considered as a natural right
Occupation and civil law as efficient causes of property
3. Labor as the efficient cause of the domain of property
Land cannot be appropriated
Universal consent does not justify property
Prescription never gives title to property
Labor : that labor by itself has no power to appropriate the things of nature
The labor leads to equality of property
That in society all wages are equal
That the inequality of faculties is the necessary condition of equality of fortunes
That, in terms of justice, labor destroys property
4. That property is impossible : property is physically and mathematically impossible
Property is impossible because it demands something from nothing
Property is impossible because wherever it exists, production costs more than it is worth
Property is impossible because with a given capital production is proportional to labor, not to property
Property is impossible because it is homicide
Property is impossible because with it society devours itself
Property is impossible because it is the mother of tyranny
Property is impossible because in consuming what it receives it loses it, because in saving it nullifies it, and because in using it as capital it turns it against production
Property is impossible because its power of accumulation is infinite, while it is exercised only over finite quantities
Property is impossible because it is powerless against property
Property is impossible because it is the negative of equality
5. Psychological exposition of the idea of the just and the unjust and determination of the principle of government and right
Of the moral sense in man and in animals
Of the first and second degrees of sociability
Of the third degree of sociability
Of the causes of errors : the origin of property
Characteristics of communism and of property
Determination of the third social form : conclusions
Translation of: Qu'est-ce que la propriété?
Translation of: Qu'est-ce que la propriété?