Proudhon: What is Property?

What is property? is one of the most notorious and influential works of social criticism of the nineteenth century and certainly the best-known book by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, revolutionary author and contemporary of Marx. Proudhon's short answer to this question - "Property is theft" - was even more notorious, linking private property as it did with worst features of "bourgeois" political hegemony and exploitation. Yet because of the eagerness of later admirers to place Proudhon in one later tradition or another (socialist, utopian, anarchist, fascist, etc.) the intellectual qualities of his book have never been fully appreciated; nor has his critique of the institution of property been situated properly in the context of nineteenth-century political thought in general. This new translation, with a critical and historical introduction to these neglected aspects of Proudhon's "diabolical work" (as he called it), tries to do justice to the work of this subversive critic who, through his assault on the central institution of modern Western society, spent his whole life in quest of social justice. Book jacket.