About the author
French journalist, economist, and political theorist (1809–1865), the first person to call himself an anarchist. Self-educated and from a working-class background, Proudhon's What Is Property? (1840) established anarchism as a distinct tradition separate from both liberalism and state socialism. His later work on mutualism, federalism, and the duality of property influenced anarchism, syndicalism, and libertarian socialism across Europe.
Synopsis
An extended inquiry into the legal and moral foundations of property. Proudhon argues that the right to extract income from things you do not yourself use or produce — rent, interest, profit — is structurally equivalent to theft, and proposes mutualism as an alternative: an economy of fair exchange, cooperative credit, and reciprocal obligation, without either capitalism or state socialism.
Quote to notice
Direct quote · Public domain“If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder — my meaning would be understood at once. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is theft?”
Proudhon's provocation insists that economic exploitation is a moral category, not merely a legal arrangement. The analogy to murder and slavery is deliberate: he wants to force readers to treat the extraction of labour value — rent, profit, interest — as a form of violence, not a natural right.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Locke's Second Treatise of Government or Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia for philosophical defences of private property rights that Proudhon targets directly.
Reading note
Focus on Chapter 3 for the core argument about property and labour. The opening chapters establish the philosophical method by working through natural law and utilitarian justifications for property and showing each fails. The final chapter introduces mutualism as the positive alternative.
Best paired with
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government.