The Philosophy of Misery
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM
SYSTEM OF ECONOMICAL CONTRADICTIONS OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MISERY.
BY
P. J. PROUDHON
Destruam et aedificabo.
Deuteronomy: c. 32.
VOLUME FIRST.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.
OF THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE
% 1. Opposition between FACT and RIGHT in Social Economy
% 2. Inadequacy of Theories and Criticisms
CHAPTER II.
OF VALUE
% 1. Opposition of Value in USE and Value in EXCHANGE
% 2. Constitution of Value; Definition of Wealth
% 3. Application of the Law of Proportionality of Values
CHAPTER III.
ECONOMIC EVOLUTIONS.--FIRST PERIOD.--THE DIVISION OF LABOR
% 1. Antagonistic Effects of the Principle of Division
% 2. Impotence of Palliatives.--MM. Blanqui, Chevalier,
Dunoyer, Rossi, and Passy
CHAPTER IV.
SECOND PERIOD.--MACHINERY
% 1. Of the Function of Machinery in its Relations to Liberty
% 2. Machinery's Contradiction.--Origin of Capital and Wages
% 3. Of Preservatives against the Disastrous Influence of Machinery
CHAPTER V.
THIRD PERIOD.--COMPETITION
% 1. Necessity of Competition
% 2. Subversive Effects of Competition, and the Destruction of
Liberty thereby
% 3. Remedies against Competition
CHAPTER VI.
FOURTH PERIOD.--MONOPOLY
% 1. Necessity of Monopoly
% 2. The Disasters in Labor and the Perversion of Ideas caused
by Monopoly
CHAPTER VII.
FIFTH PERIOD.--POLICE, OR TAXATION
% 1. Synthetic Idea of the Tax. Point of Departure and
Development of this Idea
% 2. Antinomy of the Tax
% 3. Disastrous and Inevitable Consequences of the Tax.
(Provisions, Sumptuary Laws, Rural and Industrial Police,
Patents,Trade-Marks, etc.)
CHAPTER VIII.
OF THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN AND OF GOD, UNDER THE LAW OF
CONTRADICTION, OR A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE
% 1. The Culpability of Man.--Exposition of the Myth of the Fall
% 2. Exposition of the Myth of Providence.--Retrogression of God
INTRODUCTION.
Before entering upon the subject-matter of these new memoirs, I
must explain an hypothesis which will undoubtedly seem strange,
but in the absence of which it is impossible for me to proceed
intelligibly: I mean the hypothesis of a God.
To suppose God, it will be said, is to deny him. Why do you not
affirm him?
Is it my fault if belief in Divinity has become a suspected
opinion; if the bare suspicion of a Supreme Being is already
noted as evidence of a weak mind; and if, of all philosophical
Utopias, this is the only one which the world no longer
tolerates? Is it my fault if hypocrisy and imbecility everywhere
hide behind this holy formula?
Let a public teacher suppose the existence, in the universe, of
an unknown force governing suns and atoms, and keeping the whole
machine in motion. With him this supposition, wholly gratuitous,
is perfectly natural; it is received, encouraged: witness
attraction--an hypothesis which will never be verified, and
which, nevertheless, is the glory of its originator. But when,
to explain the course of human events, I suppose, with all
imaginable caution, the intervention of a God, I am sure to shock
scientific gravity and offend critical ears: to so wonderful an
extent has our piety discredited Providence, so many tricks
have been played by means of this dogma or fiction by charlatans
of every stamp! I have seen the theists of my time, and
blasphemy has played over my lips; I have studied the belief of
the people,--this people that Brydaine called the best friend of
God,--and have shuddered at the negation which was about to
escape me. Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to
reason; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic
contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori
dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who
knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us?
I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my
heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of
social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an
hypothesis,--I mean a necessary dialectical tool.
I.
If I follow the God-idea through its successive transformations,
I find that this idea is preeminently social: I mean by this that
it is much more a collective act of faith than an individual
conception. Now, how and under what circumstances is this act of
faith produced? This point it is important to determine.
From the moral and intellectual point of view, society, or the
collective man, is especially distinguished from the individual
by spontaneity of action,--in other words, instinct. While the
individual obeys, or imagines he obeys, only those motives of
which he is fully conscious, and upon which he can at will
decline or consent to act; while, in a word, he thinks himself
free, and all the freer when he knows that he is possessed of
keener reasoning faculties and larger information,--society is
governed by impulses which, at first blush, exhibit no
deliberation and design, but which gradually seem to be directed
by a superior power, existing outside of society, and pushing it
with irresistible might toward an unknown goal. The
establishment of monarchies and republics, caste-distinctions,
judicial institutions, etc., are so many manifestations of this
social spontaneity, to note the effects of which is much easier
than to point out its principle and show its cause. The whole
effort, even of those who, following Bossuet, Vico, Herder,
Hegel, have applied themselves to the philosophy of history, has
been hitherto to establish the presence of a providential destiny
presiding over all the movements of man. And I observe, in this
connection, that society never fails to evoke its genius previous
to action: as if it wished the powers above to ordain what its
own spontaneity has already resolved on. Lots, oracles,
sacrifices, popular acclamation, public prayers, are the
commonest forms of these tardy deliberations of society.
This mysterious faculty, wholly intuitive, and, so to speak,
super-social, scarcely or not at all perceptible in persons, but
which hovers over humanity like an inspiring genius, is the
primordial fact of all psychology.
Now, unlike other species of animals, which, like him, are
governed at the same time by individual desires and collective
impulses, man has the privilege of perceiving and designating to
his own mind the instinct or fatum which leads him; we shall see
later that he has also the power of foreseeing and even
influencing its decrees. And the first act of man, filled and
carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore
the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and
which he calls GOD,--that is, Life, Being, Spirit, or, simpler
still, Me; for all these words, in the ancient tongues, are
synonyms and homophones. "I am ME," God said to Abraham,
"and I covenant with THEE.".... And to Moses: "I am the Being.
Thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, `The Being hath sent
me unto you.'" These two words, the Being and Me, have in the
original language--the most religious that men have ever
spoken--the same characteristic.[1] Elsewhere, when Ie-hovah,
acting as law-giver through the instrumentality of Moses, attests
his eternity and swears by his own essence, he uses, as a form of
oath, _I_; or else, with redoubled force, _I_, THE BEING. Thus
the God of the Hebrews is the most personal and wilful of all the
gods, and none express better than he the intuition of humanity.
[1] Ie-hovah, and in composition Iah, the Being; Iao, ioupitur,
same meaning; ha-iah, Heb., he was; ei, Gr., he is, ei-nai, to
be; an-i, Heb., and in conjugation th-i, me; e-go, io, ich, i,
m-i, me, t-ibi, te, and all the personal pronouns in which the
vowels i, e, ei, oi, denote personality in general, and the
consonants, m or n, s or t, serve to indicate the number of the
person. For the rest, let who will dispute over these analogies;
I have no objections: at this depth, the science of the
philologist is but cloud and mystery. The important point to
which I wish to call attention is that the phonetic relation of
names seems to correspond to the metaphysical relation of ideas.
God appeared to man, then, as a me, as a pure and permanent
essence, placing himself before him as a monarch before his
servant, and expressing himself now through the mouth of poets,
legislators, and soothsayers, musa, nomos, numen; now through the
popular voice, vox populi vox Dei. This may serve, among other
things, to explain the existence of true and false oracles; why
individuals secluded from birth do not attain of themselves to
the idea of God, while they eagerly grasp it as soon as it is
presented to them by the collective mind; why, finally,
stationary races, like the Chinese, end by losing it.[2] In the
first place, as to oracles, it is clear that all their
accuracy depends upon the universal conscience which inspires
them; and, as to the idea of God, it is easily seen why isolation
and statu quo are alike fatal to it. On the one hand, absence of
communication keeps the mind absorbed in animal
self-contemplation; on the other, absence of motion, gradually
changing social life into mechanical routine, finally eliminates
the idea of will and providence. Strange fact! religion, which
perishes through progress, perishes also through quiescence.
[2] The Chinese have preserved in their traditions the
remembrance of a religion which had ceased to exist among them
five or six centuries before our era.
(See Pauthier, "China," Paris, Didot.) More surprising still is
it that this singular people, in losing its primitive faith,
seems to have understood that divinity is simply the collective
me of humanity: so that, more than two thousand years ago, China
had reached, in its commonly-accepted belief, the latest results
of the philosophy of the Occident. "What Heaven sees and
understands," it is written in the Shu-king, "is only that which
the people see and understand. What the people deem worthy of
reward and punishment is that which Heaven wishes to punish and
reward. There is an intimate communication between Heaven and
the people: let those who govern the people, therefore, be
watchful and cautious." Confucius expressed the same idea in
another manner: "Gain the affection of the people, and you gain
empire. Lose the affection of the people, and you lose empire."
There, then, general reason was regarded as queen of the world, a
distinction which elsewhere has been bestowed upon revelations.
The Tao-te-king is still more explicit. In this work, which is
but an outline criticism of pure reason, the philosopher Lao-tse
continually identifies, under the name of TAO, universal reason
and the infinite being; and all the obscurity of the book of Lao
tse consists, in my opinion, of this constant identification of
principles which our religious and metaphysical habits have so
widely separated.
Notice further that, in attributing to the vague and (so to
speak) objectified consciousness of a universal reason the first
revelation of Divinity, we assume absolutely nothing concerning
even the reality or non-reality of God. In fact, admitting that
God is nothing more than collective instinct or universal reason,
we have still to learn what this universal reason is in itself.
For, as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in
individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social
laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the
fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly
empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means
of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that
universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws;
universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate
sphere and as a reality distinct from pure reason, just as the
planetary system, though created according to the laws of
mathematics, is a reality distinct from mathematics, whose
existence could not have been deduced from mathematics alone: it
follows, I say, that universal reason is, in modern languages,
exactly what the ancients called God. The name is changed: what
do we know of the thing?
Let us now trace the evolution of the Divine idea.
The Supreme Being once posited by a primary mystical judgment,
man immediately generalizes the subject by another
mysticism,--analogy. God, so to speak, is as yet but a point:
directly he shall fill the world.
As, in sensing his social me, man saluted his AUTHOR, so, in
finding evidence of design and intention in animals, plants,
springs, meteors, and the whole universe, he attributes to each
special object, and then to the whole, a soul, spirit, or genius
presiding over it; pursuing this inductive process of apotheosis
from the highest summit of Nature, which is society, down to the
humblest forms of life, to inanimate and inorganic matter. From
his collective me, taken as the superior pole of creation, to the
last atom of matter, man EXTENDS, then, the idea of God,--that
is, the idea of personality and intelligence,--just as God
himself EXTENDED HEAVEN, as the book of Genesis tells us; that
is, created space and time, the conditions of all things.
Thus, without a God or master-builder, the universe and man
would not exist: such is the social profession of faith. But
also without man God would not be thought, or--to clear the
interval--God would be nothing. If humanity needs an author, God
and the gods equally need a revealer; theogony, the history of
heaven, hell, and their inhabitants,--those dreams of the human
mind,--is the counterpart of the universe, which certain
philosophers have called in return the dream of God. And how
magnificent this theological creation, the work of society! The
creation of the demiourgos was obliterated; what we call the
Omnipotent was conquered; and for centuries the enchanted
imagination of mortals was turned away from the spectacle of
Nature by the contemplation of Olympian marvels.
Let us descend from this fanciful region: pitiless reason knocks
at the door; her terrible questions demand a reply.
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