Note 674 — Chapter V · : PROUDHON AND THE SOCIALISM OF 1848

“Consequently we consider ourselves anarchists and we have proclaimed the fact more than once. Anarchy is suitable for an adult society just as hierarchy is for a primitive one. Human society has progressed gradually from hierarchy to anarchy.” (Œuvres, vol. xix, p. 9.) A little later, in Idée générale de la Révolution, he states that the aim of the Revolution was “to build up a property constitution and to dissolve or otherwise cause the disappearance of the political or government system by reducing or simplifying, by decentralising and suppressing the whole machinery of the State.” This idea was borrowed from Saint-Simon, and Proudhon has acknowledged the debt in his Idée générale. This conception of industrial society rendering government useless or reducing it to harmless proportions is a development, though perhaps somewhat extravagant, of the economic Liberalism of J. B. Say. The first edition of the Mémoire sur la Propriété contains an admission of anarchical tendencies. “What are you, then? I am an anarchist.—I understand your doubts on this question. You think that I am against the Government.—That is not so. You asked for my confession of faith. Having duly pondered over it, and although a lover of order, I have come to the conclusion that I am in the fullest sense of the word an anarchist.”