Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born in Besançon to a family of modest means and worked as a printer before winning a scholarship to study. His 1840 book What Is Property? made him famous for answering that property is theft, meaning income drawn from others' labor. He was elected to the French Constituent Assembly in 1848 and was later imprisoned for articles attacking Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. He proposed mutualism, a system of free contracts, worker associations and a people's bank offering interest-free credit, and late in life wrote in favor of a federation of autonomous communities.

Proudhon's ideas shaped Bakunin, Kropotkin, French syndicalism, Spanish federalism and the cooperative movement, and he is often credited with turning the word anarchist into a positive label. Marx answered his economics in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and the dispute helped split anarchists from Marxists. Later readers range from libertarian socialists to some market-oriented anarchists who value his defense of contracts and decentralization. Feminist and anarchist scholars criticize his antifeminism, and historians have documented antisemitic passages in his private notebooks. Admirers stress his originality on federalism, credit and workers' self-management, and his insistence that social change should come from voluntary association rather than state command. His federalist ideas also influenced later debates on European federation and decentralization.