Proudhon and the Theory of Modern Liberalism

Author(s): Frederick M. Watkins

Source: The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne
d'Economique et de Science politique , Aug., 1947, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Aug., 1947), pp. 429-435
Published by: Canadian Economics Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/137768

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 PROUDHON AND THE THEORY OF MODERN LIBERALISM*

THE ideological weakness of modern liberalism has long been recognized as

one of the more striking features of contemporary politics. Although con-
stitutional democracy has on the whole proved rather more successful than
totalitarian government in satisfying the ordinary needs of men, its achieve-
ments have generally failed to arouse a great deal of enthusiasm. In compari-
son with the aggressive self-confidence of communists and fascists, the attitude
of contemporary liberals is notoriously defensive and pessimistic. What are the
causes underlying this curious failure of liberal morale? To what extent can it
be attributed to deficiencies in the theoretical structure of modern liberalism?
These questions must be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the problems
of contemporary political thought.
When substantial accomplishments fail to evoke enthusiasm, it is reason-
able to suppose that those accomplishments are being measured against standards
which in some way or other are alien to their nature. A good deal of the
weakness of modern liberalism arises out of the fact that it insists on judging
the achievements of constitutional democracy, an essentially pluralist system, in
terms of standards which are still largely absolutist in character. Liberal govern-
ment depends in practice on the existence of a multi-myth, multi-group society.
Policy is determined not, as in totalitarian countries, by imposing the will of a
homogeneous ruling group upon the rest of the community, but by a process of
parliamentary negotiation between the supporters of widely varying points of
view. In a society of this sort, the coercive functions of government are neces-
sarily limited by the claims of rival individuals and groups. The willingness of
parliamentary democracies to negotiate with rather than to coerce churches,
trade unions, and other private associations is a sign not of weakness but of
devotion to the principles of liberal politics. During the recent war, Russian
purchasing agents in Canada and the United States sometimes expressed
impatient amazement at the fact that busy government officials in those count
would waste their time negotiating with strikers instead of having them shot for
treason. This impatience was not widely shared by the supporters of consti-
tutional democracy. In defending themselves against the charges of weakness,
however, American and Canadian liberals were handicapped by the fact that
orthodox liberal theory provided no clear grounds for rejecting the Russian point
of view. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when royal absolut-
ism was at its height, Western political theorists acquired the habit of thinking
in terms of sovereignty. The theorists of modern liberalism, in spite of long
experience with the practice of constitutional government, never saw fit to
make a clean break with the absolutist doctrines of their predecessors. For them
no less than for Hobbes and Bodin, the presence of a single omnipotent centre
of coercive authority seemed indispensable to the existence of any modern state.
To explain and justify the practice of government by negotiation in terms of
such a theory is difficult in the extreme. The resulting cleavage between

*This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science
Association in Quebec, May 30, 1947.

429

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430 The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

absolutist theory and pluralistic practice goes far to account for the ideological
uncertainties of contemporary liberalism.
The failure of liberal theorists to come to grips with the realities of liberal
politics is a reflection of the prevailing optimism of eighteenth and nineteenth-cen-
tury thought. This optimism prevented them from clearly facing one of the central
problems of political theory, the problem of the relationship between peace and
justice. In periods when men are realistically aware of the darker potentialities
of human nature, the danger that political power may be used for unjust ends
is normally recognized as one of the crucial issues of politics. Should injustice
be resisted, even though resistance endangers the maintenance of peace and
order? Or is the need for peace and order so great that established authority
ought to be obeyed even at the expense of justice? In an imperfect world,
these are the unpleasant alternatives between which it is necessary to choose at
the outset of any attempt to create an adequate theory of politics. The founda-
tions of Western constitutionalism were laid in the middle ages, when the pre-
vailing body of opinion favoured the proposition that justice is more important
than peace. When the disasters of religious warfare led men in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries to regard the maintenance of peace as the supreme
consideration, theories of absolute sovereignty became the order of the day. The
rise of modern liberalism came only when the elimination of the religious crisis
gave men the courage once again to challenge established authority and to
endanger the maintenance of peace and order in the interests of new conceptions
of justice. Because of the rationalistic optimism of the period, however, most
of the theorists of eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism were unable, as
clearly as their more pessimistic predecessors, to understand the nature of the
choice they were actually making. Confident in the existence of a natural
harmony of interests, the philosophers of the enlightenment long clung to the
belief that enlightened despots or enlightened parliaments could be persuaded to
use sovereign power in the interests of rational justice. When the faith of the
enlightenment faded, this optimistic mode of thought was perpetuated by the
Marxists, with their belief in the natural harmony of interests in a coming class-
less society. By refusing to face the fact that all power is liable to abuse, most
eighteenth and nineteenth-century theorists avoided the necessity of making a
definite choice between the rival claims of peace and of justice. This prevented
them from grappling with the basic theoretical issues of constitutional govern-
ment.
As long as nineteenth-century optimism remained unimpaired, liberalism
could survive on this basis. Unfortunately the twentieth century has been a
time of steadily increasing pessimism. With the fading of belief in the natural
harmony of interests, and with the indefinite postponement of hopes for the
creation of a classless society, the men of our time have been faced ever more
clearly with the necessity of choosing between peace and justice. Communists
and fascists have met this situation in a clear and logical fashion. Their theorists
proclaim that justice is attainable only as a by-product of peace, and that peace
depends on the establishment of a rigorously coercive sovereign state. As a
result of their long experience with the practice of constitutional government,

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 Proudhon and the Theory of Modern Liberalism 431

liberals instinctively feel that the dangers of injustice through the abuse of
totalitarian power outweigh the advantages of totalitarian peace and order.
In answer to the totalitarian boast of strikes avoided and of railroads run on
time, they are disposed to exalt the virtues of a society in which ordinary men
are free to fight for their own conception of justice. Liberal theorists have not
yet accustomed them, however, to accept the hard fact that disorder is the
inevitable price of liberal achievements. When parliamentary negotiation fails to
bear the fruit of immediate social harmony, the disappointment of their optimistic
expectations is all too apt to lead them to a mood of querulous frustration. In-
grained belief in the possibilty of simultaneously maximizing both peace and just-
ice has unfitted them to meet the problems of twentieth-century politics. This
situation will continue as long as liberal theory rests on the unrealistic bases of
nineteenth-century thought.
Even in the nineteenth century, however, there were a few exceptional
thinkers who dared to challenge the assumptions of optimistic rationalism. One
of the most powerful and suggestive of these thinkers was Pierre Joseph
Proudhon. Although Proudhon is a fairly well-known name in the history
of political thought, his writings, apart from the celebrated but misleading essay
on property, are seldom read. This neglect is partly due to the efforts of Marx
and his followers who, in their campaign for control of the working-class move-
ment, were careful to classify him, along with Fourier and other earlier writers,
under the unreliable-sounding designation of Utopian socialist. In comparison,
however, with most of his contemporaries, including Marx himself, Proudhon
was actually the least Utopian of thinkers. At a time when most people were
disposed to exaggerate the rational perfectibility of human society, he clearly
recognized the fact that potentialities of evil and injustice are intrinsic to the
nature of man. Justice for him was not a thing capable of being established
once and for all in a classless, or in any other conceivable form of society, but the
constantly threatened product of perpetual struggle between the rational and
irrational elements of human nature. Faced with the necessity of choosing
between peace and justice, he felt no hesitation in accepting justice as the
supreme value of human life. Since most of his contemporaries overlooked the
necessity of making such a choice, they were little attracted to his proposition
that peace and order should be subordinated to the interests of justice. But if
his rejection of the optimistic assumptions of nineteenth-century thought did
much to limit his influence in his own time, it has served to make him one of the
few nineteenth-century theorists who can be read with profit by students of
twentieth-century politics.
The political thought of Proudhon, like that of his younger contemporary
Marx, was a reaction against the optimism of the eighteenth-century enlighten-
ment. The supporters of laissez-faire economics had promised that the nautral har-
mony of interests, operating under the police protection of a properly constituted
liberal state, would automatically satisfy the just claims of every member of the
community. As long as political and economic power remained in the hands of the
middle classes, however, the interests of other social groups were seriously neglect-
ed in practice. This led the working classes, in the course of the nineteenth centu-

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 432 The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

ry, to challenge the power of the ruling group. By trade union organization,
strikes, and other initially illegal acts, they gradually succeeded in forcing the lib-
eral state to pay attention to their claims for social justice. The political theories
of Proudhon and of Marx were both attempts to draw general lessons from this
particular body of political experience.
The two men differed widely, however, in their interpretation of that
experience. Although Marx saw that the early liberal state had failed to live up
to its promise of universal justice, he did not allow that fact to shake his faith in
the perfectibility of society. He simply transferred his hopes from the middle
classes to the proletariat. Where the men of the enlightenment had regarded
market-infringing political action as the source of all evil, Marx ascribed the
same fatal influence to the private ownership of the means of production, and
promised that the problem of injustice would be solved as soon as the working
classes gained absolute power. To Proudhon, on the other hand, the collapse of
laissez-faire liberalism was a phenomenon which seemed to call for a more
thoroughgoing reconsideration of the problem of politics. He believed that the fail-
ure of the early liberal state was due not to any peculiar deficiencies of the middle
classes as such, but to the universal tendency of all human beings to abuse absolute
power for their own selfish advantage. Working-class groups, if placed in a
similar position, would be equally subject to this human failing. The value of
the working-class movement lay in the fact that, by creating an effective balance
of social forces, it had made it impossible for any one social group to pursue its
own interests without regard for the corresponding interests of others. To pre-
vent any future re-concentration of powers was the primary object of Proudhon's
political writings. Thus the injustice of middle-class absolutism, which inspired
Marx with nothing more than a desire for working-class absolutism, led Proud-
hon to undertake a radical revision of the absolutist presuppositions of contempor-
ary liberal thought.
Although Proudhon was not a professional philosopher, he was sufficiently
acute to see that his political and social ideas involved a frontal attack upon
the prevailing assumptions of nineteenth-century philosophy. The theory of
modern absolutism, both in its fascist and in its communist forms, owes much
to the dialectical pattern of thought first elaborated by the philosopher Hegel.
The Hegelian dialectic was an attempt to minimize the significance of conflict.
Although conflict between opposing principles was regarded as the primary
agency of historic progress, the ultimate purpose of history under the Hegelian
system was to resolve all conflict in an enduring synthesis. Hegel himself applied
the metaphysical pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to demonstrate the
final perfection of the conservative Prussian monarchy. The Marxist system of
dialectical materialism was a similar attempt to demonstrate the final perfection
of a coming communist society. In a world long accustomed to the eighteenth-
century conception of the natural harmony of interests, most people were pre-
pared to accept the idea that the elimination of conflict was the predestined goal
of history. Proudhon rejected this belief. Much of his work was devoted,
therefore, to the elaboration of a philosophical system designed to overcome the
metaphysical foundations of the Hegelian absolutist position.

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 Proudhon and the Theory of Modern Liberalism 433

The starting-point of Proudhon's own philosophy was the concept of the

antinomy. Philosophers had long been preoccupied with the problem of uniting
apparently antithetical and irreconcilable concepts in a single philosophical sys-
tem. The Hegelian dialectic, in its original application, had been designed to
show that such concepts as being and non-being were related to one another as
thesis and antithesis, and that they could be resolved in a higher synthesis, in
this case the concept of becoming. In attacking the principle of dialectical syn-
thesis, Proudhon maintained the proposition that the existence of permanent and
unresolvable conflicts between opposing principles, or antinomies, was intrinsic
to the metaphysical nature of the universe. Although the contrast between black
and white can be resolved in a synthesis of neutral gray, even amateur photo-
graphers know that the production of uniformly gray prints is not the proper
goal of the art of photography. A good photograph is one which sets off the
qualities of light and dark in a properly balanced composition. Proudhon's theory
of antinomies was a generalization from this particular type of experience.
According to him all progress consists of increasing differentiation. In the
organic world, simple unicellular animals represent a lower stage of evolution
than complex mammals, which depend for their existence upon the maintenance
of a delicate balance between a large number of highly specialized organs.
Improvement generally is a function of increasing complexity and tension. Thus
the basic task of human reason is not to synthesize and eliminate differences,
but to understand and maximize the effectiveness of the various antinomies which
lie at the basis of the universe.
The purpose of Proudhon's metaphysical speculations was not to con-
tribute to the body of philosophic doctrine, but to prepare the way for acceptance
of his pluralistic conception of society. In society no less than in other forms
of existence, the development of antinomies is essential to progress. The growth
of the modern world has been characterized by the emergence of individuals and
groups performing increasingly specialized functions, and deriving from that
specialized experience ever more sharply differentiated forms of individual and
group self-consciousness. Progress consists not, as Hegel and other monistic
theorists would have us believe, in the subordination of these individuals and
groups to higher synthetic entities, such as the state, the class, the nation, or the
race, but in maximizing their capacity for independent self-determination.
Development from monism to pluralism was in Proudhon's eyes the final goal
of social evolution.
But if progress involves increasing differentiation between self-determin-
ing individuals and groups, the maintenance of peace and order in society
becomes an obvious problem. Since antinomies are by definition antithetical
principles, it would seem as though the maximization of antinomies would
involve the minimization of opportunities for joint social action. Proudhon
believed, however, that antinomies were related to one another by attraction
as well as by repulsion. According to the logic of dialectical synthesis, the
most enduring form of marriage should be that which unites the most feminine
possible man with the most masculine possible woman. Experience shows,
however, that it is the very intensity of the differences between male and female

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 434 The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

which necessitates and facilitates the union of the two sexes in a mutually inte
dependent society. Proudhon believed that the same principle applied to all
forms of social organization. In a relatively undifferentiated primitive society,
both attraction and repulsion are relatively weak. When all individuals and
groups are more or less alike people are neither set apart by consciousness of
individual differences nor drawn together by a recognition of mutual interde-
pendence. With the growth of differentiation, attractive and repulsive forces
increase simultaneously. Thus the progress of society is characterized not by
the growth of the individual at the expense of society, but by the raising of the
antinomy of liberty versus authority to an ever-increasing pitch of polar tension.
What is the mechanism through which this tension operates to create
effective forms of social organization? The concept of justice was Proudhon's
answer to this question. Proudhon was enough of a rationalist to believe that
human reason is sufficient to enable interdependent individuals and groups to
discover mutually acceptable bases for common action. The sense of justice
emerges when men, by rational generalization from their own consciousness of
personality, learn to recognize the corresponding rights of other individuals and
groups. Proudhon was, however, too pessimistic to assume that rational con-
siderations alone would be enough to induce men to respect the claims of rival
personalities. Human beings are at once too selfish and too lazy to assume the
burden of rational negotiation by voluntary choice. If any individual or group
has sufficient power to impose its will upon the rest of society, its natural tend-
ency will be to seek personal advantage without regard for the rights of other
members of the community. The search for rational justice begins only at the
point where effective resistance on the part of others makes it impossible, or at
least unprofitable, for rulers to maintain an exclusively privileged position.
Irrepressible conflict is the stimulus needed to induce men to undergo the
labour of applying their rational powers to the creation of mutually beneficial
forms of social life. Thus the emergence of social antinomies, in the very act of
multiplying the occasions for social conflict, encourages the establishment of
social life on a foundation of rational justice.
This conception of justice made it necessary for Proudhon to reject the
absolutist doctrine of sovereignty. Although he called himself an anarchist,
his position was not anarchistic in the ordinary meaning of the term. Unlike
Godwin and other optimistic rationalists, he never envisaged the possibility of
a society maintained without the aid of coercive police authority. He was an
anarchist only in the sense that he did not believe in the desirability of a state
vested with an absolute monopoly of coercive power. States, like other forms
of human association, exist for the accomplishment of shared purposes. If the
state were powerless, there would be nothing to prevent the selfishness of indivi-
duals and groups from riding rough-shod over the rights of the larger com-
munity. If the state were omnipotent, there would be nothing to prevent its
rulers from violating the rights of other individuals and groups. The just
society is one where the coercive powers of private and public associations are
so perfectly in balance that no single authority can afford to neglect the claims of
the others. Although Proudhon thought people would be able, with increasing

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 Proudhon antd the Theory of Modern Liberalism 435

experience in the techniques of rational negotiation, to defend their rights with

comparatively little use of overt violence, he believed that the widest possible
dispersion of capacities for effective resistance was necessary to the maintenance
and development of justice. The fact that this might lead on occasion to
serious disorders was fully recognized. His confidence in the value of justice
was so great, however, that he was willing for its sake to sacrifice the advantages
of an absolutely peaceful sovereign state.
The importance of Proudhon's political thought lies in the fact that it con-
forms, to a far greater degree than more orthodox liberal theories, with the
practice of modern parliamentarism. The main difference between dictatorship
and democracy lies in their respective attitudes toward the phenomenon of private
association. Whereas communists and fascists make every effort to destroy the
power of all individuals and groups which might conceivably challenge the
position of the sovereign party-state, liberal democrats endeavour to maintain
an effective balance between private and public association. Parties and pres-
sure groups are accorded both the right and the duty to organize for the pur-
pose of influencing state policy. Through formal or through customary consti-
tutional prohibitions, the state is denied the right to act in any field, such as
that of religious practice and belief, where experience has shown that majority
action is likely to evoke an excessive degree of minority resistance. When
legally impeccable enactments of the state, as in the case of American pro-
hibition, or as in earlier instances of legal bans upon trade union activity, are
followed by widespread violations, the normal tendency of liberal governments is
to meet the situation by revising the law rather than by pressing for ultimate
enforcement. Although liberal societies pay formal respect to the theory of
sovereignty, they are prepared in practice to recognize the fact that sovereign
enactments may be unjust, and that organized private resistance, both legal and
illegal, is a necessary means of preventing that injustice from becoming inveterate.
In its essential features, therefore, the political thought of Proudhon stands
remarkably close to the practice of modern liberalism. As such it is well worth
the attention of anyone who is interested in the problem of strengthening the
theoretical foundations of constitutional government.

FREDERICK M. WATKINS

McGill University.

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