[D66] Kropotkin on Proudhon’s Justice

[A.O.]

Kropotkin on Proudhon’s Justice

    robertgraham.wordpress.com
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    August 31st, 2018

Recently I have been reading criticisms of Kropotkin’s claims that
Proudhon advocated the use of labour notes, accompanied by the
suggestion that he had only a superficial understanding of Proudhon’s
ideas. While he may have been wrong (as were many others) to attribute
the advocacy of labour notes to Proudhon, he was not ignorant of
Proudhon’s work. In his last book, Ethics: Origin and Development, where
he analyzed ethical conceptions from a naturalist, evolutionary point of
view, he devoted the following section to Proudhon’s theory of justice,
showing the connections between Proudhon’s conception of justice and
Kropotkin’s own ideas regarding mutual aid and morality. Several
selections by Proudhon and Kropotkin can be found in Volume One of
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, including
excerpts from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and “Anarchist Morality.”

Proudhon on Justice

Among the socialists, Proudhon (1809–1865) approached nearer than any
other the interpretation of justice as the basis of morality. Proudhon’s
importance in the history of the development of ethics passes unnoticed,
like the importance of Darwin in the same field. However, the historian
of Ethics, Jodl, did not hesitate to place this peasant-compositor, — a
self-taught man who underwent great hardships to educate himself, and
who was also a thinker, and an original one, — side by side with the
profound and learned philosophers who had been elaborating the theory of
morality.

Of course, in advancing justice as the fundamental principle of
morality, Proudhon was influenced on one side by Hume, Adam Smith,
Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopædists, and by the Great French
Revolution, and on the other side by German philosophy, as well as by
Auguste Comte and the entire socialistic movement of the ‘forties. A few
years later this movement took the form of the International Brotherhood
of Workers, which put forward as one of its mottoes the masonic formula:
“There are no rights without obligations; there are no obligations
without rights.”

But Proudhon’s merit lies in his indicating clearly the fundamental
principle following from the heritage of the Great Revolution — the
conception of equity, and consequently of justice, and in showing that
this conception has been always at the basis of social life, and
consequently of all ethics, in spite of the fact that philosophers
passed it by as if it were non-existent, or were simply unwilling to
ascribe to it a predominating importance.

Already in his early work, “What is property?” Proudhon identified
justice with equality (more correctly — equity), referring to the
ancient definition of justice: “Justum aequale est, injustum inaequale”
(The equitable is just, the inequitable — unjust). Later he repeatedly
returned to this question in his works, “Contradictions économiques” and
“Philosophie du Progrès”; but the complete elaboration of the great
importance of this conception of justice he gave in his three-volume
work, “De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église,” which
appeared in 1858.[200]

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