C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (prö-dô
‘). A French social economist; born at Besançon, July 15, 1809; died at Passy, Jan. 19, 1865. In his early years he was a compositor and afterward proofreader in a printing-office; and in that situation acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, also of Catholic and patristic theology. He wrote: ‘An Essay toward a General Grammar’ (1837); ‘What Is Property?’ (1840), answering the question in the words already used by Brissot, “property is robbery”; ‘System of Economic Contradictions, or Philosophy of Misery’ (2 vols., 1846), to which Karl Marx replied with ‘The Misery of Philosophy’; ‘Justice in the Revolution and in the Church,’ a violent attack on all existing institutions of Church and State (1858).