114 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
production, the division of labor, credit, money, &c., as categories fixed, immutable, eternal. M. Proudhon, who has before him these already formed categories, would explain to us the act of formation, the generation of these categories, principles, laws, ideas, thoughts.
The economists explain to us how production is car~ ried on in the relation given, but what they do aot ex- plain is how these relations are produced, that is to say the historical movement which has created them. M. Proudhon, having taken these relations as abstract principles, categories, and thoughts, has only to put order into these thoughts, which may be found ranged alphabetically at the end of any treatise on political economy. The material of the economists is the active and busy life of men; the materials of M. Proudhon are the dogmas of the economists. But from the moment that we cease to follow the historical movement of the relations of production, of which the categories are nothing but the theoretical expression, from the moment that we see in these categories only spontaneous thoughts and ideas, independent of the real relations, we are forced to assign the movement of pure reason as the origin of these thoughts and ideas. “How does pure reason, eternal, impersonal, give birth to these thoughts? How does it proceed in order to produce them?
If we had the intrepidity of M. Proudhon in this Hegelianism we should say: Reason is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this expression mean? Impersonal reason having outside of itself neither ground upon which to stand, nor object to which it can be opposed, nor subject with which it can be composed, finds itself forced to make a somersault in posing, oppos- ing and composing itself—position, opposition, composi- tion. To speak Greek, we have the thesis, the antithesis
