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quainted, had naturally not only criticised property from different points of view, but had, in utopian fashion, suppressed it. In his book Proudhon is to Saint Simon and Fourier almost what Feuerbach is to Hegel. Com- pared with Hegel, Feuerbach is very poor. Nevertheless, after Hegel, he made an epoch, because he accentuated certain points, disagreeable for the Christian conscience and important for philosophic progress, but which had been left by Hegel in an obscure and mystic light,
The style of this writing of Proudhon is, if I may say so, bold and vigorous, and it is its style, in my opinion, which is its great merit. We see that even when he merely reproduces he discovers; that what he says is new to him, and that it serves him as something new.
The provoking audacity with which he lays hands on the economic sanctuary, the brilliant paradoxes by which he ridicules the dull bourgeois common-sense, his in- cisive criticism, his bitter irony, with here and there a profound and sincere sentiment of revolt agaihst the established order of things, his revolutionary spirit—this it is which electrifies the readers of “What is Property?” and made the book on its appearance a powerful revolu- tionary impulse. In a rigorously scientific history of political economy, the work would scarcely be worthy of mention. But these sensational books play a part in the sciences as well as in literature. Take, for example, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.” The first edition was simply a sensational pamphlet, and a plagiarism from one end to the other into the bargain. Yet what an im- pression has this pasquinade produced on humanity ?
If I had before me this book of Proudhon’s it would be easy for me to give some illustrations of his first style. In the chapters which he himself considers the best he imitates the contradictory method of Kant, the only
