Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865): Proudhon was one of the few great revolutionary leaders of genuinely plebeian origion, his father having been a barrel-maker. Scholarship aid enabled him to pursue his studies. In 1840, in Paris, his pamphlet What Is Property? was published and created a sensation with the thesis that property is theft and an impossibility. His further publications gave him a wide reputation as a radical. Involved with radical politics and in his contact with the Marxists, he soon rejected their doctrine, seeking rather a middle way between socialist theories and classical economics. From: Prominent Anarchists and Left-Libertarians