Justice, Order and Anarchy:
The International Political Theory Of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

W. A. L. Prichard

Doctoral Thesis 
Submitted in Partial Fulfilment 
of the Requirements for the
Award of Doctor of Philosophy 
of Loughborough University
3rd April 2008
© by W. A. L. Prichard, 2008 

The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: “Tout est Bien”
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affereuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces members dispersés;
Direz-vous, C’est l’effet des éternelles lois
Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?
Non, ne présentez plus à mon coeur agité
Ces immuables lois de la necéssité,
Cette chaîne des corps, des esprits, et des mondes
O rêves de savants! O chimères profondes!
Dieu tient en main la chaîne, et n’est point enchaîné;
Par son choix bienfaisant tout est déterminé,
Il est libre, il est juste, il n’est point implacable.
Pourquoi donc suffrons-nous sous un maître équitable? 


The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
Useless eternal pains maintenance!
Deceived Philosophers Who Shout: “Everything is Good”
Run, contemplate these hideous ruins,
These debris, these shreds, these unhappy ashes,
These women, these children huddled together,
Under these broken marbles these dispersed members;
You say, It’s the effect of the eternal laws
Who of a free and good God requires choice?
No, no longer present to my restless heart
These immutable laws of necessity,
This chain of bodies, minds, and worlds
O dreams of scholars! O deep dreams!
God holds the chain in his hand, and is not chained;
By his beneficent choice everything is determined,
He is free, he is just, he is not implacable.
Why then will we suffice under a fair master?


Abstract

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist PierreJoseph Proudhon’s writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality.

The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon’s voluminous writings on international
politics. These texts have been relatively marginalised in the broader secondary literature
on Proudhon’s thinking, and the thesis seeks to correct this important lacuna. 
In International Relations (IR), the academic discipline to which this thesis will make its
most obvious original contribution, Proudhon’s writings on war and peace have been
almost completely ignored. 

By providing an anarchist approach to world politics, the thesis will also contribute to IR’s historiographical and critical theoretical literature. 

The second claim to originality lies in using these writings and the context from which they
emerged to tell a story about the evolution of the nineteenth century, the origins of the
twentieth century and provide possible ways of thinking beyond the twenty first. 

The thesis employs a contextualist methodology that works in four ways.  

First, I have contextualised Proudhon’s thought geo-politically, in relation to the dynamics of the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. 

Secondly, I have sought to understand Proudhon’s ideas against the backdrop of the evolution of the French nation state in the mid to late nineteenth century. 

Third, I have shown how Proudhon’s thought emerges out of the dominant intellectual currents of his day – ideas that range from the inspiration for the activism of Fourierist and Saint-Simonian feminists, to the epochal influence of Rousseau and Kant. 

Finally, I argue that Proudhon’s thinking on world politics needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of his own thinking after Napoleon III’s coup d’état of the 2nd of December 1851. 

I will show that Proudhon’s mature anarchism, his mutualist federalism, was an engaged response to each of these social and intellectual contexts. I will argue that his critiques of these processes, and their intellectual champions, have been given an added poignancy given that he campaigned in large part against those very processes that culminated in two world wars.

Keywords: Anarchism, Balance of Power, Federalism, International Relations,
International Political Theory, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Political Theory, Mutualism,
Nineteenth-Century France 

INTRODUCTION (EXCERPT)

IR Theory
Writing in the The Times Literary Supplement, soon after the end of the Second World
War, E. H. Carr claimed that Proudhon was “one of the first crank financial reformers”,
an “isolated eccentric” out of touch with his time.

 Furthermore, he argued, Proudhon’s vision of “a world of independent self-assertive individuals” was doomed to besubsumed by the forces of modern nationalism and his approach was also full of “self -contradictions”.

 For example, Carr casts Proudhon as an individualist and suggests that
this clashes with his theory of federalism. He thought Proudhon something of a
chauvinist, and that this contradicted his critique of everyone else’s nationalism. 
Perhaps most importantly Carr also implied that Proudhon’s two-volume La Guerre et la Paix, the central text of this thesis, could be dismissed “as a passing aberration” or a “confusion of thought”. It was a “panegyric on war” that included a “disconcerting streak of self assertive nationalism”.

 This evaluation doubtless goes some way towards explaining why Carr agreed with J. Selwyn Schapiro that Proudhon was a “progenitor of Hitlerism”.

 This is quite a claim, but Schapiro goes even further than this. He argues that
Proudhon’s followers have in fact mistakenly seen Proudhon as an anarchist; Schapiro
claims he was, in fact, a virulent anti-Semite and a “harbinger of Fascism”,
 an argument that Carr believes he “depicts […] with skill and plausibility.” 

As the thesis will show, both Carr and Schapiro’s accounts of Proudhon’s thought are completely inaccurate.

Hans Morgenthau, the second ‘father’ of IR theory, gives us insight into the prevalence of
two further positions on Proudhon’s thought in the immediate post-war period. The first
is the argument that Proudhon was a liberal individualist and supporter of laissez faire
capitalism. Morgenthau believed that Proudhon, like his contemporaries Cobden and
Bright, was “convinced that the removal of trade barriers was the only condition for the
establishment of permanent harmony among nations, and might even lead to the
disappearance of international politics altogether.” Nineteenth-century nationalism and
power politics sounded the death knell of Cobden and Bright’s liberal internationalism, as
I will discuss in chapters one and two. However, as I will show in chapters one, five and
six, this argument is simply not applicable to Proudhon’s thought.

But perhaps even more important is Morgenthau’s claim that “Proudhon was among the
first to glorify the blessings of science in the international field.” The historical
significance of Proudhon’s thought in this area was subsequently ignored by all who
followed Morgenthau, because for Morgenthau what this actually meant was that
Proudhon was thus guilty of a second naïveté – scientism. Morgenthau’s position on
science in its application to matters of world politics is well known. He argued against
neo-Kantian “scientific utopians” who, he argued, believed that if human behaviour could
be brought into line with universal reason, the harmony that would emerge would be
forceful enough to illustrate the stupidity of the “atavism of power politics”. Proudhon,
it is implied, was one of the first to suggest such nonsense, and Morgenthau directs the
reader to Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix in a footnote as evidence of this. Both Carr
and Morgenthau were the fathers of Realism as an approach to international relations, and
their casting of all who came before them as idealists is perhaps the founding myth of
academic IR. For both, neo-Kantian liberalism was the cause of the inter-war crisis and
the failure of IR to establish itself as a coherent discipline. Placing Proudhon in this neoKantian tradition was a discursive strategy that is simply not warranted by the evidence.
As I will show in chapters three and four, by unpacking Proudhon’s critique of Kant,
Morgenthau was also simply wrong.

Carr and Morgenthau cannot be held solely responsible for Proudhon’s absence from the
canon of IR theory, and I have not come across any evidence to suggest that others have
repeated their views in print. Nevertheless, their influence in the formation of IR as a
post-war academic discipline is incontestable,15 and yet it is only very recently that their
ideas have begun to be re-examined. Both Carr and Morgenthau cast nearly all who came
before them as utopians or idealists. The hegemony of realism in post-war debates about
IR theory, particularly its explicit statism, helps explain why Proudhon’s thought might
be seen to be antithetical to a realist-dominated IR. A return to Proudhon’s thought is
perhaps only possible now that this hegemony has begun to be eroded by a plethora of
critical and post-statist approaches to IR theory. I return to this literature below. 

Perhaps the best work to engage with Proudhon’s international thought is Madalene
Amoudruz’ 1945 text Proudhon et l’Europe.
It provides a good historical contextualisation of his thought. Amoudruz shows that what transpired in the totalitarian century after Proudhon’s death was the “inverse” of what he had argued and campaigned for. Nevertheless, Proudhon is deliberately painted as simply an astute journalist with the common sense of the “petit paysanne”. This is unfortunate. What we ultimately take from Amoudruz is that Proudhon’s thought simply does not contain any of the deeper and more penetrating philosophical insights of his more illustrious contemporaries. This lack of intellectual contextualisation, also a flaw in Hoffman’s work, has contributed to the myth of Proudhon’s intellectual and political provincialism, a view reinforced by E. H. Carr who claimed that Amoudruz’ work is indeed “[m]ore judicial” than most. I will rectify this in this thesis by contextualising Proudhon’s thought within the dominant intellectual currents of his day, and by so doing show how deeply involved in these
debates he actually was.

The final work of political and social history to note is Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (1984). This work is excellent.
As the title suggests, Vincent locates Proudhon within the development of the French
republican movement and ties his thought to the work of Rousseau and Montesquieu
amongst others. While generally comprehensive, the work does not engage with
Proudhon’s international political theory or his underlying theory of justice to any
significant degree. For example, there is only one index reference to La Guerre et la
Paix, and Vincent admits that he does not engage with De la Justice, Proudhon’s
unquestioned magnum opus and the inspiration for La Guerre et la Paix, “in any
detail”. Vincent’s aims are more to tie his early life, context and writings to his work on
federalism. This thesis will fill an important gap in between these two periods. 

What is so surprising is that this contemporary move in IR theory is a remarkable and
unconscious repetition of the arguments Proudhon made all those years ago. While
Proudhon’s arguments were made in radically different times, they were made for the
much the same reasons. Proudhon questioned and reformulated the newly devised
sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, the teleological Kantian philosophy of history,
the claims about the immutability of the social order espoused by the religious right, and
the ahistorical nationalist statism of Rousseau. Proudhon also criticised the Jacobin
communism of Louis Blanc, the providentialism of the liberal Saint-Simonian
technocrats, and the capitalist doctrines of laissez-faire. By standing fast to a commitment
to individual and group autonomy, a sociological and moral ontology, anti-dogmatism in
social theory and an openness in historical analysis, he broke decisively with each of
these authors – in particular in relation to their statism – and in so doing devised
anarchism as an alternative political paradigm.

As Alexander Herzen, one of the most prominent Russian revolutionaries of the mid to
late nineteenth century, observed at the time: “Proudhon is the first of a new set of
thinkers. His work marks a transition period, not only in the history of socialism, but also
in the history of French logic.” It will be argued that Proudhon’s thought was arguably
the first comprehensive break from the state-based, materialist and deterministic
paradigm that dominated modern social theory, particularly on the left, within fifty years
of his death. Indeed, it is against this past dominance that contemporary critical theory is
directed. As such, what needs to be explained is less how Proudhon might contribute to
contemporary IR theory but how and why IR theorists like Linklater are making
Proudhonist arguments and calling for a return to his ideas. Of course we cannot
address this issue before we have a full account of Proudhon’s arguments. Careful
research design is thus vital to substantiating the historical, analytical and political claims

this thesis makes.