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Proudhon and the Problem of Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Alan Ritter
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Extract

The problem of community, as Proudhon understands it, is to reconcil individual freedom with social peace. His political theorizing can best be seen as a prolonged effort to achieve this reconciliation. Proudhon was not at all original in placing the problem of community, as thus conceived, at the top of his agenda. He was simply responding in the usual way to the challenge presented by the Revolution to all writers on politics in early nineteenth-century France.- By disrupting social order at the same time that it awakened demands for freedom, the Revolution had made an answer to the problem of community both urgent and difficult. A reconstructed French community both free and safe was clearly needed, but how could it be achieved? If pressing demands for freedom were met, a tenuous social peace would be endangered, while if peace were secured, demands for fredom would go unsatisfied. The need and the difficulty of reconciling peace and freedom under the circumstances prevailing in France led Proudhon, like so many of his contemporaries, to devote himself to finding an answer to the problem of community.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 1967 , pp. 457 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

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12 Législation Primitive, p. 389.Google Scholar Nothing points up so sharply the gulf between Hobbes and Bonald, despite their common first premise, as their conflicting attitudes toward guilds. Hobbes' zeal for strong political rule leads him to focus attention on the guild's ability to obstruct government. Hence he brands them “worms in the entrayles” of the commonwealth. (Leviathan, Ch. 29). Bonald, on the other hand, is so concerned with the guilds' allegedly salutary psychological effects upon their members that he ignores their threat to effective government.

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15 Théorie du pouvoir, II 64–5.Google ScholarIn A Theory of stable Democracy (Princeton, 1961).Google ScholarHarry Eckstein seems to have revived and elaborated some of the points made by Bonald here. Eckstein's thesis is that “a government will tend to be stable if its authority pattern is congruent with the other authority patterns of the society of which it is a part.” (p. 6) Bonald sees that where a very similar type of congruence prevails, government is most likely to endure. “It is an axiom of social science… that popular states, presbyterian religions and families dessolvable by divorce are generally found in the same country.… just as fixity of tenure in State, religion and family is generally found in the same societies.” (Législation primitive), p. 51.Google Scholar

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58 This was Lincoln's attitude toward the democratic ideal. It was to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 27, 1857, cited in Arthur Holcome, Securing the Blessings of Liberty (Fair Lawn. N.J., 1964), p. 55.Google Scholar

59 Dahl, Robert and Lindblom, Charles, for example, remark and lament that “badrgaining lacks a widely accepted theoretical rationale”. Politics, Economics and Welfare (New York, 1953), p. 472.Google Scholar