"Property is theft" — the 1840 book that made the phrase, and argued for it chapter by chapter.

What is Property?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon · 1840

Proudhon's What is Property? is the book that coined anarchism's most famous line and, with it, launched Proudhon as the first person to call himself an anarchist. Working as a formal inquiry rather than a manifesto, he tests and rejects the standard justifications for property — occupation, labor, civil law — before building his own distinction between property (which he attacks) and possession (which he defends). The book provoked Marx's fierce rebuttal in The Poverty of Philosophy and shaped the mutualist and federalist traditions Bakunin and Kropotkin carried forward. Read it to see where the argument against property actually started, in Proudhon's own careful, combative prose.

6 chapters · 86,718 words · ~6.6 hr read