What is Property?

Glossary

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"I Am an Anarchist": Proudhon's declaration in Chapter VI's imagined dialogue, where he rejects every conventional political label — republican, democrat, monarchist, constitutionalist — before naming himself, in full seriousness, an anarchist: 'a firm friend of order' who nonetheless rejects rule by any master. It is the moment often credited with making Proudhon the first person to claim the label for himself.; Related: Justice and Equality
"Property is Theft": The book's opening declaration and most famous line: Proudhon's claim that property, understood as the legal right to appropriate the 'fruits of another's labor' without laboring oneself, is a form of theft from the person who actually produced the wealth.; Related: Property vs. Possession, The Right of Increase

C

Collective Force: Proudhon's argument that when many laborers combine their work, the result exceeds what the sum of their individual, separately-paid labor could produce — a thousand men working twenty days can achieve what no individual could do in a million centuries. Because employers pay only individual wages, this surplus 'collective force' goes uncompensated, which Proudhon treats as a hidden form of theft built into wage labor itself.; Related: The Right of Increase, "Property is Theft"

E

Equality of Conditions: The principle, drawn from the Academy of Besançon's own prize questions on inheritance law, that Proudhon takes as his book's ultimate goal: a society in which conditions, not merely legal rights, are equalized — which he argues property structurally prevents no matter how equal the formal rights on paper.; Related: Justice and Equality, The Academy of Besancon

F

First Proposition: "Something for Nothing": The first of the ten propositions: property is impossible because it demands payment (rent, interest) for the mere fact of ownership, without the proprietor contributing any corresponding labor or product — extracting value from nothing.; Related: The Ten Propositions, The Right of Increase
Fourth Proposition: Property is Homicide: The fourth of the ten propositions: Proudhon argues that the right of increase, taken to its logical extreme, starves and kills laborers by charging them, cumulatively, more for the products of their own labor than they can ever afford to pay — a slow, structural violence he names outright as homicide.; Related: The Ten Propositions, The Right of Increase

H

Heredity and Inequality: The Academy's 1840 prize question — on the economic and moral consequences of equal inheritance among children — that Proudhon takes as the immediate occasion for his memoir, reframing it as the more fundamental question of what property itself is and whether it can ever be made equal.; Related: The Academy of Besancon, Equality of Conditions

J

Jean-Baptiste Say: A leading French political economist whose writings Proudhon repeatedly quotes and attacks as representative of the economists' confused and self-serving justifications for property, including the claim that land's non-fugitive nature is grounds for ownership.; Related: Charles Comte
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Quoted early in Chapter IV for his famous line imagining the rich man's arrogant claim 'I built this wall; I earned this land by my labor' — an image Proudhon uses as a launching point for his own attack on labor as a justification for exclusive property.
Jus Utendi et Abutendi: The Roman law formula Proudhon quotes for property's legal definition — 'the right to use and abuse one's own' — which he treats as damning in itself: a right that includes the power to destroy, waste, or neglect what one owns, unconstrained by any obligation to the thing's social usefulness.; Related: Property vs. Possession
Justice and Equality: Chapter V and VI's turn from critique to foundation: Proudhon grounds his whole argument in a theory of justice as equality, developed from the moral sense and social instinct shared by humans and social animals, as the basis for the society of equals he argues property prevents.; Related: The Moral Sense, The Social Instinct

L

Labor Has No Power to Appropriate: The thesis of Chapter IV, Section 4: Proudhon argues that labor, contrary to the standard economists' defense of property, cannot justify exclusive ownership of natural wealth — because if labor could create such a right, it would apply equally to everyone who labors, leading logically to equality of possessions rather than to unequal property.; Related: The Ten Propositions

M

M. Blanqui: Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, a professor of political economy and defender of property who intervened to prevent legal prosecution of Proudhon's book, and whose admiring but critical letter — reproduced in the preface — argues that Proudhon's critique of property's abuses does not justify abolishing it outright.; Related: The Academy of Besancon
M. Charles Comte: A French economist whose defense of landed property, based on the claim that land's fixed and stationary nature justifies its appropriation, Proudhon examines and rejects in Chapter IV, arguing the same reasoning would equally justify appropriating air and water.; Related: Occupation and Civil Law
Malthus and Population: Thomas Malthus's theory that population grows geometrically while production grows only arithmetically, which Proudhon engages in Chapter V to argue that property itself, through the right of increase, has a 'pauperizing power' that Malthus failed to notice — meaning property, not population, is the deeper cause of scarcity.; Related: The Right of Increase
Marx's Reply: The Poverty of Philosophy: Karl Marx's 1847 book-length rebuttal to Proudhon's later work, written partly in response to the ideas developed here — a foundational disagreement between two currents of nineteenth-century radical thought that would shape the later split between Marxism and anarchism.; Related: "I Am an Anarchist"
Mutualism and Its Legacy: The tradition of thought Proudhon founded on the possession-without-property model developed in this book, later carried forward and revised by anarchist thinkers including Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, who built federalist and communist variants of anarchism partly in dialogue with Proudhon's mutualism.; Related: "I Am an Anarchist", Property vs. Possession

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Ninth Proposition: Powerless Against Property: The ninth of the ten propositions: property is impossible because its own logic of interest and increase turns against property-owners themselves as much as against laborers, proving the principle cannot be applied consistently even among proprietors.; Related: The Ten Propositions

O

Occupation and Civil Law: The two conventional justifications for property Proudhon examines and rejects in Chapters II and III: that first occupation of land creates a permanent right to it, and that civil law's sanction is sufficient grounds for ownership. He argues that since all people have an equal right of occupancy, occupation alone can justify only equal possession, never exclusive property.; Related: Usufruct, Prescription

P

Plato to Fourier: The Tradition of Association: The lineage of communal and associational thinkers Proudhon cites in his preface — from Plato and Pythagoras through Babeuf, Saint-Simon, and Fourier — whose theories of association he claims to explain, correct, and complete with his own system of possession without property.; Related: Equality of Conditions
Prescription: The legal doctrine that a right (such as property) can be gained or lost through the mere passage of time. Proudhon devotes a full section of Chapter IV to arguing that prescription actually contradicts property rather than founding it, since it shows that even the law admits property claims are not permanent or self-evident.; Related: Occupation and Civil Law
Property vs. Possession: Proudhon's central distinction, on which his whole argument turns: 'property' is the absolute right to use and dispose of a thing regardless of one's own labor on it, which he attacks, while 'possession' is the secure, non-transferable right to use and work what one occupies, which he defends as the basis for a just society.; Related: Jus Utendi et Abutendi, Usufruct

T

The Academy of Besançon: The learned society that awarded Proudhon the Suard pension supporting his studies, and to whom the book is addressed as a formal memoir in its preface. The Academy publicly disavowed the finished work as 'anti-social doctrine' once it saw what Proudhon had actually argued.; Related: M. Blanqui
The Academy's Prize Questions: The sequence of essay topics the Academy of Besançon posed in the years before 1840 — on the causes of rising suicide rates and on the merits of a weekly day of rest — which Proudhon's preface reconstructs as steadily circling toward the deeper question of equality that his memoir on property finally addresses directly.; Related: The Academy of Besancon
The Civil Code: The French legal code (the Napoleonic Code) whose formal definitions of property, prescription, and ownership Proudhon repeatedly quotes and dissects, treating its internal contradictions as evidence that even the law's own logic cannot consistently justify property.; Related: Occupation and Civil Law, Prescription
The Moral Sense: Proudhon's term for the innate capacity for justice and sympathy he argues humans share with social animals — the biological root, in his account, of the idea of equality and the sense that some arrangements (like property) are unjust, rather than a purely rational or divinely revealed principle.; Related: The Social Instinct, Justice and Equality
The Right of Increase: Proudhon's term (droit d'aubaine) for property's built-in claim to unearned income — rent, interest, profit collected simply because one owns something, regardless of labor performed. He treats this 'right' as property's defining and most damning feature, the mechanism by which it extracts wealth from labor without producing anything in return.; Related: Something for Nothing, Collective Force
The Right of the Strongest: Proudhon's account, late in the book, of one historical root of property and domination: force imposed by conquerors on the conquered, which he traces forward into bondage, usury, taxation, and rents as its later, more disguised forms.; Related: Justice and Equality
The Social Instinct: The animal drive toward group living and mutual preservation that Proudhon treats as the origin of justice, distinguishing it from the more exclusively human idea of equality that develops alongside it as intelligence and civilization advance.; Related: The Moral Sense
The Ten Propositions (Chapter IV): Chapter IV's formal demonstration that 'property is impossible,' argued through ten numbered propositions, each showing a different internal contradiction in the concept of property — including that it demands something for nothing, that it is homicide, and that it is powerless against itself.; Related: Something for Nothing, Property is Homicide, Powerless Against Property

U

Usufructuary: A person who has the right to use and enjoy the fruits of a thing without owning it outright — Proudhon's model for what every occupant of land or resources actually is, or should be: responsible for a thing's preservation and productive use, but without the power to destroy it, hoard it, or extract unearned income from it.; Related: Property vs. Possession, Occupation and Civil Law