PROUDHON, PIERRE JOSEPH

   French Socialist, born at Besançon, the son of a cooper; worked in a printing establishment, spent his spare hours in study, specially of the social problem, and in 1840 published a work entitled "What is Property?" and in which he boldly enunciated the startling proposition, "Property is theft"; for the publication of this thesis he was at first unmolested, and only with its application was he called to account, and for which at last, in 1849, he was committed to prison, where, however, he kept himself busy with his pen, and whence he from time to time emitted socialistic publications till his release in 1852, after which he was in 1858 compelled to flee the country, to return again under an act of amnesty in 1860 and die; he was not only the assailant of property, but of government itself, and preached anarchy as the goal of all social progress and not the starting-point, as so many unfortunately fancy; but by anarchy, it would seem, he meant the right of government spiritually free, and, in the Christian sense of that expression, to exemption from all external control (see I Tim. i. 9) (1809-1865).