Natural Right in the Political Philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

When Professor Georges Gurvitch, the highly esteemed occupant of the chair of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg before World War II and the author of a series of brilliant studies in the pluralist philosophy of law, referred to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as the central figure in the development of modern social and judicial philosophy, the basis of his highly flattering judgment was the philosophy of law that serves as the basis of Proudhon’s mutualism, a socio-legal conceptualization that had not only greatly influenced Gurvitch’s own thinking but which had exerted tremendous influence as well over the thought of such outstanding social theorists as Herzen, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin. To state, therefore, that Proudhon was not only the first to call himself an anarchist but also “the most important” anarchist thinker of the modern period, is to establish his right to he heard. We are not entitled to skip lightly over his conception of law and justice as past generations have done.

Volume 4, Number 1 (1980)