George Woodcock’s biography of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon follows one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most unruly political thinkers.

It follows his working-class beginnings through the revolutions, prison terms, polemics and intellectual battles that made him a foundational figure in anarchist and mutualist thought. 

First published in 1956, it doesn't just flatten Proudhon into the slogan for which he remains notorious — “property is theft” — and spends its time tracing the system beneath it. He was about property versus possession, labour and value, federalism, mutual credit, decentralisation, and his suspicion of both capitalism and centralised socialism fuelled him. 

Woodcock was himself closely associated with anarchist thought, and the biography is consequently sympathetic. Yet, Proudhon is not without flaws, emerging as argumentative, contradictory, frequently difficult however, enormously generative. He was a printer and autodidact whose ideas developed through continual collision with the political upheavals around him. There is useful material here too on the wider nineteenth-century radical milieu, including socialism, revolutionary politics, the Mutualists and Proudhon’s fraught relationship to Marx.

Edition / Condition: Schocken Books, New York, 1972. First Schocken paperback edition. Originally published 1956. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to covers, with edge wear and some age-toning. Internally clean and firmly bound. Good condition.