Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - Controversy

Controversy

In addition to being considered a founding father of anarchism, he has also been considered by some to be a forerunner of fascism. He was first used as a reference, surprisingly, in the Cercle Proudhon, a right-wing association formed in 1911 by George Valois and Edouard Berth. Both had been brought together by the syndicalist Georges Sorel. But they would tend toward a synthesis of socialism and nationalism, mixing Proudhon's mutualism with Charles Maurras' integralist nationalism. In 1925, George Valois founded the Faisceau, the first fascist league which took its name from Mussolini's fasci. Historian of fascism, in particular of French fascists, Zeev Sternhell, has noted this use of Proudhon by the far-right. In The Birth Of Fascist Ideology, he states that:

the Action Française...from its inception regarded the author of La philosophie de la misère as one of its masters. He was given a place of honour in the weekly section of the journal of the movement entitled, precisely, 'Our Masters.' Proudhon owed this place in L'Action française to what the Maurrassians saw as his antirepublicanism, his anti-Semitism, his loathing of Rousseau, his disdain for the French Revolution, democracy, and parliamentarianism: and his championship of the nation, the family, tradition, and the monarchy.

K. Steven Vincent, however, states that "to argue that Proudhon was a proto-fascist suggests that one has never looked seriously at Proudhon’s writings."

J. Salwyn Schapiro argued in 1945 that Proudhon was a racist, "a glorifier of war for its own sake" and his "advocacy of personal dictatorship and his laudation of militarism can hardly be equalled in the reactionary writings of his or of our day."

Other scholars have rejected Schapiro's claims. Graham Purchase states that while Proudhon was personally racist, "anti-semitism formed no part of Proudhon’s revolutionary programme."

Albert Meltzer has said that that though Proudhon used the term "anarchist", he was not one, and that he never engaged in "anarchist activity or struggle" but rather in "parliamentary activity".