Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( 1809 – 1865 ) was the first philosopher to label himself an " anarchist.

Proudhon favoured a right of individuals to retain the product of their labour as their own property, but believed that any property beyond that which an individual produced and could possess was illegitimate.

It is Proudhon's philosophy that was explicitly rejected by Joseph Dejacque in the inception of anarchist-communism, with the latter asserting directly to Proudhon in a letter that " it is not the product of his or her labour that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature.

After Dejacque and others split from Proudhon due to the latter's support of individual property and an exchange economy, the relationship between the individualists, who continued in relative alignment with the philosophy of Proudhon, and the anarcho-communists was characterised by various degrees of antagonism and harmony.

Lum's political philosophy was a fusion of individualist anarchist economics – " a radicalized form of laissez-faire economics " inspired by the Boston anarchists – with radical labor organization similar to that of the Chicago anarchists of the time. Herbert Spencer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon influenced Lum strongly in his individualist tendency.

Proudhon was an early pioneer of anarchism as well as of the important individualist anarchist current of mutualism.

For anarchist historian George Woodcock " Although ( Pierre Joseph ) Proudhon was the first writer to call himself an anarchist, at least two predecessors outlined systems that contain all the basic elements of anarchism.

For Proudhon, the capitalist's employee was " subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience.

Seventeen years ( 1857 ) after Proudhon first called himself an anarchist ( 1840 ), anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque was the first person to describe himself as a libertarian.

Proudhon reasoned that any wealth gained without labor was stolen from those who labored to create that wealth.

Even a voluntary contract to surrender the product of labor to an employer was theft, according to Proudhon, since the controller of natural resources had no moral right to charge others for the use of that which he did not labor to create and therefore did not own.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (; 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865 ) was a French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist.

Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language.

Proudhon was born in Besançon, France on February 15, 1809, at 37 Rue du Petit Battant in the suburb of Battant.

His father, Claude-François Proudhon who worked as a brewer and a cooper, was originally from the village of Chasnans, near the border with Switzerland.

It was also during this time that Proudhon formed one of his closest friendships, with Gustave Fallot, a scholar from Montebéliard who came from a family of wealthy French industrialists.

The period following this was marked by unemployment and poverty, with Proudhon travelling around France ( and also, briefly, to Neufchâtel, Switzerland ) where he unsuccessfully sought stable employment in printing and as a schoolteacher.

Ultimately, Proudhon found that he preferred to spend the majority of his time, studying alone, and was not fond of urban life, longing to return home to Besançon.

The cholera outbreak in Paris granted him his wish to return home, when Fallot was struck with the illness, making him unable to financially support Proudhon any longer.

Many of his ideas on authority, morality, and property disturbed the essay judges at the Academy, and Proudhon was only awarded the bronze medal ( something in which Proudhon took pride, because he felt that this was an indicator that his writing made elite academics uncomfortable ).

Hubert Lagardelle wrote that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon laid out the fundamental theories of anarcho-syndicalism, through his repudiation of both capitalism and the state, his flouting of political government, his idea of free, autonomous economic groups, and his view of struggle, not pacifism, as the core of humanity.

Impressed by Proudhon's corrections of one of his Latin manuscripts, Fallot sought out his friendship, and the two were soon regularly spending their evenings together discussing French literature by Montaigne, Rabelais, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and many other authors to whom Proudhon had not been exposed during his years of theological readings.

Proudhon began mingling amongst the circle of metropolitan scholars surrounding Fallot, but felt out of place and uncomfortable amidst people who were both wealthier, and more accustomed to scholarly debate.

" Tucker characterized the economic demands of Proudhon and Warren by saying, " though opposed to socializing the ownership of capital, they aimed nevertheless to socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few [...] Absolute Free Trade ; free trade at home, as well as with foreign countries ; the logical carrying out of the Manchester doctrine ; laissez-faire the universal rule.

He was to remain an anarchist for the rest of his life, writing several books on the subject, including Anarchism, the anthology The Anarchist Reader ( 1977 ), and biographies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin, Oscar Wilde and Peter Kropotkin.

In this period socialism emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social experiments associated primarily with British and French thinkers — especially Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Saint-Simon.

Some commentators do not identify Proudhon as an individualist anarchist due to his preference for association in large industries, rather than individual control.

Now, nobody ever pounded Rousseau as effectively as Proudhon did, and in that fact the Cercle Proudhon finds its excuse.

Though Proudhon opposed this type of income, he expressed: "...

In the seminal work What is Property ?, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon favored possessions for active personal use, and opposed the ' freedom ' to use property for the exploitation of others ( non-labor income e. g. rent, interest etc .).

Though Proudhon opposed this type of income, he expressed: "...

Though Proudhon opposed this type of income, he expressed that he had never intended "... to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent and interest on capital.

In a session of the French legislature, Proudhon proposed a government-imposed income tax to fund his mutual banking scheme, with some tax brackets reaching as high as 33 percent and 50 percent, which was turned down by the legislature.

This income tax Proudhon proposed to fund his bank was to be levied on rents, interest, debts, and salaries.

In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today " one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape.

His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson ( whose lectures at the Collège de France he attended ), and later William James.

Alexandre Skirda, in his book Facing the Enemy: A history of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ( p. 131 ), attributes much of the controversy about the Platform to the original 1926 French translation made by its opponent Voline.

" An individualist rather than anarchist communist, Proudhon said that " communism ... is the very denial of society in its foundation ..." and famously declared that " property is theft!

Anarcho-communists, such as Kropotkin, later disagreed with Proudhon for his support of " private property " in the products of labour ( i. e. wages, or " remuneration for work done ") rather than free distribution of the products of labour.

" Some consider Proudhon to be an individualist anarchist, while others regard him to be a social anarchist.

The progression towards violence in anarchism stemmed, in part, from the massacres of some of the communes inspired by the ideas of Proudhon and others.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( 1809 – 1865 ) advocated a conception of social contract which didn't involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others.

Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and others developed these ideas in a free-market direction, while Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, and others adapted Proudhon's ideas in a more conventionally socialist direction.

Libertarian socialists, sometimes known as left-anarchists, hold that, as Proudhon said, " Property is theft " — that is, in reference to the ownership of productive resources, property is not the right to use, but the right to keep others from using.

In 1850, the American newspaper The Spirit of the Age, edited by William Henry Channing, published proposals for a " mutualist township " by Joshua King Ingalls and Albert Brisbane, together with works by Proudhon, William B. Greene, Pierre Leroux, and others.