Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Home , Benjamin Tucker, Black anarchism, Gerrard Winstanley, Johann Most, Liberty (1881–1908)

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON

One of the staunchest of Thoreau attackers, Vincent Buranelli, in “The Case Against Thoreau” (Ethics 67), would allege in 1957 that Henry from time to time altered his principles and his tactics with little or no legitimation. Buranelli charged him with having practiced a radical and dangerous politics. In his article we learn that Thoreau’s political theory “points forward to Lenin, the ‘genius theoretician’ whose right it is to force a suitable class consciousness on those who do not have it, and to the horrors that resulted from Hitler’s ‘intuition’ of what was best for Germany.” In his article we learn that Thoreau’s defense of John Brown gave “allegiance to inspiration rather than to ratiocination and factual evidence.” According to this source “Thoreau’s commitment to personal revelation made him an anarchist.” 1 An anarchist? According to the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, the term “anarchism” derives from a Greek root signifying “without a rule” and indicates “a cluster of doctrines whose principal uniting feature is the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.” So who the hell are these people, the “Anarchists”? —Well, although an early theorist of the no-

1. The initials of the person who prepared this material for the EB were “G.W.” — the PROPÆDIA volume lists these initials as belonging to George Woodcock, apparently a recidivist encyclopedist as he is listed as also having prepared a number of other ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA articles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON government society was the Gerrard Winstanley who had founded

the Digger movement in England as of 1649, and although the first widely distributed anarchist writings had been those of William Godwin as of 1793, and although the first person willing to term

himself an anarchist had been Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as of HDT WHAT? INDEX

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON 1840, — it turns out that our Henry Thoreau has the honor of

being first on the EB’s shortlist of American suspects! In the United States, a native and mainly nonviolent tradition developed during the 19th century in the writings of Henry Thoreau, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker (editor of The Anarchist, a highly individualist journal published in Boston). Activist Anarchism in the U.S. was mainly sustained by immigrants from Europe, including Johann Most (editor of Die Frieheit), Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman, whose LIVING MY LIFE gives a picture of radical activity in the United States at the turn of the century. David S. Reynolds has offered us an interestingly different 2 shortlist in his BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. This is to be found on page 98: In reestablishing Thoreau’s links with his age, we should remind ourselves initially of what is already known but sometimes forgotten: he can be directly connected with other reformers and writers of his time. Other Thoreau-like figures included the notable nineteenth-century individualistic anarchists —Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William Batchelder Greene, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Benjamin Tucker– who were from Thoreau’s home state of Massachusetts and were his contemporaries. What I immediately flashed on when I saw the above allegation was, “Hey, here are 5 guys, all Thoreau’s contemporaries, and all from his home state — and not one of these guys has as yet been captured to be represented in the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo contexture in spite of the fact that we have been working on this database for all of seven years [at that point] and are pushing toward having recorded 500 thumbnail biographies of such contemporaries! –So, why not, have I been overlooking something? Did these 5 guys have something in common with Thoreau over and above proximity in location and in duration?” The results of my initial Boolean searches are below: Josiah Warren — nothing in common, no connection at all. 2. Reynolds, David S. BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND MELVILLE. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON Ezra Heywood — nothing in common, no connection at all.

William Batchelder Greene — There happened to have been a Thomas A. Greene in New Bedford who had rare plants of interest to Thoreau. There happened to have been a Calvin Greene who asked for and paid for a photograph of Thoreau. There happened to have been an Anne Greene Phillips who went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in the summer of 1840. Relatives maybe? No, there was no William B. Greene to be found. Stephen Pearl Andrews — nothing in common, no connection at all. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker — nothing in common, no connection at all.

I’m not sure what conclusion could be derived from such a study as this, other than perhaps that individualistic anarchists aren’t all that interested in networking with one another, or that proximity in location and duration, such as co-presence in a State or co-presence in a Century, tends to amount to hardly anything at all in the great scheme of things.

One thing I am sure of, however, is that using the standard tactic employed by our FBI, of guilt by association, if the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ever investigated Thoreau on suspicion of his being an anarchist, they would have concluded that he was “not a keeper.” My reasoning is as follows. The type case of the anarchist would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the property-is-theft internationalist who lived and wrote at the same time as Thoreau, and was in and out of prison in France. He would be at the exact center of every anarchist’s hotlist. If Thoreau had been intrigued at all by the various ideas of the various anarchists, for sure he –who read French very HDT WHAT? INDEX

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON adequately– would have been consulting the writings of Proudhon, whose life exactly overlapped his, as they appeared, QUEST CE-QUE LA PROPRIÉTÉ (WHAT IS PROPERTY?) in 1840 followed by WARNING TO PROPRIETORS in 1842 followed by PHILOSOPHIE DE LA MISÈRE (SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS; OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY) in 1846 followed by LE REPRESENTANT DU PEUPLE in 1848 followed by CONFESSIONS D’UN REVOLUTIONAIRRE in 1849 followed by THE GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in 1851 followed by DE LA JUSTICE DANS LA REVOLUTION ET DANS L’EGLISE in 1858. However, we have records on Thoreau’s reading which are at least as good as the stacks of reports which our FBI obsessively collects of the readings and contacts of “suspect” (marginal) persons, and the interesting fact is, Thoreau never ever displayed the slightest interest either in Proudhon or in any other of this mottled collection of scribblers and agitators.

So, here’s the report I would make, if I were an operative investigating Henry Thoreau as a security risk. Taking a clue from the manner in which, in the early 1960s, the national security investigators actually behaved in regard to me personally, I would deliver the following report to my superior officer: “We weren’t able to come up with much, but maybe if we lean on him, we can turn something up. Let’s interrogate, wink wink nudge nudge, him about the fact that Waldo Emerson’s first wife Ellen Louisa Tucker was a Tucker, and in a considerably later timeframe the known anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was also a Tucker. Had Henry perhaps met Emerson’s first wife? Let’s interrogate him about the fact that Emerson’s second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by the man who in 1854 would become the father of the know anarchist William Batchelder Greene. Did Thoreau perhaps borrow this book from Lidian and read these tales? What did he make of them? Was there any suspicious disloyal content? We both know that the real purpose of such “investigations” is persecution, and that they are designed to put the fear of the Lord in people and make sure they understand who is boss. Let’s do like we did with Austin Meredith and tell him that we interviewed his mother — and that his mother had told us all about how when he was a teenager, she found out that he masturbated. Who knows what guilty connections will show up?” HDT WHAT? INDEX