I. Since Proudhon approves only the single legal norm that contracts must be lived up to, he can sanction only a single legal relation, that of parties to a contract. Hence he must necessarily reject the State; for it is established by particular legal norms, and, as an involuntary legal relation, it binds even those who have not entered into any contract at all. Proudhon does accordingly reject the State absolutely, without any spatial or temporal limitation; he even regards it as a legal relation which offends against justice to an unusual degree.
"The government of man by man is slavery."[144] "Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy."[145] "In a given society the authority of man over man is in inverse ratio to the intellectual development which this society has attained, and the probable duration of this authority may be calculated from the more or less general desire for a true—that is, a scientific—government."[146]
"Royalty is never legitimate. Neither heredity, election, universal suffrage, the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and time, makes royalty legitimate. In whatever form it may appear, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic,—royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegal and absurd."[147] Democracy in particular "is nothing but a constitutional arbitrary power succeeding another constitutional arbitrary power; it has no scientific value, and we must see in it only a preparation for the Republic, one and indivisible."[148]
"Authority was no sooner begun on earth than it became the object of universal competition. Authority, Government, Power, State,—these words all denote the same thing,—each man sees in it the means of oppressing and exploiting his fellows. Absolutists, doctrinaires, demagogues, and socialists, turned their eyes incessantly to authority as their sole cynosure."[149] "All parties without exception, in so far as they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism; and there will be no liberty for citizens, no order for societies, no union among workingmen, till in the political catechism the renunciation of authority shall have replaced faith in authority. No more parties, no more authority, absolute liberty of man and citizen,—there, in three words, is my political and social confession of faith."[150]
II. Justice demands, in place of the State, a social human life on the basis of the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to. Proudhon calls this social life "anarchy"[151] and later "federation"[152] also.
1. After the abrogation of the State, men are still to live together in society. As early as 1841 Proudhon says that the point is "to discover a system of absolute equality, in which all present institutions, minus property or the sum of the abuses of property, might not only find a place, but be themselves means to equality; individual liberty, the division of powers, the cabinet, the jury, the administrative and judiciary organization."[153]
But men are not to be kept together in society by any supreme authority, but only by the legally binding force of contract. "When I bargain for any object with one or more of my fellow-citizens, it is clear that then my will alone is my law; it is I myself who, in fulfilling my obligation, am my government. If then I could make that contract with all, which I do make with some; if all could renew it with each other; if every group of citizens, commune, canton, department, corporation, company, etc., formed by such a contract and considered as a moral person, could then, always on the same terms, treat with each of the other groups and with all, it would be exactly as if my will was repeated ad infinitum. I should be sure that the law thus made on all points that concern the republic, on the various motions of millions of persons, would never be anything but my law; and, if this new order of things was called government, that this government would be mine. The rÉgime of contracts, substituted for the rÉgime of laws, would constitute the true government of man and of the citizen, the true sovereignty of the people, the Republic."[154]
"The Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and of wills, thinks and acts as a single man. In the Republic every citizen, in doing what he wishes and nothing but what he wishes, participates directly in legislation and government, just as he participates in the production and circulation of wealth. There every citizen is king; for he has plenary power, he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subjected TO order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned IN order, as the provisional government would have it. It is liberty delivered from all its hobbles, superstition, prejudice, sophism, speculation, authority; it is mutual liberty, not self-limiting liberty; liberty, not the daughter but the MOTHER of order."[155]
2. Anarchy may easily seem to us "the acme of disorder and the expression of chaos. They say that when a Parisian burgher of the seventeenth century once heard that in Venice there was no king, the good man could not get over his astonishment, and thought he should die of laughing. Such is our prejudice."[156] As against this, Proudhon draws a picture of how men's life in society under anarchy might perhaps shape itself in detail, to execute the functions now belonging to the State.
He begins with an example. "For many centuries the spiritual power has been separated, within traditional limits, from the temporal power. [But there has never been a complete separation, and therefore, to the great detriment of the church's authority and of believers, centralization has never been sufficient.] There would be a complete separation if the temporal power not only did not concern itself with the celebration of mysteries, the administration of sacraments, the government of parishes, etc., but did not intervene in the nomination of bishops either. There would ensue a greater centralization, and consequently a more regular government, if in each parish the people had the right to choose for themselves their vicars and curates, or to have none at all; if in each diocese the priests elected their bishop; if the assembly of bishops, or a primate of the Gauls, had sole charge of the regulation of religious affairs, theological instruction, and worship. By this separation the clergy would cease to be, in the hands of political power, an instrument of tyranny over the people; and by this application of universal suffrage the ecclesiastical government, centralized in itself, receiving its inspirations from the people and not from the government or the pope, would be in constant harmony with the needs of society and with the moral and intellectual condition of the citizens. We must, then, in order to return to truth, organic, political, economic, or social (for here all these are one), first, abolish the constitutional cumulation by taking from the State the nomination of the bishops, and definitively separating the spiritual from the temporal; second, centralize the church in itself by a system of graded elections; third, give to the ecclesiastical power, as we do to all the other powers in the State, the vote of the citizens as a basis. By this system what to-day is GOVERNMENT will no longer be anything but administration; all France is centralized, so far as concerns ecclesiastical functions; the country, by the mere fact of its electoral initiative, governs itself in matters of eternal life as well as in those of this world. And one may already see that if it were possible to organize the entire country in temporal matters on the same bases, the most perfect order and the most vigorous centralization would exist without there being anything of what we to-day call constituted authority or government."[157]
Proudhon gives a second example in judicial authority. "The judicial functions, by their different specialties, their hierarchy, [their permanent tenure of office,] their convergence under a single departmental head, show an unequivocal tendency to separation and centralization. But they are in no way dependent on those who are under their jurisdiction; they are all at the disposal of the executive power, which is appointed by the people once in four years with authority that cannot be diminished; they are subordinated not to the country by election, but to the government, president or prince, by appointment. It follows that those who are under the jurisdiction of a court are given over to their 'natural' judges just as are parishioners to their vicars; that the people belong to the magistrate like an inheritance; that the litigant is the judge's, not the judge the litigant's. Apply universal suffrage and graded election to the judicial as well as the ecclesiastical functions; suppress the permanent tenure of office, which is an alienation of the electoral right; take away from the State all action, all influence, on the judicial body; let this body, separately centralized in itself, no longer depend on any but the people,—and, in the first place, you will have deprived power of its mightiest instrument of tyranny; you will have made justice a principle of liberty as well as of order. And, unless you suppose that the people, from whom all powers should spring by universal suffrage, is in contradiction with itself,—that what it wants in religion it does not want in justice,—you are assured that the separation of powers can beget no conflict; you may boldly lay it down as a principle that separation and equilibrium are henceforth synonymous."[158]
Then Proudhon goes on to the army, the customhouses, the public departments of agriculture and commerce, public works, public education, and finance; for each of these administrations he demands independence and centralization on the basis of general suffrage.[159]
"That a nation may manifest itself in its unity, it must be centralized in its religion, centralized in its justice, centralized in its army, centralized in its agriculture, industry, and commerce, centralized in its finances,—in a word, centralized in all its functions and faculties; the centralization must work from the bottom to the top, from the circumference to the centre; all the functions must be independent and severally self-governing.
"Would you then make this invisible unity perceptible by a special organ, preserve the image of the old government? Group these different administrations by their heads; you have your cabinet, your executive, which can then very well do without a Council of State.
"Set up above all this a grand jury, legislature, or national assembly, appointed directly by the whole country, and charged not with appointing the cabinet officers,—they have their investiture from their particular constituents,—but with auditing the accounts, making the laws, settling the budget, deciding controversies between the administrations, all after having heard the reports of the Public Department, or Department of the Interior, to which the whole government will thenceforth be reduced; and you will have a centralization the stronger the more you multiply its foci, a responsibility the more real the more clear-cut is the separation between the powers; you have a constitution at once political and social."[160]
