Proudhon Pierre-Joseph (1809–65), French socialist theorist and father of anarchism. He became well known following the publication of What Is Property? (1840), the work containing his main ideas. He argued that the owner of the means of production deprives the workers of a part of their labor: ‘property is theft.’ In order to enable each worker to dispose of his labor, capital and largescale property must be limited. The need to abolish large-scale private property surpassed the immediate need for a state as a controlling agent over chaotic social relationships. To this end he stressed the need for serious reforms in the exchange system. Since the economy and society largely depended on the credit system, Proudhon advocated establishing popular banks that would approve interest-free loans to the poor. Such a mutualism would start the transformation of the actual into a just and nonexploited society of free individuals. Without class antagonism and political authorities, such a society would tend toward an association of communal and industrial collectivities. It would move toward a flexible world federation based on self-management. The main task of social science, then, is to make manifest this immanent logic of social processes. Proudhon’s ideas influenced anarchists, populists (Bakunin, Herzen), and syndicalists (Jaurès). His conception of self-management was an important inspiration for the later concept of soviets (councils). He criticized the inequalities of the contemporary society from the viewpoint of small producers and peasants. Although eclectic and theoretically rather naive, his work attracted the serious attention of his contemporaries and led to a strong attack by Marx in The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy. G.Fl.