Justice, order and anarchy

341 Pages·2016·1.44 MB·English

Loughborough University
Institutional Repository
Justice, order and anarchy:
the international political
theory of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809-1865)
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by the/an author.
Additional Information:
• Doctoral Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for
the Award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.
Metadata Record: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/12162
Publisher: (cid:13)c W.A.L. Prichard
Please cite the published version.
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author and is made available in the Institutional Repository
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For the full text of this licence, please go to:
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For
Social Justice

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Justice, Order and Anarchy:
The International Political Theory Of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

W. A. L. Prichard

Doctoral Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the
Award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University

3rd April 2008
© by W. A. L. Prichard, 2008

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The Lisbon Earthquake

Voltaire
(1755)

D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: “Tout est Bien”
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affereuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces members dispersés;

Direz-vous, C’est l’effet des éternelles lois
Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?

Non, ne présentez plus à mon coeur agité
Ces immuables lois de la necéssité,
Cette chaîne des corps, des esprits, et des mondes
O rêves de savants! O chimères profondes!
Dieu tient en main la chaîne, et n’est point enchaîné;
Par son choix bienfaisant tout est déterminé,
Il est libre, il est juste, il n’est point implacable.
Pourquoi donc suffrons-nous sous un maître équitable?

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Abstract

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon’s writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality.
The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon’s voluminous writings on international
politics. These texts have been relatively marginalised in the broader secondary literature
on Proudhon’s thinking, and the thesis seeks to correct this important lacuna. In
International Relations (IR), the academic discipline to which this thesis will make its
most obvious original contribution, Proudhon’s writings on war and peace have been
almost completely ignored. By providing an anarchist approach to world politics, the
thesis will also contribute to IR’s historiographical and critical theoretical literature. The
second claim to originality lies in using these writings and the context from which they
emerged to tell a story about the evolution of the nineteenth century, the origins of the
twentieth century and provide possible ways of thinking beyond the twenty first.

The thesis employs a contextualist methodology that works in four ways. First, I have
contextualised Proudhon’s thought geo-politically, in relation to the dynamics of the
balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Secondly, I have sought to understand
Proudhon’s ideas against the backdrop of the evolution of the French nation state in the
mid to late nineteenth century. Third, I have shown how Proudhon’s thought emerges out
of the dominant intellectual currents of his day – ideas that range from the inspiration for
the activism of Fourierist and Saint-Simonian feminists, to the epochal influence of
Rousseau and Kant. Finally, I argue that Proudhon’s thinking on world politics needs to
be understood in relation to the evolution of his own thinking after Napoleon III’s coup
d’état of the 2nd of December 1851. I will show that Proudhon’s mature anarchism, his
mutualist federalism, was an engaged response to each of these social and intellectual
contexts. I will argue that his critiques of these processes, and their intellectual
champions, have been given an added poignancy given that he campaigned in large part
against those very processes that culminated in two world wars.
Keywords: Anarchism, Balance of Power, Federalism, International Relations,
International Political Theory, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Political Theory, Mutualism,
Nineteenth-Century France
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Preface

“Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present
lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.”

Eric Hobsbawm
“Our schools of rationality balk at having their histories written,
which is no doubt significant.”

Michel Foucault

During the course of writing up my research Masters in International Relations (IR)
theory at the University of Wollongong, I discovered that Proudhon had written a fair bit
on international politics. But despite a plethora of post-statists in modern IR and political
theory, most of whom called themselves postmodern or critical, no one seemed to have
read any anarchism, let alone Proudhon’s work on international politics. Nor had I for
that matter. So this thesis effectively began life as a hunch, in late-1999. I assumed,
somewhat naively, that anything Proudhon had to say about world politics would
undoubtedly be able to contribute to contemporary postmodern, critical and post-
sovereign social theory, and would obviously resonate with the concerns and aspirations
of the anti-capitalist carnival in Seattle that July. I also hoped to contribute something to
IR theory, though I had a fair idea that it would not be gladly received.

This utopianism turned into giddy excitement when I took delivery of the two volumes of
Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix. I then developed a self-assured arrogance when I was
offered a (self-funded) place on the PhD programme at the Department of International
Politics, at Aberystwyth. Being from North Wales, I felt like I was going home, and I also
thought I was radical. But the PhD ultimately became too much of a burden, and
thankfully I did not have to bear it alone. Generous financial support and guidance from
friends, colleagues and family has helped me through. I would not have made it without
them. I have had superb supervision and have infuriated so many people with my defence
of Proudhon, that innumerable bad ideas thankfully never made it into this final draft.
What remains can only be described as the emergent, irreducible product of collective
effort. As a result I owe a profound debt of thanks, and a comparable financial debt, to
many.
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I began work on the thesis in 2001 having spent the previous nine months working as a
chef in a trendy West London restaurant. Despite an ability to work all hours and a
stubbornness born of desperation, I was utterly unprepared for the rude awakening I
received on arrival at Aberystwyth. I had no idea what a PhD was and despite my first
supervisor’s hope that I had thick skin, and my own cocksure riposte that chefs have
calloused hands, I had no idea what he meant. It turned out that I had neither the requisite
skills nor the temperament for academic writing – but, thankfully, I really did have
thicker skin than most.

The problem was, I guess, that I did not have a ‘coherent’ project. This is a problem most
PhD students face and I claim no special status. Moreover, most students construct the
shape of the PhD after it’s been substantially written. But it’s rare that none of your peers
and seniors have any idea what it is you’re going to write about and most are actively
hostile towards it. “Why Proudhon?” people would ask, isn’t he: “contradictory”,
“paradoxical”, “dead”? “What? you mean you know nothing about his work on
international politics!?” (‘either’ should always have followed here, but rarely did). “Isn’t
he a utopian who thinks man is inherently good!?” “Surely an anarchist can have nothing
to say about IR – IR is about states?” “Perhaps history has consigned him to the dustbin
with good reason?” and finally, it all boiled down to the question: “You don’t want to
write a thesis on Proudhon do you?!” the assumption being that the history of ideas was
somehow less important than IR theory, or that it had little bearing on the main concerns
of the discipline. It goes without saying that without pinpointing someone’s ignorance,
academic careers would be few and far between. For others, ignorance can be the most
formidable barrier to starting one.

After a difficult year I failed to produce the requisite work. I had failed to adjust to the
demands of a modern PhD because I was working 15 hours a week as a chef. I also had
12 hours a week of research training (useless platitudes to funding bodies trying to weed
out critical thinking) and taught four hours of seminars a week as well. Independent
research of a type I was not acquainted with was almost impossible. I was encouraged to
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take a second Masters. This time it would be a taught Masters, so that I learnt the right
things and so that I had a better frame of reference within which to locate the thesis – the
assumption remained that I would contribute to contemporary problems in IR theory. It
also gave me a year to practice my writing, secure funding and rejoin my PhD buddies in
twelve months time. I was not so fortunate.

I passed the Masters degree well – even getting a distinction for my dissertation again –
but I was forced to accept that I had not jumped through the hoops well enough. Due to a
lack of funding, for the duration of the year I had to work 20+ hours a week in a hot
kitchen under precarious financial conditions. Sadly I was not alone in this experience,
nor, I should imagine, will I be the last to face it. Thankfully, I secured a generous grant
to cover fees and maintenance, from the Thomson Foundation, which was paid in
exchange for research work for the Welsh TV station S4C. This was greatfully received.

I worked 16 hours a week compiling reports on the nature of Welsh-language
broadcasting. Little by little I became socialised into the role of an anarchist Mary
Whitehouse (imagine such a thing!). This became a problem in the second year of the re-
started PhD when I also took on a position of warden in a hall of residence. My highly
developed left-conservative attitudes clashed with childishness and sleep deprivation and
ensured that along with my significant PhD problems and 16 hours of TV a week, 2004-5
went down as one of the worst years of my life.

I had been looking into ways of getting out of Aberystwyth for two years when, by pure
chance, I received an email from the Research on Anarchism list. The Department of
Politics, IR and European Studies at Loughborough University was advertising a fully
funded PhD place for someone to work on anarchism from within IR or politics. Imagine
my surprise! With Aberystwyth still unable to offer me very much of anything at all, I
left as soon as I could. With five years of graduate education behind me I moved to
Loughborough and started the first year of my PhD for the third time. A formal
expression of thanks to Loughborough University hardly seems sufficient for what was a
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