Born in Besanςon on 15 January 1809 into a humble family, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon worked in a printing workshop from 1827 onwards.
Together with three friends he bought himself such a workshop in 1836 but without commercial success. He obtained the Baccalaureat diploma and, in 1838, a grant which allowed him to resume his studies.
Elected to the Parliament in 1848, he was condemned on 28 March 1849 to three years’ imprisonment for having insulted the president of the Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. He published in 1858 De la justice dans la revolution et dans l,Eglise but the book was seized and Proudhon condemned, on 2 June 1858, to three years’ imprisonment for “outrage on the public and religious morals” and having “turned into derision a cult legally recognised by the State”. He had to flee to Belgium but was pardoned in December 1860. He returned to Paris in 1862 where he died on 19 January 1865.Proudhon published many works, and his complete writings number 26 volumes. As an economist, his main works are his three pamphlets on property (1840, 1841a, 1841b), Systeme des contradictions economiques (1846) and the part of De la creation de l’ordre dans l’humanite (1843) dedicated to political economy. The content of Theorie de la propriety (1866) shows an evolution in his thought at the end of his life.
Proudhon has a peculiar place among the 1848 revolutionaries. He reproached the socialists, the communists and the Saint-Simonians for having considered the political revolution as a means and the social revolution as an end. They wanted to conquer the power to transform the society. For Proudhon, the social revolution is the means, and the political revolution - liberty - the end. He proclaimed himself an anarchist (Proudhon 1840: 229). The social structure must be organized on the basis of contracts because free associations are the only form of a just society. He was in favour of federalism and the systematic abolition of any governmental function, the regalian ones included (1851: 286).
In 1839, taking part in a competition organized by the Academie of Besanςon, he wrote De l’utilite de la celebration du Dimanche, consideree sous les rapports de l’hygiene publique, de la morale, des relations de famille et de cite. He not only defended the Sunday rest against “those philanthropists... who suffer... from the fact that the poor only work six days for an insufficient wage and invariably conclude that they must work one day more” (1839: 41), but proclaimed that “the equality of conditions... is the aim of society” (ibid.: 44). He used some ideas he found in the French and English classical economists. He was convinced that, once the errors that vitiated its teaching are removed, economics could provide the positive conception of the new order of things. From the incoherent disorder in which, in his opinion, economic doctrines were at that time, he pretended to create a science, which would have formed “the head of the human encyclopaedia”.