
What is Property?
1840 · 225 pages
Property is theft, Proudhon answered, meaning property that lets one man live off another's labor. Nobody had called himself an anarchist before, and his quarrel with Marx still splits the left.
★ 6.2

Property is theft, Proudhon answered, meaning property that lets one man live off another's labor. Nobody had called himself an anarchist before, and his quarrel with Marx still splits the left.

The first man to fence a field and say this is mine founded civil society, Rousseau writes, and ruined it. His case against progress split the Enlightenment and still unsettles readers.