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| '''Property is theft!''' (]: ''La propriété, c'est le vol!'') is a slogan coined by ] ] in his 1840 book '']''. | |||
| {{bquote|If I were asked to answer the following question: ''What is ]?'' and I should answer in one word, ''It is ]!'', my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required . . . Why, then, to this other question: ''What is ]?'' may I not likewise answer, ''It is ]!'', without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?|||Pierre-Joseph Proudhon|'']''{{Ref_label|A|I|none}} }} | |||
| By "property," Proudhon referred to the ] concept of the ''] of property''{{ndash}} the right of the proprietor to do with his ] as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed ] with the rights (which he considered valid) of ], ], and ]. | |||
| In the ''Confessions d'un revolutionnaire'' Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase:<ref>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism''. Edited by Daniel Guerin, translated by Paul Sharkey. 2005. AK Press. ISBN 1904859259 p. 55-56</ref> | |||
| {{bquote|In my first memorandum, in a frontal assault upon the established order, I said things like, Property is theft! The intention was to lodge a protest, to highlight, so to speak, the inanity of our institutions. At the time, that was my sole concern. Also, in the memorandum in which I demonstrated that startling proposition using simple arithmetic, I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion. | |||
| In the ''System of Economic Contradictions'', having recalled and confirmed my initial formula, I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order – a formula that could neither destroy the first proposition nor be demolished by it: Property is freedom. In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself; just as the striking of a debit from an account is tantamount to striking it from the credit record.}} | |||
| ==Literal contradiction== | |||
| ], although initially favourable to Proudhon's work, later criticised, among other things, the expression "property is theft" as ] and unnecessarily confusing, writing that "since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property" and condemning Proudhon for entangling himself in "all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property."<ref name=marx1/> In a 1963 article, ] scholar ], used the phrase's literal self-refutation as his prime example of the fallacy of the stolen concept: "f no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as “theft”…to use the concept “theft” while denying the validity of the concept of “property,” is to use “theft” as a concept to which one has no logical right—that is, as a stolen concept".<ref> by ] - originally published in ''The Objectivist Newsletter'' in January 1963.</ref> | |||
| ==Similar phrases== | |||
| ] had previously written, in his ''Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property'' (''Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol''), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature."<ref name=curiosities>William Shepard Walsh, '''', p. 923</ref> ] would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville,<ref name=marx1>], "", from ''Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2'', first published in ''Der Social-Demokrat'', Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865</ref> although this is contested by subsequent scholarship.<ref>Robert L. Hoffman, ''Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon'', (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.</ref> | |||
| Similar phrases also appear in the works of ], who taught that ''superfluum quod tenes tu furaris'' (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen). | |||
| == Footnotes == | |||
| <div class="references-small"> | |||
| '''<small>I</small>.''' {{Note_label|A|I|none}} This translation by ] renders "''c'est le vol''" as "it is robbery," although the slogan is typically rendered in English as "property is theft." | |||
| </div> | |||
| ==References== | |||
| {{Reflist}} | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
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