What Is Property?

About this book

'Property is theft!' With this famous answer to the question of his title, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon attacks the right of owners to draw rent, interest and profit from land and capital without working, which he sees as a form of robbery that makes inequality inevitable. He examines and rejects, one by one, the arguments that property is a natural right or is justified by occupation or labour, and calls instead for a society of equals founded on justice, in which possession is limited to what a person uses.

Context and significance

Proudhon (1809–1865), a self-taught printer from a poor family in Besançon, published the book in 1840, and in it he became the first person to call himself an anarchist. Karl Marx first praised him and later attacked him. Read Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and The Communist Manifesto.

About the author