Système des Contradictions Économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère.

First edition. Two volumes. 8vo. [4], xliii, [1, blank], 435, [1, Table des Matières]; [4], 531, [1, Table des Matières] pp., with the half titles. Some occasional foxing, more so to the front and rear leaves of both volumes. Contemporary quarter morocco with marbled paper covered boards, spines with four single raised bands outlined in gilt, the second and fourth panels lettered in gilt, the rest elaborately tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers. An excellent copy. Paris, Chez Guillaumin et Cie.

Proudhon’s magnum opus, the most comprehensive statement of his anarchist diagnosis of the economic contradictions of industrial capitalism. "The two forces which Proudhon conceived as fatal to social justice and the brotherhood of man were the tendency towards the accumulation of capital, which lead to the continual increase of inequalities of wealth, and the tendency directly connected with it which united political authority with economic control and so was designed to secure a growth of despotic plutocracy under the guise of free liberal institutions. Property is theft: to be a citizen is to be deprived of rights."

Proudhon sent a copy of the book to Karl Marx, then his friend, for review. Marx read it in two days, and was infuriated. "He therefore determined to destroy it, and with it Proudhon’s reputation as a serious thinker, once and for all"; Marx published his rebuttal, Misère de la Philosophie, in 1847, "the bitterest attack delivered by one thinker upon another since the celebrated polemics of the Renaissance" (Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, pp. 113-117).

Goldsmiths 34909; Kress C.6940. Not in Einaudi. 

Stock Code: 233053