Philosophy of Poverty, Volume 1 and 2

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Publish Date: 2000-08-01
Features: This book is an important work by the 19th-century French petty-bourgeois philosopher, economist, and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), published in 1846. It was the result of his turning to the study of political economy to address a series of questions he had raised after the publication of his theoretical work What Is Property? in 1840. However, due to the limitations of his petty-bourgeois standpoint, his idealistic views detached from history and reality, his lack of genuine understanding of political economy, philosophy, history, and other sciences, as well as his excessive self-assessment, arrogance, and boastful attitude, he completely exposed his ignorance of the laws of historical development, opposition to the proletarian revolution, opposition to socialism and communism, and his attempt to promote petty-bourgeois social reform, oscillating between capital and labor. Therefore, if What Is Property? is considered his best work and at least played a revolutionary role in terms of argumentative style, then this book as a whole is "a bad book, a very bad book." The book is divided into fourteen chapters, covering economics, value, division of labor, machinery, competition, monopoly, police and taxes, the responsibility of humans and God under the laws of contradiction, trade balance, credit, property, communal ownership, population, an overview, and conclusions. The various errors exposed by the author in this book, including the formulation of questions, methods of argumentation, and the content of exposition, fully reflect the petty-bourgeois standpoint and views of the author.