Proudhon, trying to imitate Feuerbach,
was very far from recognising the insufficiency of his point of view.
All Proudhon has done is to take Feuerbach for Kant, and to ape his
Kant-Feuerbach in a most pitiful manner. Having heard that Divinity was
but a fiction, he concluded that the State is also a figment: since God
does not exist, how can the State exist? Proudhon wished to combat the
State and began by declaring it non-existent. And the readers of the
"Voix du Peuple" applauded, and the opponents of M. Proudhon were
alarmed at the profundity of his philosophy! Truly a tragi-comedy!

It is hardly necessary for modern readers to add that in taking the
State for a fiction we make it altogether impossible to understand its
"essence" or to explain its historical evolution. And this was what
happened to Proudhon.

"In every society I distinguish two kinds of constitution," says he;
"the one which I call _social_, the other which is its _political_
constitution; the first innate in humanity, liberal, necessary, its
development consisting above all in weakening, and gradually eliminating
the second, which is essentially factitious, restrictive, and
transitory. The social constitution is nothing but the equilibration of
interests based upon free contract and the organisation of the economic
forces, which, generally speaking, are labour, division of labour,
collective force, competition, commerce, money, machinery, credit,
property, equality in transactions, reciprocity of guarantees, etc. The
principle of the political constitution is authority. Its forms are:
distinction of classes, separation of powers, administrative
centralisation, the judicial hierarchy, the representation of
sovereignty by elections, etc. The political constitution was conceived
and gradually completed in the interest of order, for want of a social
constitution, the rules and principles of which could only be discovered
as a result of long experience, and are even to-day the object of
Socialist controversy. These two constitutions, as it is easy to see,
are by nature absolutely different and even incompatible: but as it is
the fate of the political constitution to constantly call forth and
produce the social constitution something of the latter enters into the
former, which, soon becoming inadequate, appears contradictory and
odious, is forced from concession to concession to its final
abrogation."[18]

The social constitution is innate in humanit