constituted value, free contract--is a universal one,
easily, and even necessarily applicable to all peoples. "Political
economy is, indeed, like all other sciences; it is of necessity the same
all over the world; it does not depend upon the arrangements of men or
nations, it is subject to no one's caprice. There is no more a Russian,
English, Austrian, Tartar, or Hindoo political economy than there is a
Hungarian, German, or American physics or geometry. Truth is everywhere
equal to itself: Science is the unity of the human race. If science,
therefore, and no longer religion or authority is taken in all countries
as the rule of society, the sovereign arbiter of all interests,
government becomes null and void, the legislators of the whole universe
are in harmony."[27]

But enough of this! The "biography" of what Proudhon called his
programme is now sufficiently clear to us. Economically it is but the
Utopia of a petty bourgeois, who is firmly convinced that the
production of commodities is the most "just" of all possible modes of
production, and who desires to eliminate its bad sides (hence his
"Radicalism") by retaining to all eternity its good sides (hence his
"Conservatism"). Politically the programme is only the application to
public relations of a concept (the "contract") drawn from the domain of
the private right of a society of producers of commodities. "Constituted
value" in economics, the "contract" in politics--these are the whole
scientific "truth" of Proudhon. It is all very well for him to combat
the Utopians; he is a Utopian himself to his finger tips. What
distinguishes him from men like Saint Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen is
his extreme pettiness and narrowness of mind, his hatred of every really
revolutionary movement and idea.

Proudhon criticised the "political constitution" from the point of view
of private right. He wished to perpetuate private property, and to
destroy that pernicious "fiction" the State, for ever.

Guizot had already said that the political constitution of a country has
its root in the conditions of property existing there. For Proudhon the
political constitution owes its origin only to human ignorance, has only
been "imagined" in default of the "social organisation" at last
"invented" by him, Proudhon, in the year of our Lord so and so. He
judges the political history of mankind like a Utopian. But the Utopian
negation of all reality by no means preserves us from its influence