He destroys
and he builds. Only the mystery of his "destruction" reveals itself
completely in his formula, "The Contract solves all problems." The
mystery of his "_aedificatio_" is in the strength of the social and
political bourgeois reality with which he reconciled himself, the more
readily in that he never managed to pluck from it any of its "secrets."

Proudhon will not hear of the State at any price. And yet--apart from
the political propositions such as the constitution of value, with which
he turns to the odious "fiction"--even theoretically he "builds up" the
State as fast as he "destroys" it. What he takes from the "State" he
bestows upon the "communes" and "departments." In the place of one great
State we see built up a number of small states; in the place of one
great "fiction" a mass of little ones. To sum up, "anarchy" resolves
itself into federalism, which among other advantages has that of making
the success of revolutionary movements much more difficult than it is
under a centralised State.[30] So endeth Proudhon's "General Idea of the
Revolution."

It is a curious fact that Saint Simon is the "father" of Proudhon's
anarchy. Saint Simon has said that the end of social organisation is
production, and that, therefore, political science must be reduced to
economics, the "art of governing men" must give way to the art of
"administration of things." He has compared mankind to the individual,
who, obeying his parents in childhood, in his ripe age ends by obeying
no one but himself. Proudhon seized upon this idea and this comparison,
and with the help of the constitution of value, "built up" anarchy. But
Saint Simon, a man of fertile genius, would have been the very first to
be alarmed at what this Socialistic petty bourgeois made of his theory.
Modern scientific Socialism has worked out the theory of Saint Simon
very differently, and while explaining the historical origin of the
State, shows in this very origin, the conditions of the future
disappearance of the State.

"The State was the official representative of society as a whole, the
gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only
in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented,
for the time being, society as a whole; in ancient times the State of
slave-owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own
time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative
of the whole of soci