ules" of property
are just those "economic laws" on whose cold-blooded necessity all
cheap "measures," whether or not recommended by Incas and Campe's
books for children and held in great esteem by the most sturdy
patriots, must come to grief.

How unkind it is to raise economic objections against a man who,
unlike others, does not boast of his "studies of political economy,"
but has rather out of modesty managed to give the impression in all
his works, that he has still to make his first studies in political
economy.

Whereas private property is not a simple relation, or even an abstract
concept, a principle, but consists in the totality of middle-class
production relations--we are concerned here not with subordinate and
decaying, but with existing, middle-class private property--whereas
all these middle-class productive relations are class relations, a
connection which is obvious to every pupil of Adam Smith or
Ricardo--an alteration in these conditions can only be brought about
by an alteration of these classes in their reciprocal connection, and
an alteration in the position of classes is--a historical change, a
product of the total social activity, the product of a specific
"historical movement."

For example, in order to explain the abolition of middle-class
property relations, modern historians would have to describe the
movement in which the bourgeoisie progressed to the point where it had
developed its conditions of life far enough to be able to abolish the
whole of the feudal orders and the feudal mode of existence, and
consequently the feudal relations of production within which these
feudal orders had been producing. The abolition of feudal property
relations and the foundation of modern middle-class society was
therefore not the result of a certain action which proceeded from a
particular theoretical principle pressed to its logical conclusion.
The principles and theories which the writers of the bourgeoisie put
forward during the latter's struggle with feudalism were rather
nothing but the theoretical expression of the practical movement. How
this expression was more or less Utopian, dogmatic, or doctrinaire,
according as it related to a more or less developed phase of the real
movement can be clearly traced.

PROUDHON

Just as the first critical moves in every science are necessarily
entangled in the assumptions of the science which they are intending
to combat, so Proudhon's work _Qu'est