P.-J. Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) was a French social thinker, the first person to call himself an anarchist. Born to a poor family in Besançon, he worked as a printer and was largely self-taught. What Is Property? (1840) made him famous with its answer, property is theft. His System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty, drew a scornful reply from Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848, he was later imprisoned for attacks on Louis Napoleon. His ideas of mutual credit, federalism and workers' association shaped the French labor movement and later anarchism.