Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/203

 being a violation of property, presupposes property, Proudhon embroils himself in all kinds of confused and fantastic notions with regard to true bourgeois property.

During my stay in Paris, in 1844, I had personal relations with Proudhon. I recall this circumstance, because up to a certain point I am responsible for his "sophistication," a word which the English use for the adulteration of a commodity. In our long discussions— often lasting all through the night—I infected him with Hegelianism, to his great prejudice, since, not knowing German, he could not study the matter thoroughly. What I had begun, M. Karl Grün, after my expulsion from France, continued. But this professor of German philosophy had the further advantage over me of understanding nothing of what he taught.

A short time before the publication of his second important work, "Philosophie de la Misère," &c., Proudhon informed me of it in a long and detailed letter, in which among other things he said: "I await the blow of your critical rod." And very soon this fell upon him (in my "Misère de la Philosophie") in such a fashion as to for ever shatter our friendship.

From the foregoing you can see that the "Philosophie de la Misère, ou Système des Contradictions Economiques," ought, in short, to give the answer to the question: "What is property?" As a matter of fact, Proudhon did not begin his economic studies until after the publication of this first book; he then discovered that in order to solve the question he had put, it was necessary to reply, not by invective, but by an analysis of modern political economy. At the same time he endeavored to establish the system of "economic categories" by means of dialectic. Hegelian contradiction had to re-