Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/208

 APPENDIX 201

and to wish to make of a particular application of credit—the pretended abolition of the rate of interest— to think to make that the basis of the social transforma- tion—that was indeed a petty chandler’s fantasy. More- over, we find that had been already elaborated con amore among the spokesmen of the small shopkeeping class of England in the seventeenth century. The polemic of Proudhon against Bastiat with reference to interest- bearing capital (1850) is far below his “Philosophie de la Misére.” He succeeds in allowing himself to be beaten even by Bastiat, and cries and blusters every time that his adversary deals him a blow.

Some years ago Proudhon wrote a thesis on imposts, published in opposition to my theories by the Govern- ment of the Canton of Vaud. In that work was extin- guished the last ray of genius; nothing of him remains but the petty bourgeois pure and simple.

The political and philosophical writings of Proudhon have all the same dual and contradictory character which we have found in his economic work. Besides, they have only a local importance, limited to France. His at- tacks upon the religion and the Church had always a great local value in a period when the French Socialists

‘boasted of their religious sentiments as of something superior to the Voltairianism of the eighteenth century and the German atheism af the nineteenth. If Peter the Great overthrew Russian barbarism by barbarity, Proud- hon did his best to overthrow French commonplace by commonplaces.

The works which cannot be regarded merely as bad writings, but are simply vile trash, which, however, were quite in keeping with the petty chandler sentiment—were, his book on the Coup d’Etat, in which he coquets with Louis Bonaparte, and endeavors to make him acceptable