Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/209

 202 APPENDIX

to the French workmen, and that against Poland, which, in honor of the Czar, he treats with the cynicism of an idiot.

Proudhon has often been compared to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Nothing could be more erroneous. He re- sembles rather Nicolas Linguet, whose “Theorie des Lois Civiles” is, moreover, a work of genius.

The nature of Proudhon leads him to dialectics. But having never comprehended scientific dialectic, he gets no further than sophistry. In fact, that arises from his petty bourgeois point of view. The petty bourgeois, precisely like our own historian Raumer, always speaks of one side and of the other side. Two opposing, contra- dictory currents dominate his material interests, and in consequence his religious, scientific and artistic views, his morality, and in fact his whole being. If he is besides, like Proudhon, a man of intellect, he will very soon be able to juggle with his own contradictions and to elaborate them in striking, noisy, if sometimes brilliant, paradoxes. Scientific charlatanism and political com- promises are inseparable from such a point of view. There is, in such case, only a single motive, individual vanity, and as with all vain people, there is no question of anything beyond the mere effect of the moment, the success of the hour. In this is necessarily lost the simple moral tact which would preserve a Rousseau, for example, from all compromise, even apparent, with the powers that be.

Perhaps posterity will say, to distinguish this most recent phase of French history, that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon, and Proudhon its Rousseau-Voltaire.

Yours, &c.,

Kart Marx,