al text
carefully reviewed and corrected, numerous explanatory notes and some
"Tidings of the Revolution." In these tidings, which form a sort of
review of the progress of ideas in Europe, Proudhon sorrowfully
asserts that, after having for a long time marched at the head of the
progressive nations, France has become, without appearing to suspect it,
the most retrogressive of nations; and he considers her more than once
as seriously threatened with moral death.

The Italian war led him to write a new work, which he published in 1861,
entitled "War and Peace." This work, in which, running counter to
a multitude of ideas accepted until then without examination, he
pronounced for the first time against the restoration of an aristocratic
and priestly Poland, and against the establishment of a unitary
government in Italy, created for him a multitude of enemies. Most of
his friends, disconcerted by his categorical affirmation of a right
of force, notified him that they decidedly disapproved of his new
publication. "You see," triumphantly cried those whom he had always
combated, "this man is only a sophist."

Led by his previous studies to test every thing by the question of
right, Proudhon asks, in his "War and Peace," whether there is a real
right of which war is the vindication, and victory the demonstration.
This right, which he roughly calls the right of the strongest or the
right of force, and which is, after all, only the right of the most
worthy to the preference in certain definite cases, exists, says
Proudhon, independently of war. It cannot be legitimately vindicated
except where necessity clearly demands the subordination of one will to
another, and within the limits in which it exists; that is, without ever
involving the enslavement of one by the other. Among nations, the right
of the majority, which is only a corollary of the right of force, is
as unacceptable as universal monarchy. Hence, until equilibrium is
established and recognized between States or national forces, there must
be war. War, says Proudhon, is not always necessary to determine which
side is the strongest; and he has no trouble in proving this by examples
drawn from the family, the workshop, and elsewhere. Passing then to the
study of war, he proves that it by no means corresponds in practice to
that which it ought to be according to his theory of the right of force.
The systematic horrors of war naturally lead him to seek a cause for
it other