y, necessary. Yet it could
only be discovered as the result of long experience, and for want of it
humanity had to invent the political constitution. Is not this an
entirely Utopian conception of human nature, and of the social
organisation peculiar to it? Are we not coming back to the standpoint of
Morelly who said that humanity in the course of its history has always
been "outside nature?" No--there is no need to come back to this
standpoint, for with Proudhon we have never, for a single instant, got
away from it. While looking down upon the Utopians searching after "the
best form of government," Proudhon does not by any means censure the
Utopian point of view. He only scoffs at the small perspicacity of men
who did not divine that the best political organisation is the absence
of all political organisation, is the social organisation, proper to
human nature, necessary, immanent in humanity.

The nature of this social constitution is absolutely different from, and
even incompatible with, that of the political constitution. Nevertheless
it is the fate of the political constitution to constantly call forth
and produce the social constitution. This is tremendously confusing! Yet
one might get out of the difficulty by assuming that what Proudhon meant
to say was that the political constitutions act upon the evolution of
the social constitution. But then we are inevitably met by the question.
Is not the political constitution in its turn rooted--as even Guizot
admitted--in the social constitution of a country? According to our
author _no_; the more emphatically _no_, that the social organisation,
the true and only one, is only a thing of the future, for want of which
poor humanity has "invented" the political constitution. Moreover, the
"Political Constitution" of Proudhon covers an immense domain, embracing
even "class distinctions," and therefore "non-organised" property,
property as it ought not to be, property as it is to-day. And since the
whole of this political constitution has been invented as a mere
stop-gap until the advent of the anarchist organisation of society, it
is evident that all human history must have been one huge blunder. The
State is no longer exactly a fiction as Proudhon maintained in 1848;
"the governmental formulas" for which people and citizens have been
cutting one another's throats for sixty centuries are no longer a "mere
phantasmagoria of our brain," as the same Proudhon believed at this
sam