a special study of him, such as Diehl. As a
matter of fact, Proudhon has carefully and elaborately set forth his
theory of property in several other works which are mixed up for the
most part with his other numerous writings, and has left behind a
fragment of a book on the theory of property, in which he meant to
produce a comprehensive theory of property as the foundation of his
whole work. We must, therefore, in order not to anticipate, leave a
complete exposition of Proudhon's theory of property to a later
portion of this book, hence we will merely glance at the work, _What
is Property?_ and also at another study which appeared in 1843 called
_The Creation of Order in Humanity_, which shows the second, or I
might say, the political side of Proudhon's train of thought in its
first beginnings, and of which Proudhon himself said later, that it
satisfied neither him nor the public, and was worse than mediocre,
although he had very little to retract in its contents. "This book, a
veritable infernal machine, which contains all the implements of
creation and destruction," he said in his _Confessions_, "is badly
done, and is far below that which I could have produced if I had taken
time to choose and arrange properly my materials. But however full of
faults my work may now appear, it was then sufficient for my purpose.
Its object was to make me understand myself. Just as contradiction had
been useful to me to destroy, so now the processes of development
served me to build up. My intellectual education was completed, the
_Creation of Order_ had scarcely seen the light, when, with the
application of the creative method which followed immediately upon it,
I understood that in order to obtain an insight into the revolution
of society the first thing must be to construct the whole series of
its antitheses, or the system of opposites."

This was done in the book which appeared at Paris in two volumes in
1846, _The System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of
Misery_, which deserves to be called his masterpiece, both because it
contains the philosophic and economic foundations of his theory in a
perfectly comprehensive and clear exposition, and because it is
impossible to understand Proudhon without a knowledge of these
contradictions. In his first work upon property, Proudhon had
represented it as something equivalent to theft. But now we have
another doctrine proposed: that Property is Liberty. These two
propositions