Proudhon
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Proudhon. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
proo-doN', Pierre Joseph (1809-1865), a French writer. He was born in Besancon and died at Paris. His father was a cooper. He attended the university of his native place for a time and learned the business of printing. He was an ingenious, studious man. In 1838 he contributed a treatise on general grammar to the academy of Besancon, for which he received a grant of $300 for three years. He then turned his attention to political economy . He is known as the founder of philosophical anarchy. In 1840 he published his famous work, What Is Property? His own answer was, "It is theft." His political writings gave offense to the French government. He was fined frequently. Anarchistic papers started by him were suppressed. More than once he found it desirable to leave the country. According to his theory all increase in wealth is due to labor and should be divided among the laborers. Profits should be distributed in the form of wages. Individual wealth, resulting from merchandising, manufacturing, and the like, should be rendered impossible. See Socialism
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
PIERRE JOSEPH, a French publicist; born in Besançon, France, July 15, 1809. He was employed in various printing offices till 1837, but had found time to think and study. The sense of the inequality of conditions among men, and of the social stigma attached to poverty, gave permanent direction to his speculations and endeavors. In 1840 appeared his famous memoir, entitled, "What is Property?" his answer to this question, "Property is Theft," being almost all that is popularly known of him. After the revolution of February, 1848, Proudhon was editor of "The People's Representative," and attracted great attention and popularity, and was chosen member of the Constituent Assembly. But he found no hearing, and therefore started a newspaper under the title of "The People was suppres suppressed. In 1849, he founded his People's Bank, but being ," which soon after sentenced, under the press laws, to three years' imprisonment and a fine, he left F France, and the bank was closed by the government. He died in Passy, France, Jan 19, 1865.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The bare facts in Aiton's 1910 and Collier's 1921 entries still hold: the printer's son from Besançon, the 1840 memoir What Is Property? with its answer "property is theft," the seat in the 1848 Constituent Assembly, the People's Bank, the prison sentence and the death at Passy in 1865. What has moved is the reading of him. Collier's regretted that the slogan was "almost all that is popularly known of him," and modern scholarship has done something about it, stressing that the same book also declares property the bulwark of liberty against the state, and reprinting the whole corpus rather than the one phrase; he is now routinely identified as the first man to call himself an anarchist. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have also foregrounded what the old entries pass over in silence: the violent antisemitism of his private notebooks and the frank misogyny of his writing on women, which now sit in every serious account beside Marx's 1847 attack on him in The Poverty of Philosophy.
Written for this edition, 2026.