ABSTRACT
“A man of paradoxes” Proudhon called himself in one of his earliest extant letters in that challenging, defiant manner which is characteristic of his personality and of his style. It was no empty boast. It is the same man who can proclaim that “God is Evil” and that “Christianity has no ethic and cannot have one”, but that “atheism is even less logical than faith” and that Catholicism is “the unique refuge of morality and beacon of conscience”. It is the same man who declared that he voted against the constitution of 1848 not because it was a good or bad constitution, but because it was a constitution, and who praised the Vienna settlement of 1814-15 as “the real starting-point of the constitutional era in Europe”. It is the same man who argued that war was irrelevant because it did nothing to solve essential economic problems, but declared that “man is above all else a warrior animal” and that “it is through war that his sublime nature becomes manifest”.
