What Is Property?

When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asked “What is property?” and answered “Property is theft,” he coined one of the most quoted lines in the history of political thought. This 1840 treatise builds a careful, often surprising argument that the right of property, as exercised over land and capital, has no just foundation and rests instead on force and legal fiction. Proudhon separates ownership earned by one’s own labor from the kind that lets some men live off the labor of others, and in the process he became the first thinker to call himself an anarchist. Combative, closely reasoned, and deeply influential on later socialists and anarchists alike, it remains a founding document of both traditions. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.