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Property is theft!
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Property is theft! is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the sovereign right of property the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security.
In the Confessions d'un revolutionnaire Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase:
lass="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m3279863",this)' onMouseout='hide("m3279863")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Karl_Marx">Karl Marx, although initially favourable to Proudhon's work, later criticised, among other things, the expression "property is theft" as self-refuting and unnecessarily confusing, writing that "since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property" and condemning Proudhon for entangling himself in "all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property."
sot de Warville had previously written, in his Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property (Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature." Marx would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville, although this is contested by subsequent scholarship.
Similar phrases also appear in the works of Saint Ambrose, who taught that superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen) and Basil of Caesarea (Ascetics, 34,1-2)
Proudhon's slogan is referenced in Douglas Adams's novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - when Arthur Dent asks who the actual owner of a spaceship is, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who stole the ship, responds, "look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property.
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Encyclopedia
Property is theft! is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the sovereign right of property the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security.
In the Confessions d'un revolutionnaire Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase:
Criticism
Karl Marx, although initially favourable to Proudhon's work, later criticised, among other things, the expression "property is theft" as self-refuting and unnecessarily confusing, writing that "since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property" and condemning Proudhon for entangling himself in "all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property."
Similar phrases
Brissot de Warville had previously written, in his Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property (Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature." Marx would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville, although this is contested by subsequent scholarship.
Similar phrases also appear in the works of Saint Ambrose, who taught that superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen) and Basil of Caesarea (Ascetics, 34,1-2)
Proudhon's slogan is referenced in Douglas Adams's novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - when Arthur Dent asks who the actual owner of a spaceship is, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who stole the ship, responds, "look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, OK?"
Footnotes
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