![]() While Italian anti-fascist Nicola Chiaromonte provided a succinct critique to his original article at the time, this work is not well-known even though it “is one of the best essays written on Proudhon”. Given this, an evaluation of Schapiro’s work is well overdue. To ask such a question should answer it but, as noted, Schapiro’s claims are repeated to this day. Was the thinker who influenced the likes of Alexander Herzen, Joseph Déjacque, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker and Daniel Guérin (to name just a few) misunderstood by them and really a proto-fascist? More recently, Marxist academic Alan Johnson championed Draper as a Marxist scholar who defended real socialism and, to illustrate his case, quoted Proudhon via Schapiro: “Proudhon (‘all this democracy disgusts me’).” Thus generations of Marxist activists have had Schapiro’s claims on Proudhon as part of their ideological education and, via them, repeated to countless anarchists. Draper’s account was restated in the 1980s by Leninist David McNally in his pamphlet Socialism from Below which, likewise, repeated many of the quotations Schapiro first used. Within left-wing activist circles, Schapiro’s thesis is best known for its use by Marxist Hal Draper who repeated many of his quotations and claims in the influential pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. Peter Marshall felt obliged to mention Schapiro’s claims, if only in passing, in his well-known history of anarchism. More recently, the introductory material to the Cambridge Texts edition of What is Property included Schapiro’s book in its list of “most useful studies” of Proudhon (along with six other works which argue the opposite) and suggests his ideas have influenced “all parts of the political spectrum, not excepting fascism”. Carr, it “depicts with skill and plausibility as the first progenitor of Hitlerism.” It was later repeated by Socialist writer George Lichtheim in 1969 and, via Lichtheim, Marxist academic Paul Thomas in 1980. Schapiro’s argument has been supported by many commentators on Proudhon and anarchism. Schapiro rested his case on a series of quotations and references which presented Proudhon as hating democracy and socialism, a supporter of dictatorship, an opponent of the labour movement, a racist who viewed blacks as the lowest of all races, a supporter of the South during the American Civil War, an anti-feminist, an anti-Semite and as a despiser of the “common man.” This was expanded four years later as a chapter in his book Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism. Salwyn Schapiro and an article published in the prestigious The American Historical Review entitled “Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism”. The latter claim is most associated with American professor J. Yet he is regularly accused of being contradictory and an inspiration for many political ideologies, from anarchism to fascism. ![]() Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) is usually considered as the father of anarchism, someone who both raised the main ideas of libertarian socialist thought and named them when he proclaimed “I am an anarchist” in 1840. ![]()
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