What is Property?
|  |
| from
What is Property? (1840) |
| An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government |
| Pierre J. Proudhon |
If I were asked to answer the following question:
What is slavery? and I should answer in one word,
It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question:
What is property! may I not likewise answer,
It is robbery, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?
