Criticisms
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 "... '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."
Max Stirner was highly critical of Proudhon, and in his work, The Ego and Its Own, made the same criticism of Proudhon's expression before Marx, asking "Is the concept 'theft' at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept 'property'? How can one steal if property is not already extant?... Accordingly property is not theft, but a theft becomes possible only through property."
Read more about this topic: Property Is Theft!
Famous quotes containing the word criticisms:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
—William James (1842–1910)