The sympathy of the economists is easily explained. They realised from the first that Proudhon was a vigorous opponent of their views, but it was not long before they discovered that he was an equally resolute critic of socialism. Let us briefly examine his attitude with regard to the latter. No one has ever referred to socialists in harsher terms. “The Saint-Simonians have vanished like a masquerade.”[636] “Fourier’s system is the greatest mystification of our time.”[637] To the communists he writes as follows: “Hence, communists! Your presence is a stench in my nostrils and the sight of you disgusts me.” Elsewhere he says: “Socialism is a mere nothing. It never has been and never will be anything.”[638] The violence of his attitude towards his predecessors springs from a fear of being confused with them. The procedure is intended to put the reader on his guard against all equivocation, and to afford him valuable preparation for appreciating Proudhon’s solutions by showing how utterly impossible the other solutions are. His attack upon the socialists roughly amounts to a charge of failure to realise that the destruction of the present _régime_ would involve taking a course in the opposite direction. The difficult problem which he set out to solve was not merely the suppression of existing economic forces, but also their equilibration.[639] He never contemplated “the extinction of such economic forces as division of labour, collective effort, competition, credit, property, or even economic liberty.”[640] His chief concern was to preserve them, but at the same time to suppress the conflict that exists between them. The socialists aim merely at destruction. For competition they would substitute an associative organisation of labour; instead of private property they would set up community of goods[641] or collectivism; instead of the free play of personal interest they would, according to Fourier, substitute love, or love and devotion, as the Saint-Simonians put it, or the fraternity of Cabet. But none of these satisfies Proudhon.