The principle of equality was not disputed, but the use of brute force through the power of the State was regarded with horror in the form in which the followers of Baboeuf, the enthusiasts for Utopianism, preached it. The necessity for an organisation of industry was not denied, but men began to ask the question whether this organisation could not proceed from below upwards till it reached freedom? Already Fourier's phalanxes might be regarded as such an attempt to organise industry through the formation of free groups from below upwards; an attempt to which the Monarchists and Omniarchists are merely an exterior addition. If we leave out of consideration the rapid failure of the various Socialistic attempts at institutions based upon the foundation of authority, yet the sad experiences of half a century filled with continual constitutional changes would have sufficed to undermine the respect for authority as such. Absolute monarchy as well as constitutional, the Republic just as much as Imperialism, the dictatorship of an individual just as much as that of the mob, had all alike failed to remove pauperism, misery, and crime, or even to alleviate them; was it not then natural for superficial minds to conclude that the radical fault lay in the authoritative form of society in the State as such? did not the thought at once suggest itself that a further extension of Fourier's system of the formation of groups on the basis of the free initiative of the individual might be attempted without taking the State into account at all? But here was a further point at which a system of social and political Anarchism might begin with some hope of success, and here it actually did begin with Proudhon. CHAPTER II PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON Biography -- His Philosophic Standpoint -- His Early Writings -- The "Contradictions of Political Economy" -- Proudhon's Federation -- His Economic Views -- His Theory of Property -- Collectivism and Mutualism -- Attempts to Put his Views into Practice -- Proudhon's Last Writings -- Criticism. The man who had such a powerful, not to say fateful, influence upon the progress of the proletarian movement of our century was himself one of the proletariat class by birth and calling.