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“The Logic of Things”: Meaning and Immanence in Proudhon’s De la Justice

Jesse Cohn

We often hear laments to the effect that even though anarchism may represent

the best human instincts of spontaneous cooperation and resistance to oppression, it

lacks the kind of intellectual sophistication that makes for “theory”: thus, David Graeber

explains apologetically, there are only “fragments” to be found of anything like “an

anarchist anthropology,” while “an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist

economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science” (Graeber, Fragments

1). This is why it is refreshing to come across a generally overlooked but insightful

monograph by Stephen Condit in which the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first to

call himself an anarchist, is described as a kind of methodology – indeed, a method of

studying “cultural and social reality” in terms of meanings: a theory of interpretation, a

kind of “hermeneutic” (9). What I would like to do here, drawing on the work of several

other able explicators, is to try to explain what kind of hermeneutic Proudhon’s is.

Specifically, I will explain it in terms of a key concept to which Proudhon refers, in his

monumental study of Justice, when he calls his own work a “theory of immanence” (De

la Justice 1.324).

* * * * *

“Un partisan de l’immanence,” Proudhon says in De la Justice, “[c’est] un vrai

anarchiste”: “a partisan of immanence [is] a true anarchist.”

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Well, actually, this is not precisely what Proudhon says. What he writes, in

reference to “a Catholic writer, M. Huet,” is that “M. Huet speaks as a partisan of

immanence, a true anarchist” (De la Justice 2.212). François Huet (1814-1869),

professor of philosophy at the University of Ghent and tutor of the future king of Serbia,

would seem like an odd choice for an example of the anarchist paradigm; he is

generally described as a liberal Catholic favoring some forms of socialized property.

Taken in context, Proudhon seems not to intend literally to say that Huet is an anarchist

(indeed, he notes that Huet “mocks at the anarchists”); he is making the larger point that

when the Church, in the very act of asserting its absolute authority over life, runs up

against the limits placed on it by the worldly, temporal authority of the State, it ironically

presents a kind of “anarchy in principle” that ill accords with its “authority in action”

(2.211-213). It is in support of this point that he quotes from Huet’s Règne social du

christianisme (1853), where Huet depicts the rise of Christianity as an event of spiritual

emancipation in which humanity “took possession of itself . . . to recognize from now on

no other foundation than human nature and its immutable laws” (qtd. in Proudhon, De la

Justice 2.212). This description of Christianity ironically accords with Proudhon’s

description of anarchy as entailing a “theory of immanence” free from any dependence

on “a principle that is superior or prior to humanity” (De la Justice 1.324). Hence,

ironically, in so far as Huet is “a partisan of immanence,” placing the source of human

order within humanity itself, he is “a true anarchist”; in so far as Huet confounds this

immanent order with a transcendent Creator (Huet qtd. in Proudhon, De la Justice

2.213), he is led right back to the theory of transcendence, the denial of human self-

sufficiency.
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Still, even in context, even when we register the ironic intent, it would seem that

the point stands: for Proudhon, anarchism is to be identified with a theory that resolutely

renounces any appeal to transcendent principles. It means turning one’s back on “the

system of transcendence” in all its forms (De la Justice 1.322).

This should delight those of us who have been seeking to establish stronger

liaisons between the anarchist tradition of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and

some of the liveliest currents of contemporary thought on the other, an effort that some

would consider to have first gotten seriously underway fifteen years ago with the

publication of Todd May’s Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. There,

without having undertaken any very close study of the anarchist tradition per se, May

forecast that the closest rapprochements with contemporary philosophy would be with

thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze – a thinker for whom, indeed, “immanence” is a

preeminently central concept. Recovering this aspect of Proudhon’s thought might

allow us to see it as something more creative and relevant than the musty rationalist

caricature to which it is often reduced. Indeed, for Daniel Colson, Proudhon’s

“anarchism” is already “an absolute immanentism” (154). Perhaps a Proudhonian

hermeneutic could even be conceptualized as a kind of immanent critique.

What does “immanent critique” mean in practice, however? Immanent critique is

generally defined as the criticism of a given discourse on its own terms, rather than in

terms of some external discourse that is supposed to be superior to it. On the face of it,

this would appear to capture beautifully what Proudhon’s methodology is about. The

problem is, this term is in almost ubiquitous use:

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 Hegel claims to practice a kind of immanent critique, so that instead of

“surveying the whole and standing above the particular existence,” the

dialectic “enter[s] into the immanent content of the thing,” developing it,

through an historical process, until it supercedes itself (32).

 Marx and Engels similarly believe that authentic social critique is not the

product of an autonomous thinking subject whose ideas transcend the

limitations of its historical situation, but rather emerges from the process of

history itself.

 Conversely, Anglo-American “New Critics” such as W. K. Wimsatt and

Monroe Beardsley argued for an analysis of literary texts that would

disregard anything that was not immanent to the text itself, e.g.,

biographical or historical context.

 Similarly, structuralists like Gerard Genette proposed that the meaning of

a text was to be “uncovered by an analysis of [its] immanent structures”

rather than “imposed from the outside” (7).

 Derrida, of course, is famous for his “axial proposition” that “there is

nothing outside the text,” which he explains as the methodological

principle that “the movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures

from the outside . . . [but] from the inside, borrowing all from the old

structure” (163, 24). J. Hillis Miller has interpreted this in terms of an

ethical principle commanding “respect for the text,” renouncing attempts to

fix the play of textual meaning “by something nontextual outside the text:

God or some other transcendent power, society, history, economic

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conditions, the psychology of the author, the ‘original’ of the text in ‘real

life’” (8, 6).

“Immanent critique” is idealist, it is materialist; it is historicist, it is ahistorical; it is

contextualist, it is textualist; it is, apparently, all things to all people. The problem, as

Daniel W. Smith points out, is that “immanence and transcendence are relative terms,

not opposites, which means that in each case one must ask: Immanent to what? Or

transcendent to what?” (46). This is precisely what we have to ask in order to

understand what kind of immanence Proudhon is a “partisan” of.

In explaining the anarchist conception of “immanence,” Colson writes that “for

libertarian thought, everything that takes place is internal to things, beings, and their

encounters with one another. Nothing comes from an external source (God, State,

Laws, Ideas, Constitutions); everything is internal” (154-155). Here, “immanent” and

“internal” appear to be effectively synonymous terms: immanentism would then mean

something like the assumption that “the meaning, value, and determination of things are

always internal to the beings, the situations, and the events themselves” (39).

Conversely, what is to be shunned is the attempt, in the name of a “science” supposedly

enjoying epistemological superiority over the limited, subjective perspective of any one

of these beings, “to dictate the meaning of the life of each, the destiny and the

determinisms that shape it, from the outside” (297). Accordingly, in the words of

Colson’s fellow Deleuzian, Jean-Clet Martin, an anarchist methodology would entail an

effort not to “see things from the outside” but to “clarify them from within” (qtd. in Colson

175).
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The notion of “see[ing] things from the outside,” here, would seem to have a

great deal in common with what James C. Scott calls “seeing like a State” – i.e., seeing

from the perspective of the urban planner’s maps, gazing down “from above . . . a

God’s-eye view, or the view of an absolute ruler” (57). This cartographic gaze,

occupying a position that could be called “metaphysical” in the sense of being

supposedly removed from, prior to, or superior to the “immediate processes of being”

(Spanos 195), is exactly what Proudhon rejects in the preface to De la Justice, where

he outlines his program of “popular philosophy.” Here, in the course of defining

“philosophy” as a kind of “research” that seeks “the logic of things,” he compares this

project of research to another kind of cartography:

[T]he first and most necessary condition is to look at things carefully; to

consider them successively in all their parts and under all their aspects,

without permitting oneself any overall pictures [vues d’ensemble] before

having assured oneself of the details . . .

The philosopher, i.e. the man who seeks . . . can be compared to a

navigator charged with making a map of an island, and who, in order to

fulfill his mission, being unable to take a photograph of the country from up

in the sky, is obliged to follow with attention, and to transfer to paper one

after another, with exactitude, all the sinuosities and wrinkles of the coast.

Finished with his circumnavigation and with the statement of his

observations, the geographer will have obtained a representation of the

island which is as faithful as possible, in its parts and in its entirety, which
 Cohn – 7

he would never have been able to do, if, kept at a distance, he had been

restricted to drawing perspectives and landscapes.

The philosopher can also be compared to a traveller who, after

having traversed in all directions a vast plain, having recognized and

visited the woods, the fields, the meadows, the vineyard, the dwellings,

etc, would then climb the mountain. As he climbed, objects would once

again pass under his eyes in a general panorama which would end up

rendering comprehensible to him that of which the inspection of details

would heretofore have given him only an incomplete idea.

Thus, the philosopher must stick close to the facts and unceasingly

refer to them . . . go[ing] from simple concepts to the most comprehensive

formulas; checking the overall pictures against those seen in detail; finally,

where immediate observation becomes impossible, show himself sober in

conjecture, circumspect of probabilities, refusing analogies, and judging

regarding remote and invisible things only with timidity, and always

reservedly, by close and visible relations. (1.192-193)

This is no heroic, Hegelian image of the philosopher at work; rather than discarding the

limited, “one-sided” data of particular, limited, sensing beings, “overcoming” them in

increasingly “all-sided,” universal, abstract Ideas, culminating in a final “Absolute,”

Proudhon’s philosopher is cautious, “sober” and “circumspect,” fashioning “overall

pictures” (note the plural) but continually “checking . . . [them] against” the givens of

“immediate observation” (1.192-193). This passage of De la Justice would then seem

 Cohn – 8

to illuminate what a distinctively anarchist approach might look like in the fields of social

science and the humanities. Here are some of its key features:

1. Dual-aspect ontology: the very notion of a “logic of things” entails, for Proudhon,

a specific understanding of the relationship between the “logical” order (the realm

of ideas and meanings) and the “thingly” order (the realm of material forces and

actions). Elsewhere in De la Justice, Proudhon expresses it this way: “the fact

and the idea are really inseparable” (2.298). This formulation in no way ratifies

Marx’s caricature of Proudhon as an Hegelian idealist who believes that ideas

are prior to or more real than facts (Proudhon, Système, 418). At the same time,

principles, ideas, and intellectual representations are themselves social “facts,” in

that

a.) they are collectively constructed and circulated,

b.) they are sometimes capable of motivating action in the world, thereby

acting as social forces in their own right, and

c.) they are implicit, either as actual forms or potentialities, within social

structures.

As Ansart points out, a large part of the point of De la Justice is to demonstrate

that “Justice” is simultaneously “a representation, an idea” and “a social reality,” a

“practice,” “a true economic force” (180-182); in De la Justice, Proudhon declares

that “reason and force” are “two essential attributes of the same being” (3.369).

Thus, Proudhon repeatedly refuses the dichotomies of ideal/material or

ideas/realities, insisting on an “ideo-realist” ontology (Création de l’Ordre 286).

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Colson underlines Proudhon’s debt to the “parallelism” of Spinoza and Leibniz,

for whom the mental and the physical are merely dual aspects of the same

substance. Again, Proudhon anticipates Deleuze in regarding signs and forces

as parallel “faces” of a single reality: forces signify, signs have force (Colson 328-

329). This is what “the logic of things” means, and it implies a kind of . . .

2. Pragmatism: the Proudhonian philosopher-mapmaker is “l’homme de pratique,”

or “practicien,” a practical person, an agent, rather than the contemplative subject

of “speculative” philosophy, seeking “the logic of things” through intimate and

active engagement with them (1.192-193). Thus, “The transcendental concepts

of substance, cause, space, time, soul, life, matter, spirit, that we place like

divinities at the summit of our intelligence are mere products of the analysis that

we make of our own experience” (2.80). This implies . . .

3. Fallibilism: there is no epistemological closure, no Hegelian Absolute at the end

of the path; the aim of research is merely to get “closer to the truth,” to be “less

prone to illusion and error” (1.193, italics mine). Rather than assuming a strict

monist ontology, then, for which the world can have only one truly correct

description, the philosopher accepts a certain . . .

4. Pluralism: at the same time that Proudhon assumes a single reality to which all

particular perspectives are immanent, this one reality is inevitably perceived from

infinitely many points of view – in Leibniz’s analogy, like a single city that can be

viewed not from just one God’s-eye vantage point but from infinitely many

prospects (Colson 175). Thus, the temptation to “transcend” the limitations of

particular perspectives in favor of a totalizing, “panoramic” view – Foucault would

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call it a “panoptical” gaze – is to be resisted in favor of the careful articulation of

relationships between partial views. This means accepting an ethic of . . .

5. Methodological humility (Narayan): the assumption behind the phrase “the logic

of things” is that a “logic” is internal to the “things” themselves, that each

particular community or culture, each specific phenomenon or event, has its own

rationality. This is quite different from the assumption governing Hegelian or

Marxian hermeneutics, for which the true meaning of any particular is immanent

to the ideal or social totality (“the true is the whole”) (Hegel 11); it has far more in

common with the anthropologist’s ethic of respect for differences. In short . . .

6. A hermeneutic of immanence: the assumption that knowledge is to be found by a

process of clarifying these logics immanent to particular patterns of action in the

world. Again, this has a great deal in common with what Graeber describes as

an anthropological “model . . . of how non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual

practice might work”:

When one carries out an ethnography, one observes what people do, and

then tries to tease out the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that

underlie their actions; one tries to get at the way people’s habits and

actions makes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely

aware of. (Fragments 11-12)

Likewise, for Proudhon, the task of a popular philosophy is to “dégager de la

masse des faits humains les principes qui les régissent” – to “draw from the

mass of human facts the principles that govern them” (1.280); i.e., to discover

“the logic of things.”

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The question that arises, then, is whether this Proudhonian methodology has

anything to offer that is radically different than the dominant theories of knowledge and

meaning then and now, i.e., whether Proudhon might not be prone to the same

problems, either wagering everything on some supposedly universal, foundational

certainty that will inevitably turn out to be neither so universal nor so certain, or

despairing of this, giving in to a bottomless relativism for which knowledge per se

virtually disappears. In fact, I think Proudhon does escape the trap of a relativist

nihilism without simply relapsing into an absolutist or positivist position. This in several

ways:

1. First of all, it must be noted that for all Proudhon’s pragmatist tendencies, his

hermeneutic is still descriptive, based on a kind of observational and

representational activity. That is, one does not abandon mapmaking simply

because one cannot take a perfectly objective, all-encompassing aerial

photograph. Unlike pragmatist relativists such as Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish,

for whom all descriptions of the world are absolutely equally valid, Proudhon

holds that some descriptions are, in practical terms, better than others. Some

can be, for certain purposes – indeed, sometimes for universally shared

purposes – more or less incomplete, erroneous, false, wrong. Thereby, we

introduce a degree of limitation into the pluralistic play of perspectives: the

differences between them are not all or always a matter of indifference. This is

immediately implied by the principle of fallibility: as Graeber puts it, “Reality is

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what one can never know completely. If an object is real, any description we

make of it will necessarily be partial and incomplete. That is, indeed, how we can

tell it is real” (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value 53).

2. The methodological humility of the Proudhonian hermeneut is not absolute; it

does not foreclose the possibility of criticism. That is, if we can assume that

some representations are going to be better, less partial, more complete, more

true than others (again, in practical terms), then there are moments in which

diligent observers can make reasoned claims to possess representations of

some part of reality better than the other representations currently in circulation.

The fact that any given representation has served or could serve somebody’s

practical purposes – indeed, this is what it means for an idea, a principle, or a

logic to be “immanent” (it is immanent in action) – does not immunize it from

criticism; Proudhon’s pragmatism does not foreclose the possibility and the

necessity for a critique of ideologies, a campaign against what used to be called

“false consciousness.” To put it another way: Proudhon’s hermeneutics are also,

like those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As

Pierre Ansart observes, for Proudhon, “people can engage in an action the real

meaning of which they understand not at all or very incompletely” – and indeed,

this is a large part of why knowledge matters at all (144).

3. The aim of Proudhonian hermeneutics is not merely a disjunctive “to each his

own,” as in relativism; indeed, this is what Proudhon repudiates in the strongest

terms as the intellectual corollary to laissez-faire capitalism (1.208). Rather, the

process of interpretation to which he appeals, even as it harnesses the forces of

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“antagonism,” “destroying” all forms of “the absolute,” is social and constructive; it

is the enactment of what he calls “the collective reason” (3.369).

Whereas individual reason tends to project its own preoccupations and

prejudices onto the universe, to create its own forms of “absolutism” (what Lacan

might call primary narcissism), the confrontation of individual reasons with one

another, under certain conditions, can disrupt this tendency toward self-

centeredness; one might say that participants in such dialogues enable one

another to transcend their own limits by forming a newer, wider spheres of

immanence – “collective beings” (2.258). Nor is this collective reason merely a

new name for Rousseau’s “general will,” in which individual wills simply cancel

one another out; nor is it merely the liberal pluralist conception according to

which democracy aggregates individual wills that remain fixed and unchanged;

nor yet is it Hegel’s dialectical Reason, overcoming the contradictions between

the ideas they represent.1 Rather, collective reason is a process by which “the

greatest multiplicity possible,” presenting “the greatest possible contradiction,”

can produce a thought that is both more powerful than and qualitatively distinct

from the sum of its parts (3.270). Immanent critique, the capacity of every being

to transcend itself, is achieved not through some navel-gazing, introspective

meditation, but through association with others.

4. “Collective reason” can be understood as the active or subjective aspect of “the

reason of things” or “the logic of things.” Inherent in the social and historical

relationships linking a “collective,” a group, a set of things is a “reason”: “the

1
If anything, Proudhon’s “collective reason” may prove to have more in common with Marx’s recently
rediscovered concept of a “general intellect,” sketched briefly in his Grundrisse, written the same year as
De la Justice.
 Cohn – 14

reason of things,” i.e., their meaning (De la Justice 1.190). Meaning, for

Proudhon, is social and historical – that is to say, it is immanent to relationships.

The “logic of things” is in this sense roughly equivalent to what Proudhon

formerly called “the reason of the series,” i.e., “the relation between the units”

comprising a “series” (Création 174). Meaning, then, is not immanent to any

supposedly self-contained “unit”; it is immanent to relationships linking “units” –

except in so far as each “unit” is always itself a “unity,” a composite of parts, each

of which presents a similar microcosm of relations, and so on ad infinitum: “the

beings to which we accord individuality do not enjoy it by any title other than that

of the collective beings: they are always groups . . .” That is to say: meaning is

always “collective” for the same reason that being is always “collective” (2.258).

Just as the strength of ten human beings may be multiplied, rather than merely

added, by their working in concert with one another (giving rise to a collective

force), and just as the cognitive abilities of a thousand individuals may be

multiplied, rather than merely added, by their social relationships over time

(giving rise to a collective reason), so meanings are emergent at each level of

composition, an “unforseen resultant” not specified in advance by the

relationships governing the seemingly more fundamental or foundational levels of

being (Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value 52-53; Proudhon,

Création 33). This is why Proudhon’s account of meaning is resolutely anti-

reductivist (and, by the same token, a “dialogical” theory of meaning, like Mikhail

Bakhtin’s).
 Cohn – 15

In questions of literary method, this would entail an absolute disregard for

the boundaries drawn by critics such as Wimsatt and Beardsley, for whom

legitimate critique must always remain immanent to “the text” taken as an

inviolable foundation, to be determined without regard to its relations to other

texts, to authorial intentions, to the contexts in which it is written and read.

Meanings, for Proudhon, are the “unforseen resultant[s]” of each and every one

of these relations, “internal” and “external” alike.

Here, then, is the form of the Proudhonian hermeneutic: an “immanent critique”

that troubles the very boundary between inside and outside, between text and context,

between the one and the many, between self and other, between immanence and

transcendence. This betweenness is what Proudhon calls “Justice.”

 Cohn – 16

Works Cited

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

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Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:

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- - - , and Mark Lance. “Beyond Foundationalism and Its Opposites: Toward a

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