LUCIANO AMODIO

Guerra e pace in Proudhon

N. 148

Summary - La Guerre et la Paix (1861) is a book by Proudhon, both theoretical and political. Theoretically Proudhon interlaces Hobbesian, Vichian and Hegelian motives to construct a philosophy of history based on the dynamism of the principle of force elevated to right and on war as its moment of truth. Proudhon revalues, against the Napoleonic wars and the Clausewitzian idea of the absolute war, the eighteenth century war "dans les formes", strictly "political", seeing its sense in the civilizing and assimilating capacity of the empires and of the great powers. Politically this leads to the exaltation of the "European balance" attained with the Treaties of the Congress of Vienna and threatened by the democratic-bourgeois nationalism of those days, particularly Italian and Polish. Proudhon regards the European balance of the time (in which the impulses of rapacity found the most efficacious outlet in the possibilities of internal robbery offered by statalism) as apt to consolidate an "armed peace" that will have to prepare in its turn the ground for an effective "peace revolution" through the substitution, by now ripe, of the right of force with the economic right, in which only the existential and malefic root of the war, pauperism (degradation of that poverty which is normal condition of the civilized man), can be taken away, though saving its dialectic-progressive element, antagonism.