[What is Property? by P. J. Proudhon]@TWC D-Link bookWhat is Property? PART FIRST 14/38
This right disappears if the public interest requires it; which, being the social interest, is also that of the occupant. What is the right of labor? It is the right to obtain one's share of wealth by fulfilling the required conditions.
It is the right of society, the right of equality. Justice, which is the product of the combination of an idea and an instinct, manifests itself in man as soon as he is capable of feeling, and of forming ideas.
Consequently, it has been regarded as an innate and original sentiment; but this opinion is logically and chronologically false.
But justice, by its composition hybrid--if I may use the term,--justice, born of emotion and intellect combined, seems to me one of the strongest proofs of the unity and simplicity of the ego; the organism being no more capable of producing such a mixture by itself, than are the combined senses of hearing and sight of forming a binary sense, half auditory and half visual. This double nature of justice gives us the definitive basis of all the demonstrations in Chapters II., III., and IV.
On the one hand, the idea of JUSTICE being identical with that of society, and society necessarily implying equality, equality must underlie all the sophisms invented in defence of property; for, since property can be defended only as a just and social institution, and property being inequality, in order to prove that property is in harmony with society, it must be shown that injustice is justice, and that inequality is equality,--a contradiction in terms.
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