capitalism

402 Psychiatry
individualist anarchist journal Liberty. Tucker noted that
Liberty was “brought into existence almost as a direct consequence
of the teachings of Proudhon” and “lives principally
to emphasize and spread them.” Tucker translated and
published a number of Proudhon’s writings, including What
Is Property? arguably his best-known book, although
Tucker considered Proudhon’s greatest work to be The
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,
which was translated into English by John Beverley
Robinson in 1923. It contains one of the most radical and
stirring critiques of the state ever penned. Proudhon wrote:
To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied
upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated,
preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured,
commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor
the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to
be, at every operation, every transaction, noted, registered,
enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed,
licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed,
corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility,
and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under
contribution, trained, ransacked, exploited, monopolized,
extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest
resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed,
fined despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed,
choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot,
deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all,
mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government;
that is its justice; that is its morality.
Proudhon was not a systematic thinker. Indeed, his economics,
like those of most anarchists of the 19th and early
20th centuries, were confused. He believed in the labor theory
of value and argued against the payment of interest on
money. (On the latter issue, he debated the great classical
liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat, a debate that was translated
by Tucker and published in the Irish World of New
York.) He favored the creation of a “People’s Bank,” which
would provide credit at cost, an idea later popularized both
by Tucker and by the American anarchist William B.
Greene. In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph
Schumpeter wrote that Proudhon’s arguments were
“absurd,” but “instead of inferring from this that there is
something wrong with his methods, [he] infers that there
must be something wrong with the object of his research so
that his mistakes are, with the utmost confidence, promulgated
as results.”
Proudhon considered himself a socialist, although Marx
and his followers chastised him as “petty bourgeois” for his
limited defense of private property, his opposition to strikes
and armed revolution, and his general ambivalence toward
class conflict. Indeed, although libertarians today will find
many of Proudhon’s specific arguments foreign, they will
recognize in his writings a deep and instinctual love of liberty
that is certainly not present in the works of contemporary
state socialists such as Marx, nor even other continental
anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.
Proudhon was an individualist—a libertarian—first and a
socialist second.
See also Anarchism; Marxism; Private Property; Socialism;
Tucker, Benjamin R.
Further Readings
Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988.
Edwards, Stewart, ed., and Elizabeth Fraser, trans. Selected Writings
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1969.
Ritter, Alan. The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Woodcock, George. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography. London:
Routledge, 1956.
PSYCHIATRY
Psychiatry appears at first to be like any other medical specialty,
but on closer examination it deviates significantly
from the practice of “normal” medicine, such as orthopedics
or urology. Normal physicians are trained in explaining
the workings of the body and in what to do if a disease
is identified. Psychologists are trained in the study of
mental processes and behavior, whereas psychiatrists are
trained in mental health and mental disease. Controversy
arises over to whom “mental illness” belongs, whether to
psychologists or psychiatrists. Economic interest plays no
small part in turf wars of this sort: Psychology, psychiatry,
and medicine are trade professions, and, like all businesses,
the seller seeks to convince consumers to buy his product
rather than that of his competitor.
Politically speaking, people supporting state-sanctioned
psychiatric practices such as involuntary commitment to
mental hospitals and the insanity defense tend to be on the
left, favoring a therapeutic (paternalistic) state. Civil libertarians
have been at times conspicuously silent regarding
these practices, although some have argued that liberty is
for mentally competent people only. Psychiatrist Thomas
Szasz is the lone exception. As a staunch defender of classical
liberalism and a critic of state entanglement with psychiatry,
he has consistently held that mental illness is a
metaphor and coercive psychiatric practices are inconsistent
with libertarian principles and the rule of law. His seminal
work, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), changed the
world of psychiatry forever. To this day, people still blame
“deinstitutionalization” and “the problem of the homeless
AS