What Is Property?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's 1840 treatise, published in French, opening with the question of its own title and answering that property, meaning the legal right to draw rent, interest or profit from a holding without working it oneself, is theft, while possession earned through use and labor is legitimate. The book is generally credited as the founding statement of anarchism as a self-named political philosophy and of the mutualist tradition within it.