It has been conjectured, [Footnote:  Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du progres, pp. 247-8 (1908).] and seems probable enough, that de Tocqueville’s book was one of the influences which wrought upon the mind of Proudhon.  The speculations of this remarkable man, who, like Saint-Simon and Comte, sought to found a new science of society, attracted general attention in the middle of the century. [Footnote:  Compare the appreciation by Weill in Histoire du mouvement social en France 1852-1910 (1911, ed. 2), p. 41:  “Le grande ecrivain revolutionnaire et anarchiste n’etait au fond ni un revolutionnaire ni un anarchiste, mais un reformateur pratique et modere qui a fait illusion par le ton vibrant de ses pamphlets centre la societe capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that “property is theft,” his gospel of “anarchy,” and the defiant, precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an impression that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary.  But when his ideas are studied in their context and translated into sober language, they are not so unreasonable.  Notwithstanding his communistic theory of property and his ideal of equality, he was a strong individualist.  He held that the future of civilisation depends on the energy of individuals, that liberty is a condition of its advance, and that the end to be kept in view is the establishment of justice, which means equality.  He saw the difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete equality, but hoped that the incompatibility would be overcome by a gradual reduction of the natural differences in men’s capacities.  He said, “I am an anarchist,” but his anarchy only meant that the time would come when government would be superfluous, when every human being could be trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining authority or external sanctions.  Nor was he a Utopian.  He comprehended that such a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and he condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that a millennium might be realised immediately by a change of organisation.

He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities are penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as “the railway of liberty”; and his radical criticism on current social theories, whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not take Progress seriously though they invoked it.

“What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and end, their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my originality as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress resolutely, irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute.  All that I have ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have written, denied or affirmed in the name of one unique idea, Progress.  My adversaries, on the other hand, are all partisans of the Absolute, in omni GENERE, CASU, et NUMERO, to use the phrase of Sganarelle.” [Footnote:  Philosophie du progres, Premiere lettre (1851).]