[PEN-L:32480] QUERY: Proudhon, Marx, universal freedom

[david zimmerman <dazimmerman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like some titles that will familiarize me with the French socialists
and the ideas mocked by Marx in the following passage from the Grundrisse.
(I'm not an economic historian.) My specific questions are below.

On p. 248 of the Penguin edition, Marx mocks "the foolishness of those
socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the
realization of the ideals of *bourgeois* society articulated by the French
revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are
*originally* (in time) or *essentially* (in their adequate form) a system
of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by
money, capital, etc."

The editor's note points to Marx's critique of Proudhon's doctrine of
exchange value in *Poverty of Philosophy*. I'm interested in knowing more
about Proudhon's notion that abstract exchange signifies (produces?)
"universal freedom and equality." Please recommend titles of books or
articles that might introduce me to the history and critique of Proudhon's
idea, including any modern restatements of it. When did it emerge? What
relation did it stand to enlightenment political thought? to revolutionary
thought? What is the relation between the formal equivalence of political
subjects (citizens) and the formal equivalence of economic agents
(exchangers)? What are the most trenchant statements and critiques of this
relation?

I'm interested because I'm studying 19th-c. American fiction writers who
connected the formal, abstract equivalence among citizens (white men, to be
sure) with the formal, abstract equivalence of exchanged commodities and of
exchangers (including slaves). Specifically, I'm studying how notions of
embodiment and race play into this odd equation of citizenship and exchange
equivalence.


David Zimmerman
English Dept.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
dazimmerman@xxxxxxxx