How did he get it done?

John Jones

Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt by Nicholas Roe
Pimlico, 428 pp, £14.99, January 2005, ISBN 0 7126 0224 0
The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt by Anthony Holden
Little, Brown, 448 pp, £20.00, January 2005, ISBN 0 316 85927 3

Leigh Hunt was a poet, playwright (tragic and comic), masque composer, translator (from Latin, French and Italian), satirist, anthologist, biographer and autobiographer, magazine editor, political journalist, theatre and literary critic, occasional essayist, philosopher of religion. He was also a jailbird and redcoat volunteer, flautist and War Office clerk, dandy (blue frock-coat and orange gloves) and sloven among slovens, chronic debtor and philanthropist, vagrant and on-the-spot accoucheur, free love enthusiast and original of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole.

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Vol. 27 No. 18 · 22 September 2005 » John Jones » How did he get it done? (print version)
Pages 32-33 | 2848 words

Letters

From Willie Thompson

The notion that ‘property is theft’ is not a ‘Marxist rationale’, as John Jones has it (LRB, 22 September). It was coined by Proudhon, and Marx ridiculed it in The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx’s argument was that property cannot be founded on theft because in order to be stolen, it must have been property in the first place.

Willie Thompson
Sunderland

From Giancarlo de Vivo

Willie Thompson says that Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) ridiculed the notion ‘coined by Proudhon’ that ‘property is theft’ (Letters, 6 October). But in 1865 Marx still regarded Proudhon’s 1840 tract Qu’est-ce que la propriété? as ‘an epoch-making book’, praising its ‘provoking audacity’ and the ‘powerful revolutionary impulse’ it gave on its appearance. It’s true that Marx did not endorse Proudhon’s analysis of bourgeois property relations; he also noted that the slogan ‘property is theft’ had been coined not by Proudhon, but by the bourgeois revolutionary Brissot de Warville in 1782, and stressed the ‘petty bourgeois’ character of Proudhon’s socialism. The Poverty of Philosophy was written in response to another of Proudhon’s works, Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère (1846), and certainly ridiculed him – but for having belatedly adopted a Utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory of value, following a group of writers who are now known as the ‘Ricardian Socialists’.

Giancarlo de Vivo
Naples