Dissolving the State

I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: an excerpt from chapter 10 of Gustave de Molinari’s 1888 Political Evolution and the Revolution. This extract includes the following passage, whose wording – despite its dismissive reference to “anarchists” – is clearly inspired by Proudhon’s call for the “absorption” and “dissolution” of the state “in the economic organism”:

Thus it is that, instead of absorbing the organism of society according to the revolutionary and communist conception, the municipality and the State are dissolved into this organism. … The future thus belongs neither to the absorption of society by the State, as the communists and collectivists suppose, nor to the suppression of the State, as the anarchists and nihilists dream, but to the diffusion of the State within society.

But if Molinari in 1888 was borrowing without acknowledgment from Proudhon’s 1851 General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon’s provisions for private police and courts in that work may in turn be borrowing without acknowledgment from Molinari’s 1849 Soirées and “The Production of Security.” Once again, the so-called “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of individualist anarchism prove to be intertwined.