Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865) was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists.
According to George Lichtheim, in The Philosophy of Poverty, the "doctrine that emerged went something like this: what people really needed were use values, whereas they were actually being offered exchanges values by the market. These represented thesis and antithesis; Proudhon looked for a synthesis which he termed 'constituted value.' This amounted to saying that goods should be exchanged in proportion to the amount of labour embodied in them - an arrangement that would do away with market fluctuations and at the same time satisfy the requirement of justice."
According to George Lichtheim, in The Philosophy of Poverty, the "doctrine that emerged went something like this: what people really needed were use values, whereas they were actually being offered exchanges values by the market. These represented thesis and antithesis; Proudhon looked for a synthesis which he termed 'constituted value.' This amounted to saying that goods should be exchanged in proportion to the amount of labour embodied in them - an arrangement that would do away with market fluctuations and at the same time satisfy the requirement of justice."
