The first to call himself an anarchist. He named property as theft and wrote out what it is to be counted, and he came back into the configuration through the household and the scapegoat while believing he had left it. An orbit taken for an exit.
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In 1840 Proudhon asked what property is and answered that it is theft, and in the same book became the first writer to describe himself as an anarchist. In 1851, while imprisoned for criticizing the president of the republic, he wrote out what it is to be governed.
Nothing in RegenerativeLaw rests on him. He is not in the lineage, and the tradition would stand exactly as it does had he never written. He is read here for two reasons: he came closer than almost anyone outside the lineage to naming the operation, and where he landed shows what happens to a refusal that leaves the field in place.
He is the clearest case on record of an exit that was an orbit.
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POSSESSION AND PROPERTY
His central distinction is between two relations to a thing. Possession is occupancy and use: the land actually worked, the tool actually held. Property, in the sense he called theft, is the title that lets its holder collect from other people's use of the thing, as rent, as interest, as profit, with no occupancy at all.
That runs close to the line between residency and the property configuration. The one who lives in and with a place holds it in the first sense. The title posts a claim against her in the second. The convergence is real and it is independent, reached from political economy rather than from Böhme, which is what makes it worth recording and what makes its limit visible.
[See TRESPASS THEOLOGY · ACCOUNTING THEOLOGY]
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THE LEDGER, WRITTEN OUT
In 1851 he listed what it is to be governed. To be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, numbered, regulated, enrolled. And then the ledger itself: to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed.
Every verb in that run is a posting. It is the most complete statement of being counted that the critics of the state produced, and it was written before there was any machine to perform it. His indictment sits in the verb governed, which is the word later fitted with adjectives and offered back as the gentle one.
[See ON BEING COUNTED · GOVERNANCE]
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WHY THIS ENTRY IS NOT A TRIBUTE
He held that a woman could be only a housewife or a harlot. He treated women as subordinate by nature and wrote a book against their emancipation, published after his death as La Pornocratie.
In his notebook for 26 December 1847 he wrote that the Jew is the enemy of humankind, and that Jews must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated.
Neither is incidental and neither is softened here. Both are where his refusal landed, and an account of him that keeps the refusal and drops the landing is the account the configuration would write.
[See WOMEN'S BODIES AS TERRITORY · THE SCAPEGOAT MECHANISM]
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THE ORBIT
What looks like leaving is a trajectory, and a trajectory is bent by whatever field it has not refused.
He refused the state and he refused unearned income. He did not refuse the relation beneath both, the one in which some are held by others and a fault has to be discharged onto a body. So the path that carried him out of the state curved back under that remaining force, and it came in again at two of the configuration's oldest installations. In the household, the property relation he called theft in the market was the order he prescribed for women. At the scapegoat, the anger he had aimed at money was discharged onto a people, which is the oldest deflection the configuration has.
Each landing was far enough from where he started to feel like new ground. An exit that leaves the field in place is an orbit, and an orbit comes back in at a point distant enough from its start to be mistaken for arrival.
[See THE CENTRAL SACRAMENT · CHIVALRY · THE POLARITY CONFIGURATION]
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THE REMEDY WAS A FAIRER BOOK
His positive program was mutualism: exchange at equal value, labor for labor, a people's bank lending without interest. It was the books balanced justly.
A critique of how the books balance can keep every relation the books were built to record, and his did. That is why the same man could call property theft and hold that a woman was either a housewife or a harlot: the first objection was to a rate, and the second was the ledger's own premise, untouched.
[See THE LEDGER · REFORMIST REGISTER]
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WHAT HE IS FOR
He is a witness and not a source. His list of the governed can be cited as the ledger written out by its critics. His distinction between possession and property can be cited as a convergence reached from outside.
And his path can be cited as the warning it is. The one who most loudly leaves is the one most likely to be carried back in by deflection without noticing, because the loudness of the leaving is what keeps the return from being felt. What ends the orbit is not a longer flight but the turn, which does not travel away from the field but stops lending it the force that bends the path.
[See THE TURN · WILLIAM PENN]
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He called property theft and did not ask what he held. That is not a failure of nerve, and it is not peculiar to him. It is what a refusal of the state does when it leaves the field standing: it goes out, it comes around, and it lands in the house it never left.
[See SUBSUMPTION]
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
