Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (January 5, 1809 - January 18, 1865) was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who was the first person to publicly call himself an anarchist.
Widely considered the “father of anarchism,” Proudhon is best remembered for his 1840 work What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government.
In this seminal thesis, Proudhon asks the question,
“What is property?” to which he memorably answers “it is robbery!”
Based on the foundational principle of mutual aid, Proudhon’s philosophy of anarchism called for a cooperative society in which self-governed individuals or groups freely shared the goods and services they produced. These “producers” were able to borrow credit to start new businesses from a non-profit-making “Bank of the People.”
While Proudhon’s theory rejected large-scale ownership of private property, in the form of wealth, as a form of theft, it allowed individuals to own enough property to maintain their livelihoods and independence. As his theories of anarchism evolved to combine elements of pure socialism with limited capitalism, Proudhon came to state that as a safeguard against government control, “Property is liberty.”
Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/anarchy-definition-and-examples-5105250