In this chapter I will set out a general introduction to the ethical foundations of Proudhon's anarchism. I will contextualise it within Proudhon's own intellectual development, the arguments his contemporaries and near contemporaries were making, and against the socio-historical background of late-nineteenth-century France. This aspect of his thought has not been widely discussed in the English language literature (Harbold, 1969; Hoffman, 1972), leading to little understanding of how the central animating concept of Proudhon's life's work — justice — fits into his economic theory. This is what I will do here. In this way I aim to illustrate why Proudhon believed that people's workplaces and economic futures were not things to be gambled with by distant individuals on frenetic markets or governed according to the (un)informed whim of politicians. He called for an approach to property that undermined the moral justification for private title and buttressed a theory of democratic worker control. By locating democracy at the heart of people's lives — at their place of work — Proudhon argued that civic participation would gain far fuller expression. Since it is in our places of work that we feel our rights and duties most keenly, the extension of the republican impulse into this domain of life was absolutely crucial to Proudhon and a moral imperative for the realisation of social justice.