Why is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon virtually unknown?

So, when playing around with the event files of Victoria 2, I noticed something curious, namely that for the event to unlock Socialism to trigger, it's not the Marx that needs to unlock, but Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Virtually everyone has heard of Marx, but until playing V2 I, and, I suspect, most people have never heard of Proudhon.

So, what I got out of his wikipedia article was that he was the first modern anarchist, and he apparently was, among others, a source of inspiration for Marx.

So, why is Proudhon obscure?
 
Not at all unknown to anyone interested in anarchism. Obscure more generally because an anarchist regime is an oxymoron?
 
Because anarchists in general are less well known than Marxists and most unlike Marxists anarchism doesn't actually have a name on it which founded the ideology. It has a lot of various theorists and people who attempted to change the world most of which are fairly unknown.
 
As others have mentioned, he's not unknown if that sort of thing interests you. However, his stuff doesn't get translated out of French so much, so the Anglophone world has heard of him less.

Also, Marx still has believers. Proudhon's ideas made sense at the time but assume a currency maintained by a metallic standard of some sort; the moment you introduce fiat currencies his system goes blooey (technical economist term, that).
 
In Italy (and I assume in France too) he's mentioned in most secondary school textbooks and he is fairly known as a name at least.
 
As others have mentioned, he's not unknown if that sort of thing interests you. However, his stuff doesn't get translated out of French so much, so the Anglophone world has heard of him less.

Also, Marx still has believers. Proudhon's ideas made sense at the time but assume a currency maintained by a metallic standard of some sort; the moment you introduce fiat currencies his system goes blooey (technical economist term, that).

Yes, but some of Marx's ideas are outdated now, too, for the same reason (Marx wrote in the XIX century about XIX century economy). So, Proudhon should have believers, too, or Marx shouldn't have as many believers as he has now.

The real reason, in my opinion, is that while Marxism became the most influential Socialist ideology - almost hegemonically so - no Anarchist ever had his own outlook on Anarchism become the only (more or less) accepted version of Anarchism, and no Anarchist non-state ever survived for more than a decade like the Soviet Union (whose Socialist status, however, is highly debatable) did.
 
Yes, but some of Marx's ideas are outdated now, too, for the same reason (Marx wrote in the XIX century about XIX century economy). So, Proudhon should have believers, too, or Marx shouldn't have as many believers as he has now.

The real reason, in my opinion, is that while Marxism became the most influential Socialist ideology - almost hegemonically so - no Anarchist ever had his own outlook on Anarchism become the only (more or less) accepted version of Anarchism, and no Anarchist non-state ever survived for more than a decade like the Soviet Union (whose Socialist status, however, is highly debatable) did.

Well, surely most Anarchists will not give Proudhon the role most Communists are willing to attribute to Marx as the main source of their social vision, and rightly so: Anarchism took at least as much inspiration from Mihail Bakunin, for example.
I would add that no other far-left thinker had the sort of influence Marx had because, simply put, Marx's thought was good. I am not saying that he was always correct, of course, but that he created an impressive intellectual system that, in the opinion of many people, seemed to be workable. He had put a lot more analytical study in his theories than most other thinkers, and critically, could claim his system was "scientific", as in based upon a scienticaly study of society, history and economy rather the simple desire to improve the conditions of mankind.
This claim appeared well-founded enough to many.
 
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