Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 6

These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a sequence of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects of the apparent movement, and they have an equal value with that of all other empirical concepts. Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which they arise, they persist until they are reduced and eliminated by a new experience, or until they are absorbed by a conception more general, genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it not necessary that in the empirical a.n.a.lysis and in the immediate study of the causes and the effects of certain definite phenomena, for example the phenomena of heat, the mind should first stop at this presumption and this persuasion, that it could and should attribute them to a subject, which if it was never for any physicist a true and substantial ent.i.ty, was certainly considered as a definite and specific force, namely, heat. Now we see that at a given moment, as a result of new experiences, this heat is resolved in given conditions into a certain quant.i.ty of motion. Still further, our thought is now on the way toward resolving all these physical factors into the flux of one universal energy, in which the hypotheses of the atoms, in the extent to which it is necessary, loses all residue of metaphysical survival.

Was it not inevitable, as a first step of knowledge in what concerns the problem of life, to spend a considerable time in the separate study of the organs and to reduce them to systems? Without this anatomy, which seems too material and too gross, no progress in these studies would have been possible; and nevertheless, above the unknown genesis and co-ordination of such an a.n.a.lytic multiplicity, there were evolving, uncertain and vague, the generic conceptions of life, soul, etc. In these mental creations have long been seen that biological unity which has finally found its object in the certain beginning of the cell and in its _processus_ of immanent multiplication.

More difficult certainly was the way which the thought had to traverse to reconstruct the genesis of all the facts of psychic life, from the most elementary successions up to the most complex derived products. Not only for reasons of theoretical difficulties, but in consequence of popular prejudices, the unity and continuity of psychic phenomena appeared, up to the time of Herbart, as separated and divided into so many factors, faculties of the soul.

The interpretation of the historico-social _processus_ met the same difficulties; it also was obliged to stop at first in the provisional view of factors. And that being so, it is easy for us now to find again the first origin of that opinion in the necessity that the historians have of finding in the facts that they relate with more or less artistic talent and in different professional views, certain points of immediate orientation, such as may be offered by the study of the apparent movement of human events.

But in this apparent movement, there are the elements of a more exact view. These concurrent factors, which abstract thought conceives and then isolates, have never been seen acting each for itself. On the contrary, they act in such a manner that it gives birth to the concept of reciprocal action. Moreover, these factors themselves arise at a given moment, and it is not until later that they acquired that physiognomy which they have in the particular narration. This State, it is well known, arose at a given moment. As for every rule of law, it may either be remembered or conjectured that it went into effect under such or such circ.u.mstances. As for many customs, it may be remembered that they were introduced at a given moment; and the simplest comparisons of the facts in different times or different places would show how society, as a whole, and in its character of being an aggregation of different cla.s.ses, had taken and took continuously various forms.

The reciprocal action of the different factors, without which not even the simplest narration would be possible, like the more or less exact information upon the origins and the variations of the factors themselves, called for research and thought more than did the constructive narration of those great historians who are real artists.

And, in effect, the problems which arise spontaneously from the data of history, combined with other theoretical elements, gave birth to the different so-called practical disciplines, which in a more or less rapid fashion and with varying success, have developed from the ancients up to our days, from ethics to the philosophy of law, from politics to sociology, from law to economics.

Now with the rise and formation of so many disciplines, through the inevitable division of labor, _points of view_ have been multiplied out of all proportion. It is certain that for the first and immediate a.n.a.lysis of the multiple aspects of the social _complexus_, a long labor of partial abstraction was necessary: which has always inevitably resulted in one-sided views. This can be shown, in a clearer and more evident manner than for any other domain, in that of law and its various generalizations, including the philosophy of law. By reason of these abstractions, which are inevitable in particular and empirical a.n.a.lysis, and by the effect of the division of labor, the different sides and different manifestations of the social _complexus_ were, from time to time, fixed and stratified in general conceptions and categories. The works, the effects, the emanations, the effusions of human activity,--law, economic forms, principles of conduct, etc.,--were, so to speak, translated and transformed into laws, into imperatives and into principles which remained placed above man himself.

And from time to time it has been necessary to discover anew this simple truth: that the only permanent and sure fact, that is to say, the only datum from which departs and to which returns every practical detail of discipline, is men grouped in a determined social form by means of determined connections. The different a.n.a.lytical disciplines, which ill.u.s.trate the facts that develop in history, have finally given rise to the need of a common and general social science, which renders possible the unification of the historic _processus_, and the materialistic doctrine marks precisely the final term, the apex of this unification.

But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in the preliminary and lateral a.n.a.lysis of complex facts. To the methodical division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the ma.s.s of knowledge pa.s.sed into the sieve, systematized, without which social history would always be wandering in a purely abstract domain, in questions of form and terminology. The separate study of the historico-social factors has served, like any other empirical study which does not transcend the apparent movement of things, to improve the instrument of observation and to permit us to find again in the facts themselves, which have been artificially abstracted, the keystones which bind them into the social _complexus_. The different disciplines which are considered as isolated and independent in the hypotheses of the concurrent factors in the formation of history, both by reason of the degree of development which they have reached, the materials which they have gathered, and the methods which they have elaborated, have to-day become quite indispensable for us, if one desires to reconstruct any portion out of past times. Where would our historic science be without the one-sidedness of philology, which is the fundamental instrument of all research, and where should we have found the guiding thread of a history of juridical inst.i.tutions, which returns again from itself to so many other facts and to so many other combinations, without the obstinate faith of the Romanists in the universal excellence of the Roman law, which engendered with generalized law and with the philosophy of law so many problems which serve as points of departure for sociology?

It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many speak, and which are mentioned in so many works, indicate something which is much less than the truth, but much more than simple error, in the ordinary sense of a blunder, of an illusion. They are the necessary product of a knowledge which is in the course of development and formation. They arise from the necessity of finding a point of departure in the confused spectacle which human events present to him who wishes to narrate them; and they serve thenceforth, so to speak, as a t.i.tle, category or index to that inevitable division of labor, by the extension of which the historico-social material has, up to this time, been theoretically elaborated. In this domain of knowledge, as well as in that of the natural sciences, the unity of real principle and the unity of formal treatment are never found at the first start, but only after a long and troublous road. So that again from this point of view the a.n.a.logy affirmed by Engels between the discovery of historical materialism and that of the conservation of energy appears to us excellent.

The provisional orientation, according to the convenient system of what are called factors, may, under given circ.u.mstances, be useful also to us who profess an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation, if we do not wish simply to rest in the domain of theory, but wish to ill.u.s.trate, through personal research, a definite period of history. As in that case we must proceed to direct and detailed research, we must first of all follow the groups of facts that seem pre-eminent, independent, or detached in the aspects of immediate experience. We should not imagine, in fact, that the unitary principle so well established, at which we have arrived in the general conception of history, may, like a talisman, act always and at first sight, as an infallible method of resolving into simple elements the immense area and the complicated gearing of society. The underlying economic structure, which determines all the rest, is not a simple mechanism whence emerge, as immediate, automatic and mechanical effects, inst.i.tutions, laws, customs, thoughts, sentiments, ideologies. From this substructure to all the rest, the process of derivation and of mediation is very complicated, often subtile, tortuous and not always legible.

The social organization is, as we already know, constantly unstable, although that does not seem evident to every one, except at the time when the instability enters upon that acute period which is called a revolution. This instability, with the constant struggles in the bosom of that same organized society, excludes the possibility for men coming to an agreement which might involve a new start at living an animal life. It is the antagonisms which are the princ.i.p.al cause of progress (Marx). But it is equally true, notwithstanding, that in this unstable organization, in which is given to us the inevitable form of domination and subjection, intelligence is always developed not only unequally, but quite imperfectly, incongruously and partially. There has been and there is still in society what we may call a hierarchy of intelligence, sentiments and conceptions. To suppose that men, always and in all cases, have had an approximately clear consciousness of their own situation, and of what was the most rational thing to do, is to suppose the improbable and, indeed, the unreal.

Forms of law, political acts and attempts at social organization were, and they still are, sometimes fortunate, sometimes mistaken, that is to say, disproportionate and unsuitable. History is full of errors; and this means that if all was necessary, granted the relative intelligence of those who have to solve a difficulty or to find a solution for a given problem, etc., if everything in it has a sufficient reason, yet everything in it was not reasonable, in the sense which the optimists give to this word. To state it more fully, the determined causes of all changes, that is to say the modified economic conditions, have ended and end by causing to be found, sometimes through tortuous ways, the suitable forms of law, the appropriate political orders and the more or less perfect means of social adjustment. But it must not be thought that the instinctive wisdom of the reasoning animal has been manifested, or is manifested, definitely and simply, in the complete and clear understanding of all situations, and that we have left only the very simple task of following the deductive road from the economic situation to all the rest. Ignorance--which, in its turn, may be explained--is an important reason for the manner in which history is made; and, to ignorance we must add the brutishness which is never completely subdued and all the pa.s.sions, and all the injustices, and the various forms of corruption, which were and are the necessary product of a society organized in such a way, that the domination of man over man in it is inevitable, and that from this domination falsehood, hypocrisy, presumption and baseness were and are inseparable. We may, without being utopians, but simply because we are critical communists, foresee, as we do in fact foresee, the coming of a society which, developing from the present society and from its very contrasts by the laws inherent in its historic development, will end in an a.s.sociation without cla.s.s antagonisms; which will have for its consequence that regulated production will eliminate from life the element of chance which, thus far, has been revealed in history as a multiform cause of accidents and incidents. But that is the future, and it is neither the present nor the past. If we propose to ourselves, on the contrary, to penetrate into the historic events which have developed up to our own times, by taking, as we do, for a guiding thread the variations of the forms of the underlying economic structure up to the simplest datum in the variations of the tool of production, we must become fully conscious of the difficulty of the problem which we are setting ourselves: because here we have not merely to open our eyes and behold, but to make a supreme effort of thought, with the aim of triumphing over the multiform spectacle of immediate experience to reduce its elements into a genetic series. That is why I said that, in particular investigations, we must ourselves start from those groups of apparently isolated facts, and from this heterogeneous ma.s.s, in a word, from that empirical study, whence arose the belief in factors, which afterwards became a semi-doctrine.

It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential difficulties by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after all of a purely a.n.a.logical value, of the so-called social organism. It was necessary too that the mind should pa.s.s through even this hypothesis, which so shortly became phraseology pure and simple. It indeed prepares the way for the comprehension of the historic movement as springing from the laws immanent in society itself, and thereby excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational. But the metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical and circ.u.mstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete development of economic materialism.

VII.

Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that period of human development, in which were realized the great politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch which, considered in its political forms, is called liberal, but which, considered in its basis, by reason of the domination of capital over the proletarian ma.s.s, is the epoch of anarchical production. The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic a.s.sertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the determined effects. The materialistic conception marks the culminating point of this new tendency in the investigation of the historic-social laws, in so far as it is not a particular case of a generic sociology, or of a generic philosophy of the State, of law, and of history, but the solution of all doubts and all uncertainties which accompany the other forms of philosophizing upon human affairs, and the beginning of their integral interpretation.

It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by certain shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who first defined this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it ever occur to any of their disciples, even of the strictest school, to represent these two thinkers as miracle-workers? What is more, if we wish to go on a search after the premises of the logical creation of Marx and Engels, it will not suffice to stop at those who are called the precursors of socialism, Saint-Simon for example, and his predecessors, or the philosophers, particularly Hegel, or the economists who had laid bare the anatomy of the society which produces commodities; we must go back to the very formation of modern society, and then at last declare triumphantly that the theory is a plagiarism from the things that it explains.

The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great social upheaval took place in France. These things, _mutatis mutandis_, have subsequently been reproduced, in various combinations and in milder forms, throughout the whole civilized world. And what else is our thought at bottom if not the conscious and systematic complement of experience, and what is this last if not the reflection and the mental elaboration of the things and the processes which arise and unfold either outside our volition, or through the work of our activity; and what is genius but the individualized, derived and acute form of thought, which arises through the suggestion of experience, in many men of the same epoch, but which remains in most of them fragmentary, incomplete, uncertain, wavering and partial?

Ideas do not fall from heaven; and what is more, like the other products of human activity, they are formed in given circ.u.mstances, in the precise fullness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought, of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development, is to disfigure their nature and their meaning.

To show how the materialistic conception of history arises precisely in given conditions, not as a personal and tentative opinion of two writers, but as the new conquest of thought by the inevitable suggestion of a new world which is in process of birth, that is to say the proletarian revolution, that was the object of my first essay, "In Memory of the Communist Manifesto." That is, to repeat, a new historic situation found its complement in its appropriate mental instrument.

To imagine now that this intellectual production might have been realized at any time and at any place, would be to take absurdity for the ruling principle in research. To transport ideas arbitrarily from the basis and the historic conditions in which they arise to any other basis whatever, is like taking the irrational for the basis of reasoning. Why should one not fancy equally that the ancient city, in which arose Greek art and science and Roman law, remaining all the while an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at the same time acquire and develop all the conditions of modern technique? Why not believe that the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the while on its inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the world market without the conditions of unlimited compet.i.tion, which actually began by its destruction and negation? Why not imagine a fief which, remaining a fief all the while, should become a factory producing commodities exclusively? Why could not Michel de Lando have written the Communist Manifesto? Why could we not also believe that the discoveries of modern science could have proceeded from the brains of men of no matter what other time and place, that is to say, before determined conditions had given rise to determined needs, and before repeated and acc.u.mulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of these needs?

Our doctrine a.s.sumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in the antagonisms of compet.i.tion, that society which as a first condition and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes capitalist acc.u.mulation in the form of private property; that society which continually produces and reproduces proletarians, and which if it is to perpetuate itself, must incessantly revolutionize its tools, and with them the State and its legal gearings. This society, which, by the very laws of its movement, has laid bare its own anatomy, produces by its reaction the materialistic conception. Even as it has produced in socialism its positive negation, so it has engendered in the new historic doctrine its ideal negation. If history is the product, not arbitrary, but necessary and normal, of men in so far as they are developing, and if they are developing in so far as they are making social experiments, and if they are experimenting in so far as they are making improvements in their labor, which acc.u.mulate and preserve products and results, the phase of development in which we live cannot be the last and final phase, and the contrasts which are intimately bound to it and inherent in it are the productive forces of new conditions. And this is how the period of the great economic and political revolutions of these last two centuries has ripened in the mind these two concepts: the immanence and constancy of the _processus_ in historic facts, and the materialist doctrine, which is at bottom the objective theory of social revolutions.

It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent that we find their doc.u.ments in writers, is something always very instructive, and serving especially to add to our critical knowledge of our concepts as of our ways of thinking. Such a return of the mind over its historic premises, when it does not lead us astray into the empiricism of a boundless erudition, and does not lead us to set up hastily vain a.n.a.logies, serves without any doubt to give suppleness and a persuasive force to the forms of our scientific activity. In the sum of our science we find again, in fact and through the approximative continuity of tradition, the excellence of all that has been found, conceived and proved, not only in modern times but even in ancient Greece, where first begins precisely and in a definite fashion for the human race the orderly development of conscious, reflective and methodical thought. It would be impossible to take a single step in scientific research without employing means long ago found and tried, such for example as logic and mathematics. To think otherwise would be to a.s.sume that each generation must begin over again all the work done since the childhood of humanity.

But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always drifting between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of grasping intellectually the new world in process of birth, to arrive at the precise a.n.a.lysis of the last elements from which society results, and which the incomparable genius of Aristotle did not see, and did not understand beyond the limits within which pa.s.ses the life of the typical citizen.

The investigation of the social structure, considered in its manners of origin and _processus_, became active and penetrating and took on multiform aspects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when economics took shape and when under the different names of "Natural Rights," "The Spirit of the Laws," or "The Social Contract," it was attempted to resolve into causes, into factors and into logical and psychological data, the multiform and often obscure spectacle of a life in which was preparing the greatest revolution ever known. These doctrines, whatever may have been the subjective intention and spirit of the authors--as in the contrasting cases of the conservative Hobbes and the proletarian Rousseau--were all revolutionary in their substance and their effects. Under all of them is always found, as a stimulus and motive, the material and moral needs of a new age, which, by reason of historic conditions, were those of the bourgeoisie. Thus it was necessary to wage war in the name of liberty upon tradition, the Church, privileges, fixed cla.s.ses, that is to say, the orders and conditions, and consequently upon the State which was or appeared to be their author, and then upon the special privileges of commerce, the arts, labor and science. And man was studied in an abstract fashion, that is to say, individuals taken separately, emanc.i.p.ated and delivered by a logical abstraction from their historic connection and from every social necessity: in the mind of many the concept of society was reduced to atoms, and it even seemed natural to the greatest number to believe that society is only the sum of the individuals composing it. The abstract categories of individual psychology sufficed for the explanation of all human facts; and this is how in all these systems, nothing is spoken of but fear, self-love, egoism, voluntary obedience, tendency toward happiness, the original goodness of man, the freedom of contract and of the moral consciousness, and of the moral instinct or sense, and also many other similar abstract and generic things, as if they were sufficient to explain history, and to create a new history out of its fragments.

By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its horror at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was traditional and had been organized for centuries, and the presentiment of a renovation of all human life, finally produced a total eclipse of the ideas of historic necessity and social necessity, that is to say, of those ideas which, barely indicated by the ancient philosophers, and so developed in our century, had at this period of revolutionary rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico, Montesquieu, and, in part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave birth to a literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found the reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called individualism. Later some have thought they saw in this word the expression of a permanent fact in human nature, which especially might serve as a decisive argument against socialism.

A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital, however produced, tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and, breaking every bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect master of society, as, in fact, it has become in the greater part of the world; hence it resulted, that apart from all forms of modern misery and the new hierarchy in which we live, there was realized the most acute ant.i.thesis of all history, that is to say, the existing anarchy of production in the whole of society, and an iron despotism in the mode of production in each workshop and each factory! And the thinkers, the philosophers, the economists and the popularizers of the eighteenth century saw nothing but liberty and equality! All reasoned in the same way; all started from the same premises, which brought them to conclude that liberty must be obtained from a government of pure administration, or that they were democrats or even communists. The approaching reign of liberty was before the eyes of all as a certain event, provided they could suppress the bonds and fetters which forced ignorance and the despotism of church and state had imposed upon men, good by nature.

These fetters did not appear to be conditions and boundaries within which men were found by the laws of their development, and by the effect of the antagonistic and thus uncertain and tortuous movement of history, but simply obstacles from which the methodical use of reason was to deliver us. In this idealism, which reached its culminating point in certain heroes of the French Revolution, is the seed of a limitless faith in the certain progress of the whole human race. For the first time, the concept of humanity appeared in all its branches, unmingled with religious ideas or hypotheses. The boldest of these idealists were the extreme materialists, because, denying every religious fiction, they a.s.signed this earth as a certain domain to the necessity of happiness provided that reason might open the way.

Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson of things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical upheaval followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be contrary to all expectations; and this at first produced a profound discouragement among the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave rise to the desire and the need of new investigations. We know that Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom operated precisely at the beginning of the century, in the exclusive forms of the ideas of premature genius, the reaction against the immediate results of the politico-economic revolution, arose resolutely, the first against the jurists, and the second against the economists.

In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been characteristic of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles, graver and more painful, had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for all was not realized, society remained in its political form as it had been before, an organization of inequalities. It must be, then, that society is something autonomous, innate, a complex automaton of relations and conditions, which defies the subjective good intentions of each of the members who compose it, and which escapes from the illusions and the designs of the idealists. It thus follows a course of its own from which we may infer certain laws of process and development, but does not suffer us to impose laws upon it. By this transformation in the minds of men, the nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of historic science and of sociology.

The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all domains of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been discovered, and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of myths. The embryonic traces of pre-history have been sought out, and, for the first time, the processes of political and legal forms have been arranged into a series. The nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of sociology in the person of Saint Simon, in whom, as happens with the self-taught precursors of genius, we find confused together the germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In this aspect the materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result which is the complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result and a complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and of all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from complex conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by the direct suggestion of new dynamic experience.

The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown themselves to be the directing power of social life. The great industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social cla.s.ses, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many cla.s.ses of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen the new cities rise around factories and create around their circ.u.mference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of history as a sinister ill.u.s.tration of a society of equals. And who did not feel--even if that had not been announced in the so-called doctrine of the Rev. Malthus--that the number of guests which this mode of economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of hands, is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation and becomes a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid and violent economic transformation which was accomplished openly in England had succeeded there, because that country had been able to build up for itself, as compared with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then unknown, and because to maintain this monopoly an unscrupulous policy had been rendered necessary, and that permitted all, for one happy moment, to translate into prose the ideological myth of the state, which was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the people.

This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the _laudatores temporis acti_ from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology, which had acc.u.mulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into contact with the facts which the rapid events of so intensive a _processus_ imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling.

Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never reached the proletarians, either because these had no political consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate and often salutary criticism of economics--a one-sided criticism, indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception.

All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is society, itself, which, by the ant.i.thetic conditions of the contrasts upon which it rests, engenders from itself, within itself, the contradiction, and finally triumphs over this by its pa.s.sage into a new form. The solution of the existing ant.i.theses is the proletariat, which the proletarians themselves know or do not know. Even as their misery has become the condition of present society, so in their misery is the justification of the new proletarian revolution. It is in this pa.s.sage from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the self-criticism exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its own _processus_--it is in this only that the dialectic of history consists, which Marx and Engels, in so far as they were materialists, drew from the idealism of Hegel. But on the final reckoning it matters little whether the literary men, who knew no other meaning for dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry nor whether the doctors and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge of particular facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated forms of thought.

But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been luminously ill.u.s.trated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on the stage, all the antagonistic forces of modern society, because this society has developed on the ruins of previous forms, and because, in so short a time and with so hasty a march, it has traversed the phases of its birth and its establishment.

The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the pa.s.sage from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old cla.s.ses of the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same time of new cla.s.ses, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its own work the reflex consciousness of its movement.

The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government, an extraordinary ma.s.s of economic resources; thus, there were, on the one side, the singular policy of the a.s.signats which finally annulled themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic t.i.tle rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate circ.u.mstances? If it had ever pa.s.sed through the head of so many troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were, driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the a.s.sembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The bewildering consciousness of this disillusion const.i.tutes the psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf, which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in itself all the elements of objective tragedy.

The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a family, to a t.i.tle, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a giant, arising, from all sides, on the shoulders of those most wretched in their poverty, and through all the devious ways of politics; it was especially shameless in its way of taking part in war and its glorious successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened by the urgency of circ.u.mstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity of business.

The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual production in the antagonistic field of compet.i.tion, revolted furiously, through violence and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a revolutionary government which, strong in its certainty of saving its country, and stronger still in its illusion of founding for eternity the liberty of equals, believed it was possible to suppress gambling by the guillotine, to eliminate Business by closing the Stock Exchange and to a.s.sure existence to the common people by fixing the maximum of prices for objects of prime necessity. Commodities, prices and Business rea.s.serted with violence their own liberty against those who wished to preach to them and impose ethics upon them.

Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the Thermidorians, whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden causes as in its apparent effects, the triumph of Business over democratic idealism. The const.i.tution of 1793, which marks the extreme limit that can be reached by the democratic ideal, was never put into practice. The grave pressure of circ.u.mstances, the menace of the foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from the Girondists to the Vendee, rendered necessary an exceptional government, which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against the Business which was bringing into existence the property of new proprietors. The const.i.tution of the year III. consecrated the principle of moderate liberalism, whence proceeds all the const.i.tutionalism of the European continent; but it was, before all else, the road leading to the guaranty of property. To change the proprietors while preserving property--that is the banner, the watchword, the ensign which defied through the years from Aug. 10, 1792, the violent tumults as well as the bold designs of those who attempted to found society upon virtue, equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory was the footpath by which the revolution arrived at the downfall of itself as an idealistic effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed corruption, this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but property is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice, there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange adventurer of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially smiled, and he was the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an end to this gigantic fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor trace of moral scruples.

In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution, fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life, which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it triumphed over the last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor also become for it a free commodity.

All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred inst.i.tution or a divine mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state, also, was becoming a technical appliance, which subst.i.tuted bureaucracy for hierarchy. And as the ancient t.i.tles no longer a.s.sured their possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon victorious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever shall be, the typical and cla.s.sical form of the law of every shopkeeping society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and selling.

The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular circ.u.mstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many other cla.s.ses and semi-cla.s.ses which after a short lapse of time almost all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology, which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith in the ideal of progress sprung from human b.r.e.a.s.t.s. To deliver the human race from superst.i.tion, and even from religion, to make of each individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are its beginnings:--and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the most idealistic of to-day as the work of several centuries to come--that is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy of the guillotine?

That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned their property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly rich purveyors, marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of letters; it was the prose of the court of that strange man to whom the qualities of military genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had, without any doubt, conferred the right of treating as an ideologist whoever did not admire the bare fact which, in life, as it was with him, can be nothing else than the simple brutality of success.

The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society into groups and cla.s.ses. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen how ideas arise from the fields of social inst.i.tutions, and how characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by circ.u.mstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak, prepared by society itself, and it is no wonder if the revolution, which was preceded ideologically by the most acute form of rationalistic doctrinairism ever known, ended finally by leaving behind it the intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical and sociological science, like that which our own century has attempted to construct.