Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History Part 9

It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called ant.i.thesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology, philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic antic.i.p.ation of the problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice to say that they are simply fools.

I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one's self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd.

Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion, that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution, favored or r.e.t.a.r.ded on this side or that by material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to a.s.sert, moreover, the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of definite social conditions. If I say _in the second place_, it is to distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say _in great part and indirectly the objects_ of these activities, it is to indicate two things: that in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and material for curiosity and for imagination.

After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have been produced, and the traditional repet.i.tion of a definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the _fables_ which are at the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates, those desperate ones, who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of the Kingdom of G.o.d. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Ta.s.so; or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of socialism and sociology, the _psychology of cla.s.ses_. Far back, farther, farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident that Zeus did not a.s.sume the characters of father of G.o.ds and men until the power of the _patria potestas_ was already established, and that series of _processus_ began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus ceases to be what was at first the simple _divus_ (brilliant) or the Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century reduced to a single abstract G.o.d, who is a simple regent of the world, all that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type, developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism, without taking up war against the G.o.ds.

There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a mult.i.tude of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy.

We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel's logic.

Here I must state certain difficulties.

Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion) to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under the name of Egyptian _world_, Greek _consciousness_, _spirit_ of the Renaissance, _dominant ideas_, _psychology of nations_, of society or of cla.s.ses. When these relations are established, and men have become accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations; and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the form of a struggle between ideas.

In the second place, through the centuries of history properly so-called, and as a consequence of the heredity of the pre-history of savagery and of the conditions of subjection and those of inferiority in which the majority of men were and are placed, resulted acquiescence in what is traditional, and the ancient tendencies are perpetuated as obstinate survivals.

In the third place, as I have said, men living socially, do not cease to live also in nature. They are not, of course, bound to nature as animals are, because they live on an artificial groundwork. Every one understands, moreover, that a house is not a cave, that agriculture is not natural pasturage, and that pharmacy is not exorcism. But nature is always the immediate subsoil of the artificial groundwork, and it is the environment which contains us. The industrial arts have put between us social animals, and nature, certain intermediaries which modify, set aside or remove the natural influences; but it has not for all that destroyed the efficacy of these, and we continually feel their effects.

And even as we are born men or women, as we die almost always in spite of ourselves, and as we are dominated by the instinct of generation, so we also bear in our temperament certain special conditions which education in the broad sense of the word, or social compact, can modify, it is true, within certain limits, but which they can never suppress.

These conditions of temperament, repeated in infinite cases throughout the centuries, const.i.tute what is called the race. For all these reasons, our dependence upon nature, although it has diminished since prehistoric times, continues in our social life, just as the food which the sight of nature affords to the curiosity and the imagination continues also in our social life. Now these effects of nature, and the sentiments immediate or mediate which result from it, although they have been perceived, since history began, only on the visual angle which is given us by the conditions of society, never fail to reflect themselves in the products of art and of religion, and that adds to the difficulties of a realistic and complete interpretation of both.

XI.

In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not possible to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic demand. Because, in fact, if we a.s.sume that the critical communist, the sociologist of economic materialism, or as he is commonly called, the Marxist, has the necessary critical preparation, the habit of historical study, and also the gift required for an orderly and vivacious narration, there is no reason for affirming that he cannot write history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political schools have written it.

We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which admits of no reply. But he was the first and the princ.i.p.al author of the decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an instrument of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable publicist, during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he applied it with the greatest precision in that essay ent.i.tled Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great distance, and after so many publications, if we except certain infinitesimal details and certain false forecasts, that it would be possible to make neither corrections nor important complements. I will not repeat, since I am not writing a bibliography, the list of the different writings of Marx or Engels--of which we have so many attempts from the Peasants' War (1850) down to his posthumous writings on The Present Unity of Germany--which are an application of the doctrine, nor those of their successors and of the popularizers of scientific socialism. Even in the socialist press we may read, from time to time, valuable attempts at explanation of certain political events, in which is found, precisely by reason of historic materialism, a clearness of vision which would be sought in vain among the writers and the disputants who have not yet torn away the fantastic veils and ideological envelopes of history.

Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories which have been written up to the present time, that there is always at bottom, if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in their spirit, a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so this doctrine, which has enabled us to study the social structure in an objective manner, must finally direct with precision the researches of history, and must end in a narrative complete, transparent and integral.

Helps are not lacking.

_Economics_, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and development as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed up with the illusion of representing the absolute laws of all forms of production, has through the dear school of experience entered since, as everyone knows, upon a period of self-criticism. Just as this self-criticism gave birth, on one side, to critical communism, so on the other side it has given birth, through the labor of the calmest, the wisest and the most prudent of the academic tradition, to the _historical school of economic phenomena_. Thanks to this school, and through the effect of the application of the descriptive and comparative methods, we are henceforth in possession of a vast sum of knowledge on the different historical forms of _economics_, from the most complex facts and those best specified through essential differences of types, down to the special domain of a cloister or a trade guild of the Middle Ages. The same thing has taken place with _statistics_, which, by the indefinite combination of its sources, succeeds now in throwing light, with a sufficient approximation, upon the movement of population in past centuries.

These studies, certainly, are not made in the interest of our doctrine, and oftener than not they are made in a spirit hostile to socialism; something not observed, we may say in pa.s.sing, by those foolish readers of printed papers who so often confuse _economic history_, _historical economics_, and _historical materialism_. But these studies, apart from the materials which they gather, are remarkable in that they witness the progress which is in course of making the _internal history_ which, little by little, is taking the place of the _external history_ with which, for centuries, the men of letters and artists were occupied.

A good part of these materials that have been gathered must always be submitted to new corrections, as for that matter happens in every domain of empirical knowledge, which oscillates continually between what is held for certain and what is simply probable, and what must, later, be integrated or eliminated.

The deductions and the combinations of the historians of economics, or of those who relate history in general, availing themselves of the guiding thread of economic phenomena, are not always so plausible or so conclusive, that one does not feel the need of saying to them: All this must be taken back and worked over. But that which is undoubted is the fact that in this present time all writing of history tends to become a science, or, better, a social discipline; and when that movement, now uncertain and multiform, shall be accomplished, the efforts of the scholars and inquirers will lead inevitably to the acceptance of economic materialism. By this incidence of efforts and of scientific labors, which start from points so opposite, the materialistic conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds as a definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from partisans and adversaries the attempt to speak _pro_ and _con_ as for partisan theses.

Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our doctrine has many indirect helps, so that it can profitably employ the results of many disciplines, in which by reason of the greater simplicity of the relations, it has been possible more easily to make the application of the genetic method. The typical case is furnished by glottology, and in a more special fashion by the study which has for its object the ancient languages.

The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very far from that evidence and that clearness of _processus_ of a.n.a.lysis and of reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at this moment, to write a summary of universal history, which should propose to develop all the varied forms of production in order to deduce from them afterwards all the rest of human activity, in a particular and circ.u.mstantial fashion. In the present state of knowledge, he who should try to give this _compendium_ of a new _Kulturgeschichte_ would do nothing but translate into economic phraseology the points of general orientation which, in other books, for example, in h.e.l.lwald, give it in Darwinian phraseology.

It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or to a great succession of phenomena.

So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the exposition and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms are clear to all. The economic developments of the bourgeoisie, the manifest knowledge of the different obstacles which it has had to overcome in the different countries, and, consequently, the development of the different revolutions, taking this word in its broadest sense, contribute to make our understanding of it easy. To our eyes the pre-history of the bourgeoisie, at the moment of the decline of the Middle Ages, is equally clear, and it would not be difficult to find, for example, in the development of the city of Florence, an attested series of developments, in which the economic and statistical movement finds a perfect correspondence in the political relations and a sufficient ill.u.s.tration in the contemporary development of intelligence already reduced into prose and stripped, in great part, of ideological illusions. Nor would it be impossible to reduce, now, under the definite visual angle of materialism, the whole of ancient Roman history. But for that, and particularly, for the primitive period, there are no direct sources; they are, on the contrary, abundant in Greece, from popular tradition, the epic, and the authentic juridical inscriptions, down to the pragmatic studies of the historical social relations. At Rome, on the other hand, the struggles for political rights carry with them almost always the economic reasons upon which they rest. Thus, the decline of definite cla.s.ses, the formation of new cla.s.ses, the movement of conquest, the change of the laws and of the forms of political array, appear to us with perfect clearness. This Roman history is hard and prosaic; it was never clad with these ideological complements which were suited to Greek life. The rigid prose of conquest, of planned colonization, of inst.i.tutions and of the forms of law, conquered and devised for solving the problems arising from definite frictions and contrasts, makes all Roman history a chain of events which follow each other in a sequence which is grossly evident.

The true problem consists, indeed, not in subst.i.tuting sociology for history, as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind it a secret reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its intuitive manifestations, and in understanding it through the aid of economic sociology. It is not a question of separating the accident from the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the intrinsic kernel, or applying any other formula used by the partisans of any species of scholasticism, but of explaining the connection and the _complexus_ precisely in so far as it is a connection and a _complexus_.

It is not merely a question of discovering and determining the social groundwork, and then of making men appear upon it like so many marionettes, whose threads are held and moved, no longer by Providence but by economic categories. These categories have themselves developed and are developing, like all the rest--because men change as to the capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and utilizing natural conditions; because men change in spirit and att.i.tude through the reaction of their tools upon themselves; because men change in their respective and co-a.s.sociated relations; and therefore as individuals depending in various degrees upon one another. We have, in fine, to do with history, and not with its skeleton. We are dealing with narration and not with abstraction, with the explaining and treating of the whole, and not merely with resolving and a.n.a.lyzing it; we have to do, in a word, now, as always, with an art.

It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the a.n.a.lysis, for example, of what the cla.s.ses were at the moment when the French Revolution broke out, and to pa.s.s then to the cla.s.ses that result from the Revolution and survive it. In that case the t.i.tles, the indications and the cla.s.sifications of the materials to a.n.a.lyze are definite; they are, for example, the city and the country, the artisan and the laborer, the n.o.bles and the serfs, the land which is freed from feudal charges, and the small proprietors who came into being, commerce which frees itself from so many restrictions, money which acc.u.mulates, industry which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to in the choice of this method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic origins, was indispensable to the preparation of historical research according to the direction of the new doctrine.[29]

But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to make us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed of living beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces, instincts and pa.s.sions. And it is the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with men also, in so far as they live historically. These particular men, moved by certain pa.s.sions, urged by certain circ.u.mstances, with such and such designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who, martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and reciprocal suppressions of each other--there is the real history of the French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all history is but the unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true that it develops only in definite forms of human activity,--whether the latter be pa.s.sionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly instinctive or deliberately heroic.

To understand the interlacings and the _complexus_ in its inner connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface; to a.n.a.lyze the pa.s.sions and the intentions, in their motives, from the closest to the most remote, and then to bring back the data of the pa.s.sions and of the intentions and of their causes to the most remote elements of a definite economic situation; there is the difficult art which the materialistic conception must realize.

And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his pupils to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await the examples which I shall give in other essays in a real historical narration, working over into a book which for some time I have already been doing in my teaching.

In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all cleared up.

What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men?

In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the extreme sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after the fashion of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their history. According to some it is sufficient to show what were the reasons, for example, of Caesarism, and Caesar matters little. According to others, there are no objective reasons of cla.s.ses and social interests which suffice to explain anything; it is the great minds which give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and history has, so to speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of narration extract themselves from embarra.s.sment in a very simple fashion, putting together at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact and subjective influences.

Historical materialism goes beyond the ant.i.thetical views of the sociologists and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates the eclecticism of the empirical narrators.

First of all the _factum_.

Let this particular Caesar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth Brumaire. All this is completely accidental with relation to the general course of things which was pushing the new cla.s.s, mistress of the field, to save from the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save, and that necessitated the creation of a bureaucratico-military government. It was, however, necessary to find the man, or the men. But what actually happened came about in the fashion that we know. It depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who directed the enterprise and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger. And from that moment the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because it is this definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events, determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded.

The very fact that all history rests upon ant.i.theses, contrasts, struggles and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in definite occasions. These men are neither a negligible accident of the social mechanism, nor miraculous creators of what society, without them, could have made in no other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the ant.i.thetic conditions, which causes the fact that definite individuals, generous, heroic, fortunate, mischievous, are called at critical moments to say the decisive word. As long as the particular interests of the different social groups are in such a state of tension, that all the parties in the struggle reciprocally paralyze each other, then to make the political gearing move, there is need of the individual consciousness of a definite individual.

The social ant.i.theses, which make of every human community an unstable organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined rapidly and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama in all its relations is repeated from community to community, from nation to nation, from state to state, because the inner inequalities concurring with the external differentiations, have produced and produce the whole movement of wars, conquests, treaties, colonizations, etc. In this drama have always appeared, in the role of leaders of society, the men who are characterized as eminent, as great, and empiricism has concluded from their presence that they were the princ.i.p.al authors of history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance to the general causes and the common conditions of the social structure, is a thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of our doctrine; but to try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology would willingly do, is pure capriciousness.

And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes.

History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of accidents and variations. It has a certain grouping, it has a certain perspective.

It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of factors, because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence of things which seem incongruous, independent, and self-directing. To present the whole as a whole, and to discover in it the continuous relations of the events which border on each other, there is the difficulty.

The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural beings.

XII.

In the successive whole, and in the continuous necessity of all historical events, is there, then, some ask, any meaning, any significance? This question, whether it comes from the camp of the idealists, or whether it comes to us from the mouth of the most circ.u.mspect critics, certainly, and in all cases, demands our attention, and requires an adequate answer.

In fact, if we stop at the premises, intuitive or intellectual, from which is derived the conception of _progress_ as an idea which incloses and embraces the total of the human _processus_, it is seen that these presumptions all rest upon the mental need, which is in us, of attributing to one or more series of events a certain sense and a certain signification. The conception of progress, for whoever examines it carefully in its specific nature, always implies judgments of estimation, and therefore, there is no one who can confuse it with the crude and bare notion of simple development, which does not contain that increment of clue which makes us say of a thing that it is progressing.

I have already said, and, it seems to me, at sufficient length, how it is that progress does not exist as something imperative or regulative over the natural and immediate succession of the generations of men.