Chapter VI: Part II: Historical Materialism (2)

This same civilized Europe, which by the continuity of its tradition, presents the most complete diagram of its _processus_, so much so that upon this model have been conceived and constructed, thus far, all the systems of historical philosophy, this Western and Central Europe, which produced the epoch of the bourgeoisie and has sought and is seeking to impose that form of society upon the whole world by different modes of conquest, direct or indirect,--this Europe is not completely uniform in the degree of its development, and its various agglomerations, national, local and political, appear disturbed, as it were, over a decidedly sloping ladder. Upon these differences depend the conditions of relative superiority and inferiority of one country to another and the reasons, more or less advantageous or disadvantageous, for economic exchange; and thereon have depended, and still depend, not only the frictions and the struggles, the treaties and the wars, but also everything that with more or less precision the political writers have been able to relate to us since the Renaissance, and certainly with increasing evidence, from Louis XIV. and Colbert to our own time.

This Europe in itself is highly variegated. Here is the consummate flower of industrial and capitalist production, namely, England, while at other points survives the artisan, vigorous or rickety, at Paris and at Naples, to grasp the fact in its extreme points. Here the land is almost industrialized, as in England; and elsewhere vegetates, in various traditional forms, the stupid peasant, as in Italy and in Austria, and in the latter country more than in the former. In one country the political life of the state--suited to the prosaic consciousness of a bourgeoisie which knows its business because it has conquered the space that it occupies--is exerted in the surest and most open fashion of an explicit class domination (it will be understood that I am speaking of France). Elsewhere, and particularly in Germany, the old feudal customs, the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the cowardice of a bourgeoisie which exploits favorable economic circumstances without bringing to them either intelligence or revolutionary courage, strengthen the existing state by preserving the lying appearances of an ethical mission to be accomplished. (With how many unpalatable sauces this state ethics, Prussian into the bargain, has been served up by the heavy and pedantic German professors!) Here and there modern capitalist production is edging its way into countries which from other points of view do not enter into our movement and especially into its political side, as is the case with unhappy Poland; or again this form only penetrates indirectly, as in the Slavonic countries. But now comes the sharpest contrast, which seems destined to put under our eyes, as in an epitome, all the phrases, even the most extreme, of our history.

Russia could not have advanced, as it is now advancing, toward the great industry, without drawing from Western Europe, and especially from our charming French _Chauvinism_, that money which she would in vain have sought within her own borders, that is to say, from the conditions of her obese territorial mass, where vegetate in ancient economic forms fifty million peasants. Russia, in order to become an economic modern society ripening the conditions of a corresponding political revolution, and preparing the means which will facilitate the addition of a large part of Asia to the capitalist movement, has been led to destroy the last relics of agrarian communism (whether its origins be primitive or secondary) which had been preserved within herself up to this point in such characteristic forms and on so large a scale. Russia must capitalize herself, and to this end she must, to start with, convert land into merchandise capable of producing merchandise, and at the same time transform into miserable proletarians the excommunists of the land. And, on the contrary, in Western and Central Europe we find ourselves at the opposite point of the series of development which has scarcely begun in Russia. Here, with us, where the bourgeoisie, with varied fortunes and triumphing over such a variety of difficulties, has already traversed so many stages of its development, it is not the recollection of primitive or secondary communism, which scarcely survives through learned combinations in the heads of scholars, but the very form of bourgeois production, which engenders in the proletarians the tendency to socialism, which presents itself in its general outlines as an indication of a new phase of history and not as the repetition of what is inevitably perishing in the Slavonic countries under our eyes.

Who could fail to see in these illustrations, which I have not sought out, but which have come almost by chance, and which can be indefinitely prolonged in a volume of economic-political geography of the present world, the evident proof of the manner in which historic conditions are all circumstanced in the forms of their development? Not only races and peoples, nations and states, but parts of nations and various regions of states, even orders and classes, are found, as it were, upon so many rounds of a very long ladder, or, rather, upon the various points of a complicated and slowly developing curve. Historic time has not marched uniformly for all men. The simple succession of generations has never been the index of the constancy and intensity of the _processus_. Time as an abstract measure of chronology and the generations which succeed one another in approximate periods give no criterion and furnish no indication of law or of process. The developments thus far have been varied because the things accomplished in one and the same unit of time were varied. Between these varied forms of development there is an affinity or rather a similarity of movements, that is, an analogy of type, or again an identity of form; thus the advance forms may by simple contact or by violence accelerate the development of backward forms. But the important thing is to comprehend that progress, our notion of which is not merely empirical, but always circumstanced and thus limited, is not suspended over the course of human events like a destiny or a fate, nor like a commandment. And for this reason our doctrine cannot serve to represent the whole history of the human race in a unified perspective which repeats, _mutatis mutandis_, the historic philosophy from thesis to conclusion, from St. Augustine to Hegel, or, better, from the prophet Daniel to M. De Rougemont.

Our doctrine does not pretend to be the intellectual vision of a great plan or of a design, but it is merely a method of research and of conception. It is not by accident that Marx spoke of his discovery as a guiding thread, and it is precisely for this reason that it is analogous to Darwinism, which also is a method, and is not and cannot be a modern repetition of the constructed or constructive natural philosophy as used by Shelling and his school.

The first to discover in the notion of progress an indication of something circumstantial and relative was the genial Saint Simon, who opposed his way of seeing to the doctrine of the eighteenth century represented by the party of Condorcet. To that doctrine, which may be called unitary, equalitarian, formal, because it regards the human race as developing upon one line of process, Saint Simon opposes the conception of the faculties and of the aptitudes which substitute themselves and compensate for each other, and thus he remains an ideologist.

To penetrate the true reasons for the relativity of progress another thing was necessary. It was necessary, first of all, to renounce those prejudices which are involved in the belief that the obstacles to the uniformity of human development rest exclusively upon natural and immediate causes. These natural obstacles are either sufficiently problematical, as is the case with races, no one of which shows the privilege of birth in its history, or they are, as is the case in geographical differences, insufficient to explain the development of the completely different historico-social conditions on one and the same geographical field. And as the historic movement dates precisely from the time when the natural obstacles have already been in great part either vanquished or notably circumscribed, thanks to the creation of an artificial field upon which it has been given to men to develop themselves further, it is evident that the successive obstacles to the uniformity of progress must be sought in the proper and intrinsic conditions of the social structure itself.

This structure has thus far started in forms of political organization, the object of which is to try to hold in equilibrium the economic inequalities; consequently this organization, as I have said more than once, is constantly unstable. From the point where there is a known history; it is the history of society tending to form the state, or having already constructed it completely. And the state is this struggle, within and without, because it is, above all, the organ and the instrument of a larger or smaller part of society against all the rest of society itself, in so far as the latter rests upon the economic domination of man over man in a more or less direct and explicit fashion, according as the different degree of the development of production, of its natural means and its artificial instruments, requires either chattel slavery, or the serfdom of the soil, or the "free" wage system. This society of antitheses, which forms a state, is always, although in different forms and various modes, the opposition of the city to the country, of the artisan to the peasant, of the proletarian to the employer, of the capitalist to the laborer, and so on _ad infinitum_, and it always ends, with various complications and various methods, in an hierarchy, whether it be in a fixed scaffolding of privilege, as in the Middle Ages, or whether, under the disguised forms of supposed equal rights for all, it be produced by the automatic action of economic competition, as in our time.

To this economic hierarchy corresponds, according to various modes, in different countries, in different times, in different places, what I may call almost a hierarchy of souls, of intellects, of minds. That is to say, that culture, which, for the idealists, constitutes the sum of progress, has been and is by the necessities of the case very unequally distributed. The greater portion of mankind, by the quality of their occupations, are composed of individuals who are disintegrated, broken into fragments and rendered incapable of a complete and normal development. To the economics of classes and to the hierarchy of social positions corresponds the psychology of classes. The relativity of progress is then for us the inevitable consequence of class distinctions. These distinctions constitute the obstacles which explain the possibility of relative retrogression, up to the point of degeneracy and of the dissolution of an entire society. The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants. The progress of technique, which fills the towns with merchandise, makes more miserable and abject the condition of the peasants, and in the cities themselves it further humbles the condition of the humble. All the progress of science has served thus far to differentiate a class of scientists and to keep ever further from culture the masses who, attached to their ceaseless daily toil, are thus feeding the whole of society.

Progress has been and is, up to the present time, partial and one-sided. The minorities which share in it call this human progress; and the proud evolutionists call this human nature which is developing. All this partial progress, which has thus far developed upon the oppression of man by man, has its foundation in the conditions of opposition, by which economic distinctions have engendered all the social distinctions; from the relative liberty of the few is born the servitude of the greater number, and law has been the protector of injustice. Progress, thus seen and clearly appreciated, appears to us as the moral and intellectual epitome of all human miseries and of all material inequalities.

To discover this inevitable relativity it was necessary that communism, born at first as an instinctive movement in the soul of the oppressed, should become a science and a political party. It was then necessary that our doctrine should give the measure of value for all past history, by discovering in every form of social organization, antithetical in its origin and organization, as they have all been up to this time, the innate incapacity for producing the conditions of a universal and uniform human progress, that is to say, by discovering the fetters which turn each benefit into an injury.

VI.

There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the belief in _historic factors_?

That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to simple historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to find a starting point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at first sight and after first examination, appear so confused and irreducible. This belief, this current opinion, has become for reasoning historians, or even for rationalists, a semi-doctrine, which has recently been urged several times, as a decisive argument, against the unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And indeed, this belief is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of history being only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various factors, that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism, whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save themselves from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine consists in the fact that it attributes the preponderance or the decisive action to the _economic factor_.

It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this belief, this opinion, or this semi-doctrine takes its rise, because real and fruitful criticism consists principally in knowing and understanding the motive of what we declare an error. It does not suffice to reject an opinion by characterizing it as false doctrine. Error always arises from some ill-understood side of an incomplete experience, or from some subjective imperfection. It does not suffice to reject the error; we must overcome it, explain it and outgrow it.

Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak, an act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a continuous series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied suppositions and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes a complicated tissue. Thus, to begin with, he must fix a point, a line, a boundary, as he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate the beginning of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to inquire how Louis XVI. was brought to convene the States General. The narrator finds himself, in a word, confronted with a _complexus_ of accomplished facts and of facts on the point of being produced, which in their totality present a certain aspect. Upon the attitude which he takes depends the form and the style of every narration, because to compose it he must take his point of departure from things already accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to develop.

Yet into this _complexus_ he must introduce a certain degree of analysis, resolving it into groups and into aspects of facts, or into concurrent elements, which afterwards appear at a certain moment as independent categories. It is the state in a certain form and with certain powers; it is the laws, which determine, by what they command or what they prohibit, certain relations; it is the manners and customs which reveal to us tendencies, needs, ways of thinking, of believing, of imagining; altogether it is a multitude of men living and working together, with a certain distribution of tasks and occupations; he observes then the thoughts, the ideas, the inclinations, the passions, the desires, the aspirations which arise and develop from this varied mode of coexistence and from its frictions. Let a change be produced, and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the empirical _complexus_, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter time; for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its internal limits as regards society by increasing or diminishing its powers and its attributes, or by changing the mode of action of one or the other; or, again, the law modifies its dispositions, or it expresses and affirms itself through new organs; or, again, finally, behind the change of exterior and daily habits, we discover a change in the sentiments, the thoughts and the inclinations of the men variously distributed in the different social classes, who mingle, change, replace each other, disappear or reappear. All this may be sufficiently understood, in its exterior forms and outlines, through the usual endowments of normal intelligence which is not yet aided, corrected or completed by science strictly so-called. Assembling within precise limits a conception of such facts is the true and proper object of narration, which is so much the clearer, more vivid and more exact, as it takes the form of a monograph; witness Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war.

Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived at a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not revealed itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts, in these most apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms which are the political forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan passions. The narrator, both because he lacks any theoretical doctrine regarding the true sources of the historic movement, and by the very attitude which he takes on the subject of the things which he unites according to the appearances which they have come to assume, cannot reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of a single, immediate intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes on a color in his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action. His task is finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts and events in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look as on a clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography has accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a concourse of physical causes which determine the immediate aspect of the Gulf of Naples, for example, without going back to its genesis.

It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive, palpable, and, I might almost say, aesthetic and artistic occasion for all those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally summed up in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors.

Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the agglomeration of the _latifundium_, which was diminishing or causing to completely disappear the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of the free men, who are the foundation and the condition of the democratic life of the ancient city. What were the causes of their failure? Their aim is clear, their spirit, their origin, their character, their heroism are manifest. They have against them other men with other interests and with other designs. The struggle appears to the mind at first merely as a struggle of intentions and passions, which unfolds and comes to an end by the aid of means which are permitted by the political form of the state and by the use or abuse or the public powers. Here is the situation: the city ruling in different manners over other cities or over territories which have lost all character of autonomy; within this city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and facing the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful, stands the immense mass of the proletarians, who are on the point of losing or who have already lost the consciousness and the political strength of a body of citizens, the mass which therefore suffers itself to be deceived and corrupted, and which will soon decay till it is but a servile accessory to its aristocratic exploiters. There is the material of the narrator, and he cannot take account of the fact otherwise than in the immediate conditions of the fact itself. The complete whole is directly seen and forms the stage on which the events unfold, but if the narration is to have solidity, vividness and perspective there must be points of departure and ways of interpretation.

In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little by little take away from the different parts of a given social _complexus_ their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their ensuing generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of factors.

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 analysis 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 entity, 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 quantity 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 analytic 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 circumstances. 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 classes, 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 analysis 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 analysis, 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 analytical disciplines, which illustrate 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 analysis of complex facts. To the methodical division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of knowledge passed 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 institutions, 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 title, 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 analogy 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 circumstances, 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 illustrate, 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, institutions, 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 principal 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 passions, 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 association without class 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 mass, 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 analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It was necessary too that the mind should pass 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 circumstantial 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 mass, 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 assertion: 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 circumstances, 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 competition, 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 accumulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of these needs?

Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes capitalist accumulation 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 accumulate 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 documents 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 analogies, 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 assume 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 analysis 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 passes 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 classes, 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, emancipated 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 antithesis 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 assigned 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.