A new interest: Marxism--Historical materialism--Criticism and
interpretation: a new historical canon--Marxian economics as an
application of the hypothetic method--The concepts of science and the
economic principle--Science and practice--Marxism and morality.
In April, 1895, his old professor at the University of Rome, Antonio
Labriola, sent to Croce an essay on the _Communist Manifesto,_ in which
he submitted to a critical examination the materialistic conception of
history elaborated during the fifty preceding years by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. Labriola had been probably the first professor in a
European University to take Historical Materialism as a subject
for his academic lectures, his first course on Marxism having been
delivered in 1889. But Croce, who had given all his thoughts first to
his literary work, and then to his meditations on art and criticism,
had not been as yet able to perceive the bearing of the new problems
discussed by his master on that problem of the nature of history which
had been the subject of his first philosophical essay, and was to be
the centre of his later speculations. Labriola's little book came to
him at a moment when he had reached an impasse in the course of his
research, and it opened to him an entirely new field of investigations,
it afforded him an escape towards studies and meditations, at
first apparently unrelated to his former ones, but the results of
which were destined to react vigorously on them. He plunged with
youthful enthusiasm into the literature not of Marxism and historical
materialism only, but of Economics in general. In the five following
years, while he continued with unremitting energy his literary labours,
now more clearly directed towards an understanding of the historical
problems of Æsthetics, and a clarification of the concepts of a
philosophical science of Æsthetics, he published a series of critical
essays on _Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica,_ intended at
the same time as a defence and a rectification of Marx's doctrines.
We shall consider this phase of Croce's work from two distinct points
of view--as a new individual experience, and as a stage in the
development of his philosophy. For the first of them, we shall again
leave the word to Croce himself: "That intercourse with the literature
of Marxism, and the eagerness with which for some time I followed the
socialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my whole being, and
for the first time awakened in me a feeling of political enthusiasm,
yielding a strange taste of newness to me: I was like a man who having
fallen in love for the first time when no longer young, should observe
in himself the mysterious process of the new passion. At that fire
I burnt also my abstract moralism, and I learnt that the course of
history has a right to drag and to crush the individual. As I had not
been disposed in my family circle to any fanaticism, and not even to a
liking for the current and conventional liberalism of Italian politics
... it seemed to me to breathe faith and hope in the vision of the
rebirth of mankind redeemed by labour and in labour."[1] This political
enthusiasm did not last very long: it disappeared when that which
was Croce's true nature, not practical but essentially theoretical,
reasserted itself, by reducing this new experience into new conceptual
forms; but without it, the whole of his philosophy of the practical
activity would forever have been like a theory of vision in the mind of
a blind man, or a theory of love in that of a keeper of the harem. Art,
thought, mortality, had already appeared to him as aspects of his own
life; to these, a new element was added now, not as a mere object of
thought, but as a passionate and concrete experience.
The interpretation of the doctrine of historical materialism presented
a number of difficulties deriving partly from the form in which the
doctrine itself had originally appeared--not as a coherent theory,
but as a series of pronouncements and observations scattered in a
variety of writings, composed at a distance of years, and the aim of
which was rather political and polemical than scientific; and partly
from its association with remnants of old metaphysics, both in its
originators and in their followers. In Marx and Engels, as well as
practically in the whole literature of Marxism, the emphasis being
laid on the substantive rather than on the adjective, historical
materialism implied the adhesion to that metaphysical materialism which
was one of the children of Hegelian metaphysics. What had been the
Idea for Hegel, was the Economy of the new metaphysicians: the only
reality, working beneath the surface of human consciousness, as an
under-structure beneath a merely apparent and illusory superstructure.
Given this conception, it is easy to understand why historical
materialism appealed so strongly to positivists and evolutionists,
who concealed a similar kind of metaphysics under their proclaimed
contempt for philosophy. The old philosophies of history had attempted
to reduce the sequence of history to a scheme of concepts, starting
with God, or Providence, or the Hegelian Idea: the new unconscious
metaphysicians substituted for the old concepts that of Economy,
or of Matter, or of Development and Evolution, from which all the
particular historical determinations could be deduced with not less
certainty than from the old metaphysical entities. And from their
predecessors they also borrowed those teleological tendencies which
are implicit in all metaphysics, attributing a will and an end to
their new God, be it called Progress or Matter, and trying to deduce
the future course of history from the dialectic of the past. Hence the
growth of a vast literature inquiring into the development of abstract
sociological schemes or of economic forms reduced to characteristics
of economic epochs, forcing the concrete materials of history into
rigid conceptual frames; hence the naïve faith in the deduction of
social predeterminations, of which the most striking was the asserted
necessity of the advent of socialism as the only logical outcome of
capitalist society.
Croce, pursuing the analysis initiated by Labriola, began by
dissociating what seemed to him to be the vital element in historical
materialism, from any intrusion of either Hegelian or positivistic
metaphysics. His criticism of historical materialism as a philosophy
of history and, generally, of the possibility of constructing
any philosophy of history, is the first resolute step towards an
anti-metaphysical conception of philosophy. Whether by metaphysics
is meant the knowledge of another world of real essences, of things
in themselves, beyond the objects of our immediate experience,
or the creation of abstract concepts duplicating and falsifying
the complex world of life, the whole trend of Croce's thought
will henceforward oppose any claim on the part of these spurious
philosophies, mythological or pseudo-scientific, to furnish an adequate
interpretation of reality. Vico's metaphysics of human ideas, which
is no metaphysics at all, because it does not postulate the existence
of any reality beyond that of the spirit of man, will more and more
become the model of Croce's own philosophy. That immanentism which
he considers as one of the spontaneous attitudes of his mind slowly
extricates itself from the ruins of his own transcendental logic,
and shows itself impervious to the allurements of both Platonism and
Positivism, of the ancient and the new myth.
Purged of its unessential philosophical associations, historical
materialism (or, more precisely, the economic interpretation of
history) appeared to Croce as nothing more than a new canon or
criterion of historical interpretation, fixing the attention of the
historian on a mass of new data, the importance of which had not been
recognized before. It was neither a new philosophy nor a new method:
it could not be legitimately employed to draw conclusions on the
relations between economic facts and the other facts of history, nor
to reduce history itself to the operation of a few abstract laws. It
was a tendency of historical thought, coinciding with the manifestation
of certain objective conditions of society (the industrial revolution)
and their reflexes in political thought, by which the economic element
in social facts acquired a stronger relief than it had ever had in the
consciousness of man. And it seemed to point, both for the historian
and for the philosopher, towards the existence of a fundamental
principle or form of human activity--economic activity, about the
nature of which, and its relation with æsthetic, logic, and moral
activity, very little had been thought and written, besides what is
contained in the introductions to all classical manuals of political
economy. While still insisting that history is art, that is, the
representation of individual happenings, Croce was thus implicitly
brought to admit of the importance of philosophy, that is, of the study
of the fundamental forms or categories of human activity, for the
historian. His conception of history was undergoing a transformation in
a direction similar to that towards which his conception of philosophy
was moving.
When he passed from the consideration of the general theory to the
examination of more technical aspects of Marx's doctrines, the first
difficulty which presented itself to him was that of the relations
between Marxian economics and pure economics, or general economic
science. The society whose economic life Marx had studied in _Das
Kapital,_ was neither human society in general, nor any particular
historical society, but a purely ideal and formal society deduced from
a proposition assumed outside the fields of pure economics: that of
the equivalence of value and labour. Starting from this postulate,
Marx had proceeded to inquire into those processes of differentiation
between the assumed standard and the actual prices of commodities in a
capitalist society, by which labour itself acquires a price and becomes
a commodity. It was a method of scientific analysis consisting in
regarding a phenomenon not as it actually exists, but as it would be
if one of its factors were altered, and in comparing the hypothetical
with the real phenomenon, conceiving of the first as diverging from
the second which is postulated as fundamental, or the second as
diverging from the first, which is postulated in the same manner.
It is only when the whole of Marxian economics is considered as the
application of such a method, that the concepts of labour-value and of
surplus-value acquire a definite and precise meaning: the description
of economic society as a pure working society (producing no goods which
cannot be increased by labour) must then be interpreted as a concept
of difference, or an instrument of elliptical comparison, as against
the descriptions of actual economic society given by pure economics.
Its positive value, not as an abstract hypothesis, but as a means
of knowledge, depends on the fact that such a society does actually
coincide with certain aspects of historical capitalist society; that
the equivalence of labour and value is not a purely imaginary fact, but
a fact among other facts, empirically opposed, limited, and distorted
by other facts. Having assumed this equivalence as a test for the study
of the social problem of labour, Marx's object was to show the special
way in which this problem is solved in a capitalist society. And this
was the real justification for his employment of the hypothetical
method.
It is clear that Croce was infinitely more interested in what Marx
had actually accomplished, than in what he had intended to do. In
Marx's own mind, the analysis of the conditions of capitalist society
led inevitably to the conclusion that a passage from capitalism to
socialism was predetermined by the structure of capitalist society
itself. It is well known that the prevision assumed what claimed to be
a strictly scientific character in the formulation of the law of the
fall in the rate of profits: the gradual decrease of surplus-values
accompanying the increase in technical improvements, and automatically
re-establishing the equivalence of labour and value. Croce offered
a very convincing criticism of this law on Marx's own grounds, by
showing that it rested on a confusion between technical and economic
facts, thus affording a remarkable example of Marx's uncertainty of his
own method. It was clear that in this particular case Marx had been
carried away by his desire to reduce the metaphysical implications of
his economic sociology to the status of an historical law. And Croce's
criticism was evidently intended both to deprive Marx's historical
determinism of one of its most powerful instruments, and to confirm
his own view of the method which gave validity and importance to such
economic speculations as Marx's were.
Marxian economics stood thus interpreted as comparative sociological
economics, and by the definition Croce also defined the scope of
sociological science, and the nature of the logical processes which
it could legitimately employ. It was a considerable advance in the
study of scientific concepts, as distinct from purely speculative
concepts. But he still believed at the time, misled by the economists'
discussions on the nature of the economic principle, that pure
economics and the philosophy of economics practically coincided; and
as he had maintained the legitimacy of Marx's method against the
criticisms of the pure, or scientific, economists, he defended pure
economics against Marx and his school, as the general science of the
economic datum. But he was soon to understand that his own point
of view and that of the pure economists were widely divergent, and
that the methods of pure economics are in fact scientific and not
philosophical. In later years, when he came to regard the science of
economics as an empirical and mathematical science, Marxian economics
appeared to him merely as a special branch of economic casuistry,
employing methods fundamentally identical with those of pure economics:
a relationship which could be illustrated by a comparison with the
parallel of non-Euclidean and classical geometry. Although he did
not reach this final position at the time, there is no doubt that
his experience of the actual scientific processes of economics freed
him from his allegiance to Herbartian logic, in which science and
philosophy were still formally undifferentiated, and led him gradually
to the distinction between the scientific and the speculative concept,
of which the relation established between Marxian and pure economics is
a tentative prefiguration.
But the most essential gain of his economic studies was in the
direction of the affirmation of the merely practical, or economic,
principle, as one of the irreducible forms of human activity, raising
the concept of the Useful to the same level (logically speaking) at
which those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good had been kept by
the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato. He was here
actually elaborating not a scientific, but a speculative concept,
though his approach to it was always by means of the discussion
of particular problems, the solution of which implied a definite
view of the relations between the economic principle on one side,
and respectively on the other side, the intellectual and the moral
principle.
As regards the possibility of inferring practical programmes from
scientific principles, he objected that neither the desirable nor
the practicable are science. Science may be a legitimate means of
simplifying problems, making it possible to distinguish in them what
can be scientifically ascertained from what can only be partially
known; in the case of the Marxian law of the fall in the rate of
profits, for instance, if such a law were proved to be scientifically
correct, it could be said, under certain conditions that the end
of capitalist society was a scientific certainty, though it would
remain doubtful what would follow it. But logic is not life, and the
appraisement of social programmes is a matter of empirical observations
and of practical convictions. The unconquerable indetermination of
social facts brings forth that element of dating in the actions of
practical men, which is to will what inspiration is to expression,
insight to intellect, in the poet and in the scientist.
Socialism could not be called a scientific programme, except in a
limited and metaphorical sense, which was not a criticism of socialism
itself, but of the bad logic of certain Socialists: the Marxian
programme as such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and boldest,
and also one of those which obtain the greatest support from the
objective conditions of existing society. Having already denied the
dependence of intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticising
the metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus asserted now the
autonomy of the economic from the logical principle.
On the other hand, he destroyed the legend of the intrinsic immorality
of Marxism, which was due to Marx's repeated assertions that the social
question is not a moral question, and to his sharp criticisms of class
ideals and hypocrisies. He pointed to the moral interest which had
guided Marx's political activity, and which could even be said to have
prompted the choice of the fundamental hypotheses of his economics.
What Marx had called the impotence of morality was the futile attempt
at apportioning praise or blame for the natural conditions of the
social order. It is only when such conditions are no longer conceived
as necessary for the social order in general, but only for a stage
in its history, and when new conditions appear that make it possible
to destroy them, that moral condemnation is justified and effective:
to use another of Marx's phrases, morality condemns what history has
already condemned. This is as much as saying that the only real
moral problems, as all other problems of human life, are those that
present themselves under given historical circumstances, at a given
time; concrete, not abstract; and that moral judgments apply not to
facts or conditions, but to actions. The passage from such a concrete,
or historical, view of morality, to a doctrine of moral relativity
is a very easy one, but Marx's own views on this point, which he
never deliberately expounded, are irrelevant to the substance of his
doctrine. For his own part, Croce reasserted the value of Kantian
ethics, and the absoluteness of the moral ideal, as an ideal which
is not above and outside the spirit of man, but rather one of its
intrinsic forms or categories. And Marx's conclusions in regard to the
function of morality in the social movement, and to the method for the
education of the proletariat, though clashing with current prejudices,
contain no contradiction of general ethical principles. But Marx's
interest was not essentially an ethical one: the moralistic criticisms
of Marx were similar to the puritanic criticisms of Machiavelli, and
resolved themselves into a charge that neither the one nor the other
had treated problems totally different from those which they had
actually attempted to clarify. While vindicating the importance of
Machiavelli in the history of the study of the economic activity of
man, Croce called Marx himself the Machiavelli of the labour movement,
implicitly suggesting a similarity of both object and method between
_Il Principe_ and _Das Kapital,_ which is singularly illuminating.
The last essays of the book on _Materialismo Storico_ are two letters
to Professor Pareto "On the Economic Principle," written in 1900; but
with these we reach a time when Croce's thought was already organizing
itself in the system of the philosophy of mind. In them we find a
sketch of the system in the form in which it appeared in the first
edition of the _Estetica_: that is, we already decidedly enter into the
maturer phase of Croce's thought. We must here pause on the threshold,
and looking back on the years of Croce's special interest in economic
problems, sum up the new elements that the study of these problems adds
to his intellectual physiognomy: a more deliberately anti-metaphysical
attitude, a growing consciousness of the complexity of history and of
the concreteness of moral life, a realization of the function of the
economic activity, a progress in the analysis of scientific concepts,
and therefore in the foundations of his logic--but, most important of
all, a continued practice of philosophical thought under the shape of
historical methodology. Apart from their interest as documents of the
growth of his philosophy, Croce's studies have also a place in the
history of social and economic thought, side by side with those of
Labriola and of Georges Sorel, as a significant episode in that Latin
crisis of Marxism, the ultimate outcome of which are the theories of
French and Italian Syndicalism.
[Footnote 1: _Contributo,_ p. 36-37.]