CHAPTER I. OF THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

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THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM

SYSTEM OF ECONOMICAL CONTRADICTIONS OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MISERY.

BY

P. J. PROUDHON

Destruam et aedificabo.

Deuteronomy: c. 32.

VOLUME FIRST.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.

OF THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE

% 1. Opposition between FACT and RIGHT in Social Economy

% 2. Inadequacy of Theories and Criticisms

CHAPTER II.

OF VALUE

% 1. Opposition of Value in USE and Value in EXCHANGE

% 2. Constitution of Value; Definition of Wealth

% 3. Application of the Law of Proportionality of Values

CHAPTER III.

ECONOMIC EVOLUTIONS.--FIRST PERIOD.--THE DIVISION OF LABOR

% 1. Antagonistic Effects of the Principle of Division

% 2. Impotence of Palliatives.--MM. Blanqui, Chevalier,

Dunoyer, Rossi, and Passy

CHAPTER IV.

SECOND PERIOD.--MACHINERY

% 1. Of the Function of Machinery in its Relations to Liberty

% 2. Machinery's Contradiction.--Origin of Capital and Wages

% 3. Of Preservatives against the Disastrous Influence of Machinery

CHAPTER V.

THIRD PERIOD.--COMPETITION

% 1. Necessity of Competition

% 2. Subversive Effects of Competition, and the Destruction of

Liberty thereby

% 3. Remedies against Competition

CHAPTER VI.

FOURTH PERIOD.--MONOPOLY

% 1. Necessity of Monopoly

% 2. The Disasters in Labor and the Perversion of Ideas caused

by Monopoly

CHAPTER VII.

FIFTH PERIOD.--POLICE, OR TAXATION

% 1. Synthetic Idea of the Tax. Point of Departure and

Development of this Idea

% 2. Antinomy of the Tax

% 3. Disastrous and Inevitable Consequences of the Tax.

(Provisions, Sumptuary Laws, Rural and Industrial Police,

Patents,Trade-Marks, etc.)

CHAPTER VIII.

OF THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN AND OF GOD, UNDER THE LAW OF

CONTRADICTION, OR A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE

% 1. The Culpability of Man.--Exposition of the Myth of the Fall

% 2. Exposition of the Myth of Providence.--Retrogression of God

INTRODUCTION.

Before entering upon the subject-matter of these new memoirs, I

must explain an hypothesis which will undoubtedly seem strange,

but in the absence of which it is impossible for me to proceed

intelligibly: I mean the hypothesis of a God.

To suppose God, it will be said, is to deny him. Why do you not

affirm him?

Is it my fault if belief in Divinity has become a suspected

opinion; if the bare suspicion of a Supreme Being is already

noted as evidence of a weak mind; and if, of all philosophical

Utopias, this is the only one which the world no longer

tolerates? Is it my fault if hypocrisy and imbecility everywhere

hide behind this holy formula?

Let a public teacher suppose the existence, in the universe, of

an unknown force governing suns and atoms, and keeping the whole

machine in motion. With him this supposition, wholly gratuitous,

is perfectly natural; it is received, encouraged: witness

attraction--an hypothesis which will never be verified, and

which, nevertheless, is the glory of its originator. But when,

to explain the course of human events, I suppose, with all

imaginable caution, the intervention of a God, I am sure to shock

scientific gravity and offend critical ears: to so wonderful an

extent has our piety discredited Providence, so many tricks

have been played by means of this dogma or fiction by charlatans

of every stamp! I have seen the theists of my time, and

blasphemy has played over my lips; I have studied the belief of

the people,--this people that Brydaine called the best friend of

God,--and have shuddered at the negation which was about to

escape me. Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to

reason; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic

contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori

dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who

knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us?

I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my

heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of

social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an

hypothesis,--I mean a necessary dialectical tool.

I.

If I follow the God-idea through its successive transformations,

I find that this idea is preeminently social: I mean by this that

it is much more a collective act of faith than an individual

conception. Now, how and under what circumstances is this act of

faith produced? This point it is important to determine.

From the moral and intellectual point of view, society, or the

collective man, is especially distinguished from the individual

by spontaneity of action,--in other words, instinct. While the

individual obeys, or imagines he obeys, only those motives of

which he is fully conscious, and upon which he can at will

decline or consent to act; while, in a word, he thinks himself

free, and all the freer when he knows that he is possessed of

keener reasoning faculties and larger information,--society is

governed by impulses which, at first blush, exhibit no

deliberation and design, but which gradually seem to be directed

by a superior power, existing outside of society, and pushing it

with irresistible might toward an unknown goal. The

establishment of monarchies and republics, caste-distinctions,

judicial institutions, etc., are so many manifestations of this

social spontaneity, to note the effects of which is much easier

than to point out its principle and show its cause. The whole

effort, even of those who, following Bossuet, Vico, Herder,

Hegel, have applied themselves to the philosophy of history, has

been hitherto to establish the presence of a providential destiny

presiding over all the movements of man. And I observe, in this

connection, that society never fails to evoke its genius previous

to action: as if it wished the powers above to ordain what its

own spontaneity has already resolved on. Lots, oracles,

sacrifices, popular acclamation, public prayers, are the

commonest forms of these tardy deliberations of society.

This mysterious faculty, wholly intuitive, and, so to speak,

super-social, scarcely or not at all perceptible in persons, but

which hovers over humanity like an inspiring genius, is the

primordial fact of all psychology.

Now, unlike other species of animals, which, like him, are

governed at the same time by individual desires and collective

impulses, man has the privilege of perceiving and designating to

his own mind the instinct or fatum which leads him; we shall see

later that he has also the power of foreseeing and even

influencing its decrees. And the first act of man, filled and

carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore

the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and

which he calls GOD,--that is, Life, Being, Spirit, or, simpler

still, Me; for all these words, in the ancient tongues, are

synonyms and homophones. "I am ME," God said to Abraham,

"and I covenant with THEE.".... And to Moses: "I am the Being.

Thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, `The Being hath sent

me unto you.'" These two words, the Being and Me, have in the

original language--the most religious that men have ever

spoken--the same characteristic.[1] Elsewhere, when Ie-hovah,

acting as law-giver through the instrumentality of Moses, attests

his eternity and swears by his own essence, he uses, as a form of

oath, _I_; or else, with redoubled force, _I_, THE BEING. Thus

the God of the Hebrews is the most personal and wilful of all the

gods, and none express better than he the intuition of humanity.

[1] Ie-hovah, and in composition Iah, the Being; Iao, ioupitur,

same meaning; ha-iah, Heb., he was; ei, Gr., he is, ei-nai, to

be; an-i, Heb., and in conjugation th-i, me; e-go, io, ich, i,

m-i, me, t-ibi, te, and all the personal pronouns in which the

vowels i, e, ei, oi, denote personality in general, and the

consonants, m or n, s or t, serve to indicate the number of the

person. For the rest, let who will dispute over these analogies;

I have no objections: at this depth, the science of the

philologist is but cloud and mystery. The important point to

which I wish to call attention is that the phonetic relation of

names seems to correspond to the metaphysical relation of ideas.

God appeared to man, then, as a me, as a pure and permanent

essence, placing himself before him as a monarch before his

servant, and expressing himself now through the mouth of poets,

legislators, and soothsayers, musa, nomos, numen; now through the

popular voice, vox populi vox Dei. This may serve, among other

things, to explain the existence of true and false oracles; why

individuals secluded from birth do not attain of themselves to

the idea of God, while they eagerly grasp it as soon as it is

presented to them by the collective mind; why, finally,

stationary races, like the Chinese, end by losing it.[2] In the

first place, as to oracles, it is clear that all their

accuracy depends upon the universal conscience which inspires

them; and, as to the idea of God, it is easily seen why isolation

and statu quo are alike fatal to it. On the one hand, absence of

communication keeps the mind absorbed in animal

self-contemplation; on the other, absence of motion, gradually

changing social life into mechanical routine, finally eliminates

the idea of will and providence. Strange fact! religion, which

perishes through progress, perishes also through quiescence.

[2] The Chinese have preserved in their traditions the

remembrance of a religion which had ceased to exist among them

five or six centuries before our era.

(See Pauthier, "China," Paris, Didot.) More surprising still is

it that this singular people, in losing its primitive faith,

seems to have understood that divinity is simply the collective

me of humanity: so that, more than two thousand years ago, China

had reached, in its commonly-accepted belief, the latest results

of the philosophy of the Occident. "What Heaven sees and

understands," it is written in the Shu-king, "is only that which

the people see and understand. What the people deem worthy of

reward and punishment is that which Heaven wishes to punish and

reward. There is an intimate communication between Heaven and

the people: let those who govern the people, therefore, be

watchful and cautious." Confucius expressed the same idea in

another manner: "Gain the affection of the people, and you gain

empire. Lose the affection of the people, and you lose empire."

There, then, general reason was regarded as queen of the world, a

distinction which elsewhere has been bestowed upon revelations.

The Tao-te-king is still more explicit. In this work, which is

but an outline criticism of pure reason, the philosopher Lao-tse

continually identifies, under the name of TAO, universal reason

and the infinite being; and all the obscurity of the book of Lao

tse consists, in my opinion, of this constant identification of

principles which our religious and metaphysical habits have so

widely separated.

Notice further that, in attributing to the vague and (so to

speak) objectified consciousness of a universal reason the first

revelation of Divinity, we assume absolutely nothing concerning

even the reality or non-reality of God. In fact, admitting that

God is nothing more than collective instinct or universal reason,

we have still to learn what this universal reason is in itself.

For, as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in

individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social

laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the

fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly

empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means

of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that

universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws;

universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate

sphere and as a reality distinct from pure reason, just as the

planetary system, though created according to the laws of

mathematics, is a reality distinct from mathematics, whose

existence could not have been deduced from mathematics alone: it

follows, I say, that universal reason is, in modern languages,

exactly what the ancients called God. The name is changed: what

do we know of the thing?

Let us now trace the evolution of the Divine idea.

The Supreme Being once posited by a primary mystical judgment,

man immediately generalizes the subject by another

mysticism,--analogy. God, so to speak, is as yet but a point:

directly he shall fill the world.

As, in sensing his social me, man saluted his AUTHOR, so, in

finding evidence of design and intention in animals, plants,

springs, meteors, and the whole universe, he attributes to each

special object, and then to the whole, a soul, spirit, or genius

presiding over it; pursuing this inductive process of apotheosis

from the highest summit of Nature, which is society, down to the

humblest forms of life, to inanimate and inorganic matter. From

his collective me, taken as the superior pole of creation, to the

last atom of matter, man EXTENDS, then, the idea of God,--that

is, the idea of personality and intelligence,--just as God

himself EXTENDED HEAVEN, as the book of Genesis tells us; that

is, created space and time, the conditions of all things.

Thus, without a God or master-builder, the universe and man

would not exist: such is the social profession of faith. But

also without man God would not be thought, or--to clear the

interval--God would be nothing. If humanity needs an author, God

and the gods equally need a revealer; theogony, the history of

heaven, hell, and their inhabitants,--those dreams of the human

mind,--is the counterpart of the universe, which certain

philosophers have called in return the dream of God. And how

magnificent this theological creation, the work of society! The

creation of the demiourgos was obliterated; what we call the

Omnipotent was conquered; and for centuries the enchanted

imagination of mortals was turned away from the spectacle of

Nature by the contemplation of Olympian marvels.

Let us descend from this fanciful region: pitiless reason knocks

at the door; her terrible questions demand a reply.

"What is God?" she asks; "where is he? what is his extent? what

are his wishes? what his powers? what his promises?"--and here,

in the light of analysis, all the divinities of heaven, earth,

and hell are reduced to an incorporeal, insensible, immovable,

incomprehensible, undefinable I-know-not-what; in short, to a

negation of all the attributes of existence. In fact, whether

man attributes to each object a special spirit or genius, or

conceives the universe as governed by a single power, he in

either case but SUPPOSES an unconditioned, that is, an

impossible, entity, that he may deduce therefrom an explanation

of such phenomena as he deems inconceivable on any other

hypothesis. The mystery of God and reason! In order to render

the object of his idolatry more and more RATIONAL, the believer

despoils him successively of all the qualities which would make

him REAL; and, after marvellous displays of logic and genius,

the attributes of the Being par excellence are found to be the

same as those of nihility. This evolution is inevitable and

fatal: atheism is at the bottom of all theodicy.

Let us try to understand this progress.

God, creator of all things, is himself no sooner created by the

conscience,--in other words, no sooner have we lifted God from

the idea of the social me to the idea of the cosmic me,--than

immediately our reflection begins to demolish him under the

pretext of perfecting him. To perfect the idea of God, to purify

the theological dogma, was the second hallucination of the human

race.

The spirit of analysis, that untiring Satan who continually

questions and denies, must sooner or later look for proof of

religious dogmas. Now, whether the philosopher determine the

idea of God, or declare it indeterminable; whether he approach it

with his reason, or retreat from it,--I say that this idea

receives a blow; and, as it is impossible for speculation to

halt, the idea of God must at last disappear. Then the atheistic

movement is the second act of the theologic drama; and this

second act follows from the first, as effect from cause. "The

heavens declare the glory of God," says the Psalmist. Let us

add, And their testimony dethrones him.

Indeed, in proportion as man observes phenomena, he thinks that

he perceives, between Nature and God, intermediaries; such as

relations of number, form, and succession; organic laws,

evolutions, analogies,-- forming an unmistakable series of

manifestations which invariably produce or give rise to each

other. He even observes that, in the development of this society

of which he is a part, private wills and associative

deliberations have some influence; and he says to himself that

the Great Spirit does not act upon the world directly and by

himself, or arbitrarily and at the dictation of a capricious

will, but mediately, by perceptible means or organs, and by

virtue of laws. And, retracing in his mind the chain of effects

and causes, he places clear at the extremity, as a balance, God.

A poet has said,--

Par dela tous les cieux, le Dieu des cieux reside.

Thus, at the first step in the theory, the Supreme Being is

reduced to the function of a motive power, a mainspring, a

corner-stone, or, if a still more trivial comparison may be

allowed me, a constitutional sovereign, reigning but not

governing, swearing to obey the law and appointing ministers to

execute it. But, under the influence of the mirage which

fascinates him, the theist sees, in this ridiculous system, only

a new proof of the sublimity of his idol; who, in his opinion,

uses his creatures as instruments of his power, and causes the

wisdom of human beings to redound to his glory.

Soon, not content with limiting the power of the Eternal, man,

increasingly deicidal in his tendencies, insists on sharing it.

If I am a spirit, a sentient me giving voice to ideas, continues

the theist, I consequently am a part of absolute existence; I am

free, creative, immortal, equal with God. Cogito, ergo sum,--I

think, therefore I am immortal, that is the corollary, the

translation of Ego sum qui sum: philosophy is in accord with the

Bible. The existence of God and the immortality of the soul are

posited by the conscience in the same judgment: there, man speaks

in the name of the universe, to whose bosom he transports his me;

here, he speaks in his own name, without perceiving that, in this

going and coming, he only repeats himself.

The immortality of the soul, a true division of divinity,

which, at the time of its first promulgation, arriving after a

long interval, seemed a heresy to those faithful to the old

dogma, has been none the less considered the complement of divine

majesty, necessarily postulated by eternal goodness and justice.

Unless the soul is immortal, God is incomprehensible, say the

theists; resembling in this the political theorists who regard

sovereign representation and perpetual tenure of office as

essential conditions of monarchy. But the inconsistency of the

ideas is as glaring as the parity of the doctrines is exact:

consequently the dogma of immortality soon became the

stumbling-block of philosophical theologians, who, ever since the

days of Pythagoras and Orpheus, have been making futile attempts

to harmonize divine attributes with human liberty, and reason

with faith. A subject of triumph for the impious! . . . . But

the illusion could not yield so soon: the dogma of immortality,

for the very reason that it was a limitation of the uncreated

Being, was a step in advance. Now, though the human mind

deceives itself by a partial acquisition of the truth, it never

retreats, and this perseverance in progress is proof of its

infallibility. Of this we shall soon see fresh evidence.

In making himself like God, man made God like himself: this

correlation, which for many centuries had been execrated, was the

secret spring which determined the new myth. In the days of the

patriarchs God made an alliance with man; now, to strengthen the

compact, God is to become a man. He will take on our flesh, our

form, our passions, our joys, and our sorrows; will be born of

woman, and die as we do. Then, after this humiliation of the

infinite, man will still pretend that he has elevated the ideal

of his God in making, by a logical conversion, him whom he

had always called creator, a saviour, a redeemer. Humanity does

not yet say, I am God: such a usurpation would shock its piety;

it says, God is in me, IMMANUEL, nobiscum Deus. And, at the

moment when philosophy with pride, and universal conscience with

fright, shouted with unanimous voice, The gods are departing!

excedere deos! a period of eighteen centuries of fervent

adoration and superhuman faith was inaugurated.

But the fatal end approaches. The royalty which suffers itself

to be limited will end by the rule of demagogues; the divinity

which is defined dissolves in a pandemonium. Christolatry is the

last term of this long evolution of human thought. The angels,

saints, and virgins reign in heaven with God, says the catechism;

and demons and reprobates live in the hells of eternal

punishment. Ultramundane society has its left and its right: it

is time for the equation to be completed; for this mystical

hierarchy to descend upon earth and appear in its real character.

When Milton represents the first woman admiring herself in a

fountain, and lovingly extending her arms toward her own image as

if to embrace it, he paints, feature for feature, the human

race.--This God whom you worship, O man! this God whom you have

made good, just, omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, and holy, is

yourself: this ideal of perfection is your image, purified in the

shining mirror of your conscience. God, Nature, and man are

three aspects of one and the same being; man is God himself

arriving at self-consciousness through a thousand evolutions. In

Jesus Christ man recognized himself as God; and Christianity is

in reality the religion of God-man. There is no other God than

he who in the beginning said, ME; there is no other God than

THEE.

Such are the last conclusions of philosophy, which dies in

unveiling religion's mystery and its own.

II.

It seems, then, that all is ended; it seems that, with the

cessation of the worship and mystification of humanity by itself,

the theological problem is for ever put aside. The gods have

gone: there is nothing left for man but to grow weary and die in

his egoism. What frightful solitude extends around me, and

forces its way to the bottom of my soul! My exaltation resembles

annihilation; and, since I made myself a God, I seem but a

shadow. It is possible that I am still a ME, but it is very

difficult to regard myself as the absolute; and, if I am not the

absolute, I am only half of an idea.

Some ironical thinker, I know not who, has said: "A little

philosophy leads away from religion, and much philosophy leads

back to it." This proposition is humiliatingly true.

Every science develops in three successive periods, which may be

called--comparing them with the grand periods of

civilization--the religious period, the sophistical period, the

scientific period.[3] Thus, alchemy represents the religious

period of the science afterwards called chemistry, whose

definitive plan is not yet discovered; likewise astrology was the

religious period of another science, since

established,--astronomy.

[3] See, among others, Auguste Comte, "Course of Positive

Philosophy," and P. J. Proudhon, "Creation of Order in Humanity."

Now, after being laughed at for sixty years about the

philosopher's stone, chemists, governed by experience, no longer

dare to deny the transmutability of bodies; while astronomers

are led by the structure of the world to suspect also an organism

of the world; that is, something precisely like astrology. Are

we not justified in saying, in imitation of the philosopher just

quoted, that, if a little chemistry leads away from the

philosopher's stone, much chemistry leads back to it; and

similarly, that, if a little astronomy makes us laugh at

astrologers, much astronomy will make us believe in them?[4]

[4] I do not mean to affirm here in a positive manner the

transmutability of bodies, or to point it out as a subject for

investigation; still less do I pretend to say what ought to be

the opinion of savants upon this point. I wish only to call

attention to the species of scepticism generated in every

uninformed mind by the most general conclusions of chemical

philosophy, or, better, by the irreconcilable hypotheses which

serve as the basis of its theories. Chemistry is truly the

despair of reason: on all sides it mingles with the fanciful; and

the more knowledge of it we gain by experience, the more it

envelops itself in impenetrable mysteries. This thought was

recently suggested to me by reading M. Liebig's "Letters on

Chemistry" (Paris, Masgana, 1845, translation of Bertet-Dupiney

and Dubreuil Helion).

Thus M. Liebig, after having banished from science hypothetical

causes and all the entities admitted by the ancients,--such as

the creative power of matter, the horror of a vacuum, the esprit

recteur, etc. (p. 22),--admits immediately, as necessary to the

comprehension of chemical phenomena, a series of entities no less

obscure,--vital force, chemical force, electric force, the force

of attraction, etc. (pp. 146, 149). One might call it a

realization of the properties of bodies, in imitation of the

psychologists' realization of the faculties of the soul under the

names liberty, imagination, memory, etc. Why not keep to the

elements? Why, if the atoms have weight of their own, as M.

Liebig appears to believe, may they not also have electricity and

life of their own? Curious thing! the phenomena of matter, like

those of mind, become intelligible only by supposing them to be

produced by unintelligible forces and governed by contradictory

laws: such is the inference to be drawn from every page of M.

Liebig's book.

Matter, according to M. Liebig, is essentially inert and entirely

destitute of spontaneous activity (p. 148): why, then, do the

atoms have weight? Is not the weight inherent in atoms the real,

eternal, and spontaneous motion of matter? And that which we

chance to regard as rest,--may it not be equilibrium rather?

Why, then, suppose now an inertia which definitions contradict,

now an external potentiality which nothing proves?

Atoms having WEIGHT, M. Liebig infers that they are INDIVISIBLE

(p. 58). What logic! Weight is only force, that is, a thing

hidden from the senses, whose phenomena alone are perceptible,--a

thing, consequently, to which the idea of division and indivision

is inapplicable; and from the presence of this force, from the

hypothesis of an indeterminate and immaterial entity, is inferred

an indivisible material existence!

For the rest, M. Liebig confesses that it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE

MIND to conceive of particles absolutely indivisible; he

recognizes, further, that the FACT of this indivisibility is not

proved; but he adds that science cannot dispense with this

hypothesis: so that, by the confession of its teachers, chemistry

has for its point of departure a fiction as repugnant to the mind

as it is foreign to experience. What irony!

Atoms are unequal in weight, says M. Liebig, because unequal in

volume: nevertheless, it is impossible to demonstrate that

chemical equivalents express the relative weight of atoms, or, in

other words, that what the calculation of atomic equivalents

leads us to regard as an atom is not composed of several atoms.

This is tantamount to saying that MORE MATTER weighs more than

LESS MATTER; and, since weight is the essence of materiality, we

may logically conclude that, weight being universally identical

with itself, there is also an identity in matter; that the

differences of simple bodies are due solely, either to different

methods of atomic association, or to different degrees of

molecular condensation, and that, in reality, atoms are

transmutable: which M. Liebig does not admit.

"We have," he says, "no reason for believing that one element is

convertible into another element" (p. 135). What do you know

about it? The reasons for believing in such a conversion can

very well exist and at the same time escape your attention; and

it is not certain that your intelligence in this respect has

risen to the level of your experience. But, admitting the

negative argument of M. Liebig, what follows? That, with about

fifty-six exceptions, irreducible as yet, all matter is in a

condition of perpetual metamorphosis. Now, it is a law of our

reason to suppose in Nature unity of substance as well as unity

of force and system; moreover, the series of chemical compounds

and simple substances themselves leads us irresistibly to this

conclusion. Why, then, refuse to follow to the end the road

opened by science, and to admit an hypothesis which is the

inevitable result of experience itself?

M. Liebig not only denies the transmutability of elements, but

rejects the spontaneous formation of germs. Now, if we reject

the spontaneous formation of germs, we are forced to admit their

eternity; and as, on the other hand, geology proves that the

globe has not been inhabited always, we must admit also that, at

a given moment, the eternal germs of animals and plants were

born, without father or mother, over the whole face of the earth.

Thus, the denial of spontaneous generation leads back to the

hypothesis of spontaneity: what is there in much-derided

metaphysics more contradictory?

Let it not be thought, however, that I deny the value and

certainty of chemical theories, or that the atomic theory seems

to me absurd, or that I share the Epicurean opinion as to

spontaneous generation. Once more, all that I wish to point out

is that, from the point of view of principles, chemistry needs to

exercise extreme tolerance, since its own existence depends on a

certain number of fictions, contrary to reason and experience,

and destructive of each other.

I certainly have less inclination to the marvellous than

many atheists, but I cannot help thinking that the stories of

miracles, prophecies, charms, etc., are but distorted accounts of

the extraordinary effects produced by certain latent forces, or,

as was formerly said, by occult powers. Our science is still so

brutal and unfair; our professors exhibit so much impertinence

with so little knowledge; they deny so impudently facts which

embarrass them, in order to protect the opinions which they

champion,--that I distrust strong minds equally with

superstitious ones. Yes, I am convinced of it; our gross

rationalism is the inauguration of a period which, thanks to

science, will become truly PRODIGIOUS; the universe, to my eyes,

is only a laboratory of magic, from which anything may be

expected. . . . This said, I return to my subject.

They would be deceived, then, who should imagine, after my rapid

survey of religious progress, that metaphysics has uttered its

last word upon the double enigma expressed in these four

words,--the existence of God, the immortality of the soul. Here,

as elsewhere, the most advanced and best established conclusions,

those which seem to have settled for ever the theological

question, lead us back to primeval mysticism, and involve the new

data of an inevitable philosophy. The criticism of religious

opinions makes us smile today both at ourselves and at religions;

and yet the resume of this criticism is but a reproduction of the

problem. The human race, at the present moment, is on the eve of

recognizing and affirming something equivalent to the old notion

of Divinity; and this, not by a spontaneous movement as before,

but through reflection and by means of irresistible logic. I

will try, in a few words, to make myself understood.

If there is a point on which philosophers, in spite of

themselves, have finally succeeded in agreeing, it is without

doubt the distinction between intelligence and necessity, the

subject of thought and its object, the me and the not-me; in

ordinary terms, spirit and matter. I know well that all these

terms express nothing that is real and true; that each of them

designates only a section of the absolute, which alone is true

and real; and that, taken separately, they involve, all alike, a

contradiction. But it is no less certain also that the absolute

is completely inaccessible to us; that we know it only by its

opposite extremes, which alone fall within the limits of our

experience; and that, if unity only can win our faith, duality is

the first condition of science.

Thus, who thinks, and what is thought? What is a soul? what is a

body? I defy any one to escape this dualism. It is with

essences as with ideas: the former are seen separated in Nature,

as the latter in the understanding; and just as the ideas of God

and immortality, in spite of their identity, are posited

successively and contradictorily in philosophy, so, in spite of

their fusion in the absolute, the me and the not-me posit

themselves separately and contradictorily in Nature, and we have

beings who think, at the same time with others which do not

think.

Now, whoever has taken pains to reflect knows today that such a

distinction, wholly realized though it be, is the most

unintelligible, most contradictory, most absurd thing which

reason can possibly meet. Being is no more conceivable without

the properties of spirit than without the properties of

matter: so that if you deny spirit, because, included in none of

the categories of time, space, motion, solidity, etc., it seems

deprived of all the attributes which constitute reality, I in my

turn will deny matter, which, presenting nothing appreciable but

its inertia, nothing intelligible but its forms, manifests itself

nowhere as cause (voluntary and free), and disappears from view

entirely as substance; and we arrive at pure idealism, that is,

nihility. But nihility is inconsistent with the existence of

living, reasoning--I know not what to call them--uniting in

themselves, in a state of commenced synthesis or imminent

dissolution, all the antagonistic attributes of being. We are

compelled, then, to end in a dualism whose terms we know

perfectly well to be false, but which, being for us the condition

of the truth, forces itself irresistibly upon us; we are

compelled, in short, to commence, like Descartes and the human

race, with the me; that is, with spirit.

But, since religions and philosophies, dissolved by analysis,

have disappeared in the theory of the absolute, we know no better

than before what spirit is, and in this differ from the ancients

only in the wealth of language with which we adorn the darkness

that envelops us. With this exception, however; that while, to

the ancients, order revealed intelligence OUTSIDE of the world,

to the people of today it seems to reveal it rather WITHIN the

world. Now, whether we place it within or without, from the

moment we affirm it on the ground of order, we must admit it

wherever order is manifested, or deny it altogether. There is no

more reason for attributing intelligence to the head which

produced the "Iliad" than to a mass of matter which crystallizes

in octahedrons; and, reciprocally, it is as absurd to refer the

system of the world to physical laws, leaving out an ordaining

ME, as to attribute the victory of Marengo to strategic

combinations, leaving out the first consul. The only distinction

that can be made is that, in the latter case, the thinking ME is

located in the brain of a Bonaparte, while, in the case of the

universe, the ME has no special location, but extends everywhere.

The materialists think that they have easily disposed of their

opponents by saying that man, having likened the universe to his

body, finishes the comparison by presuming the existence in the

universe of a soul similar to that which he supposes to be the

principle of his own life and thought; that thus all the

arguments in support of the existence of God are reducible to an

analogy all the more false because the term of comparison is

itself hypothetical.

It is certainly not my intention to defend the old syllogism:

Every arrangement implies an ordaining intelligence; there is

wonderful order in the world; then the world is the work of an

intelligence. This syllogism, discussed so widely since the days

of Job and Moses, very far from being a solution, is but the

statement of the problem which it assumes to solve. We know

perfectly well what order is, but we are absolutely ignorant of

the meaning of the words Soul, Spirit, Intelligence: how, then,

can we logically reason from the presence of the one to the

existence of the other? I reject, then, even when advanced by

the most thoroughly informed, the pretended proof of the

existence of God drawn from the presence of order in the world; I

see in it at most only an equation offered to philosophy.

Between the conception of order and the affirmation of spirit

there is a deep gulf of metaphysics to be filled up; I am

unwilling, I repeat, to take the problem for the demonstration.

But this is not the point which we are now considering. I have

tried to show that the human mind was inevitably and irresistibly

led to the distinction of being into me and not-me, spirit and

matter, soul and body. Now, who does not see that the objection

of the materialists proves the very thing it is intended to deny?

Man distinguishing within himself a spiritual principle and a

material principle,--what is this but Nature herself, proclaiming

by turns her double essence, and bearing testimony to her own

laws? And notice the inconsistency of materialism: it denies,

and has to deny, that man is free; now, the less liberty man has,

the more weight is to be attached to his words, and the greater

their claim to be regarded as the expression of truth. When I

hear this machine say to me, "I am soul and I am body," though

such a revelation astonishes and confounds me, it is invested in

my eyes with an authority incomparably greater than that of the

materialist who, correcting conscience and Nature, undertakes to

make them say, "I am matter and only matter, and intelligence is

but the material faculty of knowing."

What would become of this assertion, if, assuming in my turn the

offensive, I should demonstrate that belief in the existence of

bodies, or, in other words, in the reality of a purely corporeal

nature, is untenable? Matter, they say, is

impenetrable.--Impenetrable by what? I ask. Itself, undoubtedly;

for they would not dare to say spirit, since they would therein

admit what they wish to set aside. Whereupon I raise this double

question: What do you know about it, and what does it signify?

1. Impenetrability, which is pretended to be the definition of

matter, is only an hypothesis of careless naturalists, a gross

conclusion deduced from a superficial judgment. Experience shows

that matter possesses infinite divisibility, infinite

expansibility, porosity without assignable limits, and

permeability by heat, electricity, and magnetism, together

with a power of retaining them indefinitely; affinities,

reciprocal influences, and transformations without number:

qualities, all of them, hardly compatible with the assumption of

an impenetrable aliquid. Elasticity, which, better than any

other property of matter, could lead, through the idea of spring

or resistance, to that of impenetrability, is subject to the

control of a thousand circumstances, and depends entirely on

molecular attraction: now, what is more irreconcilable with

impenetrability than this attraction? Finally, there is a

science which might be defined with exactness as the SCIENCE OF

PENETRABILITY OF MATTER: I mean chemistry. In fact, how does

what is called chemical composition differ from penetration?[5].

. . . In short, we know matter only through its forms; of its

substance we know nothing. How, then, is it possible to affirm

the reality of an invisible, impalpable, incoercible being, ever

changing, ever vanishing, impenetrable to thought alone, to which

it exhibits only its disguises? Materialist! I permit you to

testify to the reality of your sensations; as to what occasions

them, all that you can say involves this reciprocity: something

(which you call matter) is the occasion of sensations which are

felt by another something (which I call spirit).

[5] Chemists distinguish between MIXTURE and COMPOSITION, just

as logicians distinguish between the association of ideas and

their synthesis. It is true, nevertheless, that, according to

the chemists, composition may be after all but a mixture, or

rather an aggregation of atoms, no longer fortuitous, but

systematic, the atoms forming different compounds by varying

their arrangement. But still this is only an hypothesis, wholly

gratuitous; an hypothesis which explains nothing, and has not

even the merit of being logical. Why does a purely NUMERICAL or

GEOMETRICAL difference in the composition and form of atoms give

rise to PHYSIOLOGICAL properties so different? If atoms are

indivisible and impenetrable, why does not their association,

confined to mechanical effects, leave them unchanged in essence?

Where is the relation between the cause supposed and the effect

obtained?

We must distrust our intellectual vision: it is with chemical

theories as with psychological systems. The mind, in order to

account for phenomena, works with atoms, which it does not and

can never see, as with the ME, which it does not perceive: it

applies its categories to everything; that is, it distinguishes,

individualizes, concretes, numbers, compares, things which,

material or immaterial, are thoroughly identical and

indistinguishable. Matter, as well as spirit, plays, as we view

it, all sorts of parts; and, as there is nothing arbitrary in its

metamorphoses, we build upon them these psychologic and atomic

theories, true in so far as they faithfully represent, in terms

agreed upon, the series of phenomena, but radically false as soon

as they pretend to realize their abstractions and are accepted

literally.

2. But what, then, is the source of this supposition that matter

is impenetrable, which external observation does not justify and

which is not true; and what is its meaning?

Here appears the triumph of dualism. Matter is pronounced

impenetrable, not, as the materialists and the vulgar fancy, by

the testimony of the senses, but by the conscience. The ME, an

incomprehensible nature, feeling itself free, distinct, and

permanent, and meeting outside of itself another nature equally

incomprehensible, but also distinct and permanent in spite of its

metamorphoses, declares, on the strength of the sensations and

ideas which this essence suggests to it, that the NOT-ME is

extended and impenetrable. Impenetrability is a figurative term,

an image by which thought, a division of the absolute, pictures

to itself material reality, another division of the absolute; but

this impenetrability, without which matter disappears, is, in the

last analysis, only a spontaneous judgment of inward sensation, a

metaphysical a priori, an unverified hypothesis of spirit.

Thus, whether philosophy, after having overthrown theological

dogmatism, spiritualizes matter or materializes thought,

idealizes being or realizes ideas; or whether, identifying

SUBSTANCE and CAUSE, it everywhere substitutes FORCE, phrases,

all, which explain and signify nothing,--it always leads us

back to this everlasting dualism, and, in summoning us to believe

in ourselves, compels us to believe in God, if not in spirits.

It is true that, making spirit a part of Nature, in distinction

from the ancients, who separated it, philosophy has been led to

this famous conclusion, which sums up nearly all the fruit of its

researches: In man spirit KNOWS ITSELF, while everywhere else

it seems NOT TO KNOW ITSELf--"That which is awake in man, which

dreams in the animal, and sleeps in the stone," said a

philosopher.

Philosophy, then, in its last hour, knows no more than at its

birth: as if it had appeared in the world only to verify the

words of Socrates, it says to us, wrapping itself solemnly around

with its funeral pall, "I know only that I know nothing." What

do I say? Philosophy knows today that all its judgments rest on

two equally false, equally impossible, and yet equally necessary

and inevitable hypotheses,--matter and spirit. So that, while in

former times religious intolerance and philosophic disputes,

spreading darkness everywhere, excused doubt and tempted to

libidinous indifference, the triumph of negation on all points no

longer permits even this doubt; thought, freed from every

barrier, but conquered by its own successes, is forced to affirm

what seems to it clearly contradictory and absurd. The savages

say that the world is a great fetich watched over by a great

manitou. For thirty centuries the poets, legislators, and sages

of civilization, handing down from age to age the philosophic

lamp, have written nothing more sublime than this profession of

faith. And here, at the end of this long conspiracy against God,

which has called itself philosophy, emancipated reason concludes

with savage reason, The universe is a NOT-ME, objectified by a

ME.

Humanity, then, inevitably supposes the existence of God: and if,

during the long period which closes with our time, it has

believed in the reality of its hypothesis; if it has worshipped

the inconceivable object; if, after being apprehended in this act

of faith, it persists knowingly, but no longer voluntarily, in

this opinion of a sovereign being which it knows to be only a

personification of its own thought; if it is on the point of

again beginning its magic invocations,--we must believe that so

astonishing an hallucination conceals some mystery, which

deserves to be fathomed.

I say hallucination and mystery, but without intending to deny

thereby the superhuman content of the God-idea, and without

admitting the necessity of a new symbolism,--I mean a new

religion. For if it is indisputable that humanity, in affirming

God,--or all that is included in the word me or spirit,--only

affirms itself, it is equally undeniable that it affirms itself

as something other than its own conception of itself, as all

mythologies and theologies show. And since, moreover, this

affirmation is incontestable, it depends, without doubt, upon

hidden relations, which ought, if possible, to be determined

scientifically.

In other words, atheism, sometimes called humanism, true in its

critical and negative features, would be, if it stopped at man in

his natural condition, if it discarded as an erroneous judgment

the first affirmation of humanity, that it is the daughter,

emanation, image, reflection, or voice of God,--humanism, I say,

if it thus denied its past, would be but one contradiction more.

We are forced, then, to undertake the criticism of humanism; that

is, to ascertain whether humanity, considered as a whole and

throughout all its periods of development, satisfies the Divine

idea, after eliminating from the latter the exaggerated and

fanciful attributes of God; whether it satisfies the perfection

of being; whether it satisfies itself. We are forced, in short,

to inquire whether humanity TENDS TOWARD God, according to the

ancient dogma, or is itself BECOMING God, as modern philosophers

claim. Perhaps we shall find in the end that the two systems,

despite their seeming opposition, are both true and essentially

identical: in that case, the infallibility of human reason, in

its collective manifestations as well as its studied

speculations, would be decisively confirmed.--In a word, until we

have verified to man the hypothesis of God, there is nothing

definitive in the atheistic negation.

It is, then, a scientific, that is, an empirical demonstration of

the idea of God, that we need: now, such a demonstration has

never been attempted. Theology dogmatizing on the authority of

its myths, philosophy speculating by the aid of categories, God

has existed as a TRANSCENDENTAL conception, incognizable by the

reason, and the hypothesis always subsists.

It subsists, I say, this hypothesis, more tenacious, more

pitiless than ever. We have reached one of those prophetic

epochs when society, scornful of the past and doubtful of the

future, now distractedly clings to the present, leaving a few

solitary thinkers to establish the new faith; now cries to God

from the depths of its enjoyments and asks for a sign of

salvation, or seeks in the spectacle of its revolutions, as in

the entrails of a victim, the secret of its destiny.

Why need I insist further? The hypothesis of God is allowable,

for it forces itself upon every man in spite of himself: no one,

then, can take exception to it. He who believes can do no less

than grant me the supposition that God exists; he who denies is

forced to grant it to me also, since he entertained it before

me, every negation implying a previous affirmation; as for him

who is in doubt, he needs but to reflect a moment to understand

that his doubt necessarily supposes an unknown something, which,

sooner or later, he will call God.

But if I possess, through the fact of my thought, the right to

SUPPOSE God, I must abandon the right to AFFIRM him. In other

words, if my hypothesis is irresistible, that, for the present,

is all that I can pretend. For to affirm is to determine; now,

every determination, to be true, must be reached empirically. In

fact, whoever says determination, says relation, conditionality,

experience. Since, then, the determination of the idea of God

must result from an empirical demonstration, we must abstain from

everything which, in the search for this great unknown, not being

established by experience, goes beyond the hypothesis, under

penalty of relapsing into the contradictions of theology, and

consequently arousing anew atheistic dissent.

III.

It remains for me to tell why, in a work on political economy, I

have felt it necessary to start with the fundamental hypothesis

of all philosophy.

And first, I need the hypothesis of God to establish the

authority of social science.--When the astronomer, to explain the

system of the world, judging solely from appearance, supposes,

with the vulgar, the sky arched, the earth flat, the sun much

like a football, describing a curve in the air from east to west,

he supposes the infallibility of the senses, reserving the right

to rectify subsequently, after further observation, the data with

which he is obliged to start. Astronomic philosophy, in fact,

could not admit a priori that the senses deceive us, and that

we do not see what we do see: admitting such a principle, what

would become of the certainty of astronomy? But the evidence of

the senses being able, in certain cases, to rectify and complete

itself, the authority of the senses remains unshaken, and

astronomy is possible.

So social philosophy does not admit a priori that humanity can

err or be deceived in its actions: if it should, what would

become of the authority of the human race, that is, the authority

of reason, synonymous at bottom with the sovereignty of the

people? But it thinks that human judgments, always true at the

time they are pronounced, can successively complete and throw

light on each other, in proportion to the acquisition of ideas,

in such a way as to maintain continual harmony between universal

reason and individual speculation, and indefinitely extend the

sphere of certainty: which is always an affirmation of the

authority of human judgments.

Now, the first judgment of the reason, the preamble of every

political constitution seeking a sanction and a principle, is

necessarily this: THERE IS A GOD; which means that society is

governed with design, premeditation, intelligence. This

judgment, which excludes chance, is, then, the foundation of the

possibility of a social science; and every historical and

positive study of social facts, undertaken with a view to

amelioration and progress, must suppose, with the people, the

existence of God, reserving the right to account for this

judgment at a later period.

Thus the history of society is to us but a long determination of

the idea of God, a progressive revelation of the destiny of man.

And while ancient wisdom made all depend on the arbitrary and

fanciful notion of Divinity, oppressing reason and conscience,

and arresting progress through fear of an invisible master,

the new philosophy, reversing the method, trampling on the

authority of God as well as that of man, and accepting no other

yoke than that of fact and evidence, makes all converge toward

the theological hypothesis, as toward the last of its problems.

Humanitarian atheism is, therefore, the last step in the moral

and intellectual enfranchisement of man, consequently the last

phase of philosophy, serving as a pathway to the scientific

reconstruction and verification of all the demolished dogmas.

I need the hypothesis of God, not only, as I have just said, to

give a meaning to history, but also to legitimate the reforms to

be effected, in the name of science, in the State.

Whether we consider Divinity as outside of society, whose

movements it governs from on high (a wholly gratuitous and

probably illusory opinion); or whether we deem it immanent in

society and identical with that impersonal and unconscious reason

which, acting instinctively, makes civilization advance (although

impersonality and ignorance of self are contrary to the idea of

intelligence); or whether, finally, all that is accomplished in

society results from the relation of its elements (a system whose

whole merit consists in changing an active into a passive, in

making intelligence necessity, or, which amounts to the same

thing, in taking law for cause),--it always follows that the

manifestations of social activity, necessarily appearing to us

either as indications of the will of the Supreme Being, or as a

sort of language typical of general and impersonal reason, or,

finally, as landmarks of necessity, are absolute authority for

us. Being connected in time as well as in spirit, the facts

accomplished determine and legitimate the facts to be

accomplished; science and destiny are in accord; everything which

happens resulting from reason, and, reciprocally, reason

judging only from experience of that which happens, science has a

right to participate in government, and that which establishes

its competency as a counsellor justifies its intervention as a

sovereign.

Science, expressed, recognized, and accepted by the voice of all

as divine, is queen of the world. Thus, thanks to the hypothesis

of God, all conservative or retrogressive opposition, every

dilatory plea offered by theology, tradition, or selfishness,

finds itself peremptorily and irrevocably set aside.

I need the hypothesis of God to show the tie which unites

civilization with Nature.

In fact, this astonishing hypothesis, by which man is assimilated

to the absolute, implying identity of the laws of Nature and the

laws of reason, enables us to see in human industry the

complement of creative action, unites man with the globe which he

inhabits, and, in the cultivation of the domain in which

Providence has placed us, which thus becomes in part our work,

gives us a conception of the principle and end of all things.

If, then, humanity is not God, it is a continuation of God; or,

if a different phraseology be preferred, that which humanity does

today by design is the same thing that it began by instinct, and

which Nature seems to accomplish by necessity. In all these

cases, and whichever opinion we may choose, one thing remains

certain: the unity of action and law. Intelligent beings, actors

in an intelligently-devised fable, we may fearlessly reason from

ourselves to the universe and the eternal; and, when we shall

have completed the organization of labor, may say with pride, The

creation is explained.

Thus philosophy's field of exploration is fixed; tradition is the

starting-point of all speculation as to the future; utopia is

forever exploded; the study of the ME, transferred from the

individual conscience to the manifestations of the social will,

acquires the character of objectivity of which it has been

hitherto deprived; and, history becoming psychology, theology

anthropology, the natural sciences metaphysics, the theory of the

reason is deduced no longer from the vacuum of the intellect, but

from the innumerable forms of a Nature abundantly and directly

observable.

I need the hypothesis of God to prove my good-will towards a

multitude of sects, whose opinions I do not share, but whose

malice I fear:-- theists; I know one who, in the cause of God,

would be ready to draw sword, and, like Robespierre, use the

guillotine until the last atheist should be destroyed, not

dreaming that that atheist would be himself;-- mystics, whose

party, largely made up of students and women marching under the

banner of MM. Lamennais, Quinet, Leroux, and others, has taken

for a motto, "Like master, like man;" like God, like people; and,

to regulate the wages of the workingman, begins by restoring

religion;-- spiritualists, who, should I overlook the rights of

spirit, would accuse me of establishing the worship of matter,

against which I protest with all the strength of my

soul;--sensualists and materialists, to whom the divine dogma is

the symbol of constraint and the principle of enslavement of the

passions, outside of which, they say, there is for man neither

pleasure, nor virtue, nor genius;--eclectics and sceptics,

sellers and publishers of all the old philosophies, but not

philosophers themselves, united in one vast brotherhood, with

approbation and privilege, against whoever thinks, believes, or

affirms without their permission;--conservatives finally,

retrogressives, egotists, and hypocrites, preaching the love of

God by hatred of their neighbor, attributing to liberty the

world's misfortunes since the deluge, and scandalizing reason by

their foolishness.

Is it possible, however, that they will attack an hypothesis

which, far from blaspheming the revered phantoms of faith,

aspires only to exhibit them in broad daylight; which, instead of

rejecting traditional dogmas and the prejudices of conscience,

asks only to verify them; which, while defending itself against

exclusive opinions, takes for an axiom the infallibility of

reason, and, thanks to this fruitful principle, will doubtless

never decide against any of the antagonistic sects? Is it

possible that the religious and political conservatives will

charge me with disturbing the order of society, when I start with

the hypothesis of a sovereign intelligence, the source of every

thought of order; that the semi-Christian democrats will curse me

as an enemy of God, and consequently a traitor to the republic,

when I am seeking for the meaning and content of the idea of God;

and that the tradesmen of the university will impute to me the

impiety of demonstrating the non-value of their philosophical

products, when I am especially maintaining that philosophy should

be studied in its object,--that is, in the manifestations of

society and Nature? . . . .

I need the hypothesis of God to justify my style.

In my ignorance of everything regarding God, the world, the soul,

and destiny; forced to proceed like the materialist,--that is, by

observation and experience,--and to conclude in the language of

the believer, because there is no other; not knowing whether my

formulas, theological in spite of me, would be taken literally or

figuratively; in this perpetual contemplation of God, man, and

things, obliged to submit to the synonymy of all the terms

included in the three categories of thought, speech, and

action, but wishing to affirm nothing on either one side or the

other,--rigorous logic demanded that I should suppose, no more,

no less, this unknown that is called God. We are full of

Divinity, Jovis omnia plena; our monuments, our traditions, our

laws, our ideas, our languages, and our sciences, all are

infected by this indelible superstition outside of which we can

neither speak nor act, and without which we do not even think.

Finally, I need the hypothesis of God to explain the publication

of these new memoirs.

Our society feels itself big with events, and is anxious about

the future: how account for these vague presentiments by the sole

aid of a universal reason, immanent if you will, and permanent,

but impersonal, and therefore dumb, or by the idea of necessity,

if it implies that necessity is self-conscious, and consequently

has presentiments? There remains then, once more, an agent or

nightmare which weighs upon society, and gives it visions.

Now, when society prophesies, it puts questions in the mouths of

some, and answers in the mouths of others. And wise, then, he

who can listen and understand; for God himself has spoken, quia

locutus est Deus.

The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences has proposed the

following question:--

"To determine the general facts which govern the relations of

profits to wages, and to explain their respective oscillations."

A few years ago the same Academy asked, "What are the causes of

misery?" The nineteenth century has, in fact, but one

idea,--equality and reform. But the wind bloweth where it

listeth: many began to reflect upon the question, no one answered

it. The college of aruspices has, therefore, renewed its

question, but in more significant terms. It wishes to know

whether order prevails in the workshop; whether wages are

equitable; whether liberty and privilege compensate each other

justly; whether the idea of value, which controls all the facts

of exchange, is, in the forms in which the economists have

represented it, sufficiently exact; whether credit protects

labor; whether circulation is regular; whether the burdens of

society weigh equally on all, etc.

And, indeed, insufficiency of income being the immediate cause of

misery, it is fitting that we should know why, misfortune and

malevolence aside, the workingman's income is insufficient. It

is still the same question of inequality of fortunes, which has

made such a stir for a century past, and which, by a strange

fatality, continually reappears in academic programmes, as if

there lay the real difficulty of modern times.

Equality, then,--its principle, its means, its obstacles, its

theory, the motives of its postponement, the cause of social and

providential iniquities,--these the world has got to learn, in

spite of the sneers of incredulity.

I know well that the views of the Academy are not thus profound,

and that it equals a council of the Church in its horror of

novelties; but the more it turns towards the past, the more it

reflects the future, and the more, consequently, must we believe

in its inspiration: for the true prophets are those who do not

understand their utterances. Listen further.

"What," the Academy has asked, "are the most useful applications

of the principle of voluntary and private association that we can

make for the alleviation of misery?"

And again:--

"To expound the theory and principles of the contract of

insurance, to give its history, and to deduce from its rationale

and the facts the developments of which this contract is capable,

and the various useful applications possible in the present state

of commercial and industrial progress."

Publicists admit that insurance, a rudimentary form of commercial

solidarity, is an association in things, societas in re; that is,

a society whose conditions, founded on purely economical

relations, escape man's arbitrary dictation. So that a

philosophy of insurance or mutual guarantee of security, which

shall be deduced from the general theory of real (in re)

societies, will contain the formula of universal association, in

which no member of the Academy believes. And when, uniting

subject and object in the same point of view, the Academy

demands, by the side of a theory of association of interests, a

theory of voluntary association, it reveals to us the most

perfect form of society, and thereby affirms all that is most at

variance with its convictions. Liberty, equality, solidarity,

association! By what inconceivable blunder has so eminently

conservative a body offered to the citizens this new programme of

the rights of man? It was in this way that Caiaphas prophesied

redemption by disowning Jesus Christ.

Upon the first of these questions, forty-five memoirs were

addressed to the Academy within two years,--a proof that the

subject was marvellously well suited to the state of the public

mind. But among so many competitors no one having been deemed

worthy of the prize, the Academy has withdrawn the question;

alleging as a reason the incapacity of the competitors, but in

reality because, the failure of the contest being the sole object

that the Academy had in view, it behooved it to declare, without

further delay, that the hopes of the friends of association were

groundless.

Thus, then, the gentlemen of the Academy disavow, in their

session-chamber, their announcements from the tripod! There is

nothing in such a contradiction astonishing to me; and may God

preserve me from calling it a crime! The ancients believed that

revolutions announced their advent by dreadful signs, and that

among other prodigies animals spoke. This was a figure,

descriptive of those unexpected ideas and strange words which

circulate suddenly among the masses at critical moments, and

which seem to be entirely without human antecedent, so far

removed are they from the sphere of ordinary judgment. At the

time in which we live, such a thing could not fail to occur.

After having, by a prophetic instinct and a mechanical

spontaneity, pecudesque locut{ae}, proclaimed association, the

gentlemen of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences have

returned to their ordinary prudence; and with them custom has

conquered inspiration. Let us learn, then, how to distinguish

heavenly counsel from the interested judgments of men, and hold

it for certain that, in the discourse of sages, that is the most

trustworthy to which they have given the least reflection.

Nevertheless the Academy, in breaking so rudely with its

intuitions, seems to have felt some remorse. In place of a

theory of association in which, after reflection, it no longer

believes, it asks for a "Critical examination of Pestalozzi's

system of instruction and education, considered mainly in its

relation to the well-being and morality of the poor classes."

Who knows? perchance the relation between profits and wages,

association, the organization of labor indeed, are to be found at

the bottom of a system of instruction. Is not man's life a

perpetual apprenticeship? Are not philosophy and religion

humanity's education? To organize instruction, then, would be to

organize industry and fix the theory of society: the Academy,

in its lucid moments, always returns to that.

"What influence," the Academy again asks, "do progress and a

desire for material comfort have upon a nation's morality?"

Taken in its most obvious sense, this new question of the Academy

is commonplace, and fit at best to exercise a rhetorisian's

skill. But the Academy, which must continue till the end in its

ignorance of the revolutionary significance of its oracles, has

drawn aside the curtain in its commentary. What, then, so

profound has it discovered in this Epicurean thesis?

"The desire for luxury and its enjoyments," it tells us; "the

singular love of it felt by the majority; the tendency of hearts

and minds to occupy themselves with it exclusively; the agreement

of individuals AND THE STATE in making it the motive and the end

of all their projects, all their efforts, and all their

sacrifices,--engender general or individual feelings which,

beneficent or injurious, become principles of action more potent,

perhaps, than any which have heretofore governed men."

Never had moralists a more favorable opportunity to assail the

sensualism of the century, the venality of consciences, and the

corruption instituted by the government: instead of that, what

does the Academy of Moral Sciences do? With the most automatic

calmness, it establishes a series in which luxury, so long

proscribed by the stoics and ascetics,--those masters of

holiness,--must appear in its turn as a principle of conduct as

legitimate, as pure, and as grand as all those formerly invoked

by religion and philosophy. Determine, it tells us, the motives

of action (undoubtedly now old and worn-out) of which LUXURY is

historically the providential successor, and, from the

results of the former, calculate the effects of the latter.

Prove, in short, that Aristippus was only in advance of his

century, and that his system of morality must have its day, as

well as that of Zeno and A Kempis.

We are dealing, then, with a society which no longer wishes to be

poor; which mocks at everything that was once dear and sacred to

it,--liberty, religion, and glory,--so long as it has not wealth;

which, to obtain it, submits to all outrages, and becomes an

accomplice in all sorts of cowardly actions: and this burning

thirst for pleasure, this irresistible desire to arrive at

luxury,--a symptom of a new period in civilization,--is the

supreme commandment by virtue of which we are to labor for the

abolition of poverty: thus saith the Academy. What becomes,

then, of the doctrine of expiation and abstinence, the morality

of sacrifice, resignation, and happy moderation? What distrust

of the compensation promised in the other life, and what a

contradiction of the Gospel! But, above all, what a

justification of a government which has adopted as its system the

golden key! Why have religious men, Christians, Senecas, given

utterance in concert to so many immoral maxims?

The Academy, completing its thought, will reply to us:--

"Show how the progress of criminal justice, in the prosecution

and punishment of attacks upon persons and property, follows and

marks the ages of civilization from the savage condition up to

that of the best- governed nations."

Is it possible that the criminal lawyers in the Academy of Moral

Sciences foresaw the conclusion of their premises? The fact

whose history is now to be studied, and which the Academy

describes by the words "progress of criminal justice," is simply

the gradual mitigation which manifests itself, both in the

forms of criminal examinations and in the penalties inflicted, in

proportion as civilization increases in liberty, light, and

wealth. So that, the principle of repressive institutions being

the direct opposite of all those on which the welfare of society

depends, there is a constant elimination of all parts of the

penal system as well as all judicial paraphernalia, and the final

inference from this movement is that the guarantee of order lies

neither in fear nor punishment; consequently, neither in hell nor

religion.

What a subversion of received ideas! What a denial of all that

it is the business of the Academy of Moral Sciences to defend!

But, if the guarantee of order no longer lies in the fear of a

punishment to be suffered, either in this life or in another,

where then are to be found the guarantees protective of persons

and property? Or rather, without repressive institutions, what

becomes of property? And without property, what becomes of the

family?

The Academy, which knows nothing of all these things, replies

without agitation:--

"Review the various phases of the organization of the family upon

the soil of France from ancient times down to our day."

Which means: Determine, by the previous progress of family

organization, the conditions of the existence of the family in a

state of equality of fortunes, voluntary and free association,

universal solidarity, material comfort and luxury, and public

order without prisons, courts, police, or hangmen.

There will be astonishment, perhaps, at finding that the Academy

of Moral and Political Sciences, after having, like the boldest

innovators, called in question all the principles of social

order,--religion, family, property, justice,--has not also

proposed this problem: WHAT IS THE BEST FORM OF GOVERNMENT?

In fact, government is for society the source of all initiative,

every guarantee, every reform. It would be, then, interesting to

know whether the government, as constituted by the Charter, is

adequate to the practical solution of the Academy's questions.

But it would be a misconception of the oracles to imagine that

they proceed by induction and analysis; and precisely because the

political problem was a condition or corollary of the

demonstrations asked for, the Academy could not offer it for

competition. Such a conclusion would have opened its eyes, and,

without waiting for the memoirs of the competitors, it would have

hastened to suppress its entire programme. The Academy has

approached the question from above. It has said:--

The works of God are beautiful in their own essence, justificata

in semet ipsa; they are true, in a word, because they are his.

The thoughts of man resemble dense vapors pierced by long and

narrow flashes. WHAT, THEN, IS THE TRUTH IN RELATION TO US, AND

WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF CERTAINTY?

As if the Academy had said to us: You shall verify the

hypothesis of your existence, the hypothesis of the Academy which

interrogates you, the hypotheses of time, space, motion, thought,

and the laws of thought. Then you may verify the hypothesis of

pauperism, the hypothesis of inequality of conditions, the

hypothesis of universal association, the hypothesis of happiness,

the hypotheses of monarchy and republicanism, the hypothesis of

Providence! . . . .

A complete criticism of God and humanity.

I point to the programme of the honorable society: it is not I

who have fixed the conditions of my task, it is the Academy of

Moral and Political Sciences. Now, how can I satisfy these

conditions, if I am not myself endowed with infallibility; in

a word, if I am not God or divine? The Academy admits, then,

that divinity and humanity are identical, or at least

correlative; but the question now is in what consists this

correlation: such is the meaning of the problem of certainty,

such is the object of social philosophy.

Thus, then, in the name of the society that God inspires, an

Academy questions.

In the name of the same society, I am one of the prophets who

attempt to answer. The task is an immense one, and I do not

promise to accomplish it: I will go as far as God shall give me

strength. But, whatever I may say, it does not come from me: the

thought which inspires my pen is not personal, and nothing that I

write can be attributed to me. I shall give the facts as I have

seen them; I shall judge them by what I shall have said; I shall

call everything by its strongest name, and no one will take

offence. I shall inquire freely, and by the rules of divination

which I have learned, into the meaning of the divine purpose

which is now expressing itself through the eloquent lips of sages

and the inarticulate wailings of the people: and, though I should

deny all the prerogatives guaranteed by our Constitution, I shall

not be factious. I shall point my finger whither an invisible

influence is pushing us; and neither my action nor my words shall

be irritating. I shall stir up the cloud, and, though I should

cause it to launch the thunderbolt, I should be innocent. In

this solemn investigation to which the Academy invites me, I have

more than the right to tell the truth,--I have the right to say

what I think: may my thought, my words, and the truth be but one

and the same thing!

And you, reader,--for without a reader there is no writer,--you

are half of my work. Without you, I am only sounding brass;

with the aid of your attention, I will speak marvels. Do you see

this passing whirlwind called SOCIETY, from which burst forth,

with startling brilliancy, lightnings, thunders, and voices? I

wish to cause you to place your finger on the hidden springs

which move it; but to that end you must reduce yourself at my

command to a state of pure intelligence. The eyes of love and

pleasure are powerless to recognize beauty in a skeleton, harmony

in naked viscera, life in dark and coagulated blood: consequently

the secrets of the social organism are a sealed letter to the man

whose brain is beclouded by passion and prejudice. Such

sublimities are unattainable except by cold and silent

contemplation. Suffer me, then, before revealing to your eyes

the leaves of the book of life, to prepare your soul by this

sceptical purification which the great teachers of the

people--Socrates, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Remi, Bacon,

Descartes, Galileo, Kant, etc.--have always claimed of their

disciples.

Whoever you may be, clad in the rags of misery or decked in the

sumptuous vestments of luxury, I restore you to that state of

luminous nudity which neither the fumes of wealth nor the poisons

of envious poverty dim. How persuade the rich that the

difference of conditions arises from an error in the accounts;

and how can the poor, in their beggary, conceive that the

proprietor possesses in good faith? To investigate the

sufferings of the laborer is to the idler the most intolerable of

amusements; just as to do justice to the fortunate is to the

miserable the bitterest of draughts.

You occupy a high position: I strip you of it; there you are,

free. There is too much optimism beneath this official costume,

too much subordination, too much idleness. Science demands an

insurrection of thought: now, the thought of an official is his

salary.

Your mistress, beautiful, passionate, artistic, is, I like to

believe, possessed only by you. That is, your soul, your spirit,

your conscience, have passed into the most charming object of

luxury that nature and art have produced for the eternal torment

of fascinated mortals. I separate you from this divine half of

yourself: at the present day it is too much to wish for justice

and at the same time to love a woman. To think with grandeur and

clearness, man must remove the lining of his nature and hold to

his masculine hypostasis. Besides, in the state in which I have

put you, your lover would no longer know you: remember the wife

of Job.

What is your religion? . . . . Forget your faith, and, through

wisdom, become an atheist.--What! you say; an atheist in spite of

our hypothesis!--No, but because of our hypothesis. One's

thought must have been raised above divine things for a long time

to be entitled to suppose a personality beyond man, a life beyond

this life. For the rest, have no fears for your salvation. God

is not angry with those who are led by reason to deny him, any

more than he is anxious for those who are led by faith to worship

him; and, in the state of your conscience, the surest course for

you is to think nothing about him. Do you not see that it is

with religion as with governments, the most perfect of which

would be the denial of all? Then let no political or religious

fancy hold your soul captive; in this way only can you now keep

from being either a dupe or a renegade. Ah! said I in the days

of my enthusiastic youth, shall I not hear the tolling for the

second vespers of the republic, and our priests, dressed in white

tunics, singing after the Doric fashion the returning hymn:

Change o Dieu, notre servitude, comme le vent du desert en un

souffle rafraichissan! . . . . . But I have despaired of

republicans, and no longer know either religion or priests.

I should like also, in order to thoroughly secure your judgment,

dear reader, to render your soul insensible to pity, superior to

virtue, indifferent to happiness. But that would be too much to

expect of a neophyte. Remember only, and never forget, that

pity, happiness, and virtue, like country, religion, and love,

are masks. . . .

SYSTEM OF ECONOMICAL CONTRADICTIONS: OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF

MISERY.

CHAPTER I. OF THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

% 1.--Opposition between FACT and RIGHT in social economy.

I affirm the REALITY of an economic science.

This proposition, which few economists now dare to question, is

the boldest, perhaps, that a philosopher ever maintained; and the

inquiries to follow will prove, I hope, that its demonstration

will one day be deemed the greatest effort of the human mind.

I affirm, on the other hand, the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY as well as

the PROGRESSIVE nature of economic science, of all the sciences

in my opinion the most comprehensive, the purest, the best

supported by facts: a new proposition, which alters this science

into logic or metaphysics in concreto, and radically changes the

basis of ancient philosophy. In other words, economic science is

to me the objective form and realization of metaphysics; it is

metaphysics in action, metaphysics projected on the vanishing

plane of time; and whoever studies the laws of labor and exchange

is truly and specially a metaphysician.

After what I have said in the introduction, there is nothing in

this which should surprise any one. The labor of man continues

the work of God, who, in creating all beings, did but externally

realize the eternal laws of reason. Economic science is, then,

necessarily and at once a theory of ideas, a natural theology,

and a psychology. This general outline alone would have sufficed

to explain why, having to treat of economic matters, I was

obliged previously to suppose the existence of God, and by what

title I, a simple economist, aspire to solve the problem of

certainty.

But I hasten to say that I do not regard as a science the

incoherent ensemble of theories to which the name POLITICAL

ECONOMY has been officially given for almost a hundred years, and

which, in spite of the etymology of the name, is after ail but

the code, or immemorial routine, of property. These theories

offer us only the rudiments, or first section, of economic

science; and that is why, like property, they are all

contradictory of each other, and half the time inapplicable. The

proof of this assertion, which is, in one sense, a denial of

political economy as handed down to us by Adam Smith, Ricardo,

Malthus, and J. B. Say, and as we have known it for half a

century, will be especially developed in this treatise.

The inadequacy of political economy has at all times impressed

thoughtful minds, who, too fond of their dreams for practical

investigation, and confining themselves to the estimation of

apparent results, have constituted from the beginning a party of

opposition to the statu quo, and have devoted themselves to

persevering, and systematic ridicule of civilization and its

customs. Property, on the other hand, the basis of all social

institutions, has never lacked zealous defenders, who, proud to

be called PRACTICAL, have exchanged blow for blow with the

traducers of political economy, and have labored with a

courageous and often skilful hand to strengthen the edifice which

general prejudice and individual liberty have erected in concert.

The controversy between conservatives and reformers, still

pending, finds its counterpart, in the history of philosophy, in

the quarrel between realists and nominalists; it is almost

useless to add that, on both sides, right and wrong are equal,

and that the rivalry, narrowness, and intolerance of opinions

have been the sole cause of the misunderstanding.

Thus two powers are contending for the government of the world,

and cursing each other with the fervor of two hostile religions:

political economy, or tradition; and socialism, or utopia.

What is, then, in more explicit terms, political economy? What

is socialism?

Political economy is a collection of the observations thus far

made in regard to the phenomena of the production and

distribution of wealth; that is, in regard to the most common,

most spontaneous, and therefore most genuine, forms of labor and

exchange.

The economists have classified these observations as far as they

were able; they have described the phenomena, and ascertained

their contingencies and relations; they have observed in them, in

many cases, a quality of necessity which has given them the name

of LAWS; and this ensemble of information, gathered from the

simplest manifestations of society, constitutes political

economy.

Political economy is, therefore, the natural history of the most

apparent and most universally accredited customs, traditions,

practices, and methods of humanity in all that concerns the

production and distribution of wealth. By this title,

political economy considers itself legitimate in FACT and in

RIGHT: in fact, because the phenomena which it studies are

constant, spontaneous, and universal; in right, because these

phenomena rest on the authority of the human race, the strongest

authority possible. Consequently, political economy calls itself

a SCIENCE; that is, a rational and systematic knowledge of

regular and necessary facts.

Socialism, which, like the god Vishnu, ever dying and ever

returning to life, has experienced within a score of years its

ten-thousandth incarnation in the persons of five or six

revelators,--socialism affirms the irregularity of the present

constitution of society, and, consequently, of all its previous

forms. It asserts, and proves, that the order of civilization is

artificial, contradictory, inadequate; that it engenders

oppression, misery, and crime; it denounces, not to say

calumniates, the whole past of social life, and pushes on with

all its might to a reformation of morals and institutions.

Socialism concludes by declaring political economy a false and

sophistical hypothesis, devised to enable the few to exploit the

many; and applying the maxim A fructibus cognoscetis, it ends

with a demonstration of the impotence and emptiness of political

economy by the list of human calamities for which it makes it

responsible.

But if political economy is false, jurisprudence, which in all

countries is the science of law and custom, is false also; since,

founded on the distinction of thine and mine, it supposes the

legitimacy of the facts described and classified by political

economy. The theories of public and international law, with all

the varieties of representative government, are also false, since

they rest on the principle of individual appropriation and the

absolute sovereignty of wills.

All these consequences socialism accepts. To it, political

economy, regarded by many as the physiology of wealth, is but the

organization of robbery and poverty; just as jurisprudence,

honored by legists with the name of written reason, is, in its

eyes, but a compilation of the rubrics of legal and official

spoliation,--in a word, of property. Considered in their

relations, these two pretended sciences, political economy and

law, form, in the opinion of socialism, the complete theory of

iniquity and discord. Passing then from negation to affirmation,

socialism opposes the principle of property with that of

association, and makes vigorous efforts to reconstruct social

economy from top to bottom; that is, to establish a new code, a

new political system, with institutions and morals diametrically

opposed to the ancient forms.

Thus the line of demarcation between socialism and political

economy is fixed, and the hostility flagrant.

Political economy tends toward the glorification of selfishness;

socialism favors the exaltation of communism.

The economists, saving a few violations of their principles, for

which they deem it their duty to blame governments, are optimists

with regard to accomplished facts; the socialists, with regard to

facts to be accomplished.

The first affirm that that which ought to be IS; the second,

that that which ought to be IS NOT. Consequently, while the

first are defenders of religion, authority, and the other

principles contemporary with, and conservative of,

property,--although their criticism, based solely on reason,

deals frequent blows at their own prejudices,--the second reject

authority and faith, and appeal exclusively to science,--

although a certain religiosity, utterly illiberal, and an

unscientific disdain for facts, are always the most obvious

characteristics of their doctrines.

For the rest, neither party ever ceases to accuse the other of

incapacity and sterility.

The socialists ask their opponents to account for the inequality

of conditions, for those commercial debaucheries in which

monopoly and competition, in monstrous union, perpetually give

birth to luxury and misery; they reproach economic theories,

always modeled after the past, with leaving the future hopeless;

in short, they point to the regime of property as a horrible

hallucination, against which humanity has protested and struggled

for four thousand years.

The economists, on their side, defy socialists to produce a

system in which property, competition, and political organization

can be dispensed with; they prove, with documents in hand, that

all reformatory projects have ever been nothing but rhapsodies of

fragments borrowed from the very system that socialism sneers

at,--plagiarisms, in a word, of political economy, outside of

which socialism is incapable of conceiving and formulating an

idea.

Every day sees the proofs in this grave suit accumulating, and

the question becoming confused.

While society has traveled and stumbled, suffered and thrived, in

pursuing the economic routine, the socialists, since Pythagoras,

Orpheus, and the unfathomable Hermes, have labored to establish

their dogma in opposition to political economy. A few attempts

at association in accordance with their views have even been made

here and there: but as yet these exceptional undertakings, lost

in the ocean of property, have been without result; and, as if

destiny had resolved to exhaust the economic hypothesis before

attacking the socialistic utopia, the reformatory party is

obliged to content itself with pocketing the sarcasms of its

adversaries while waiting for its own turn to come.

This, then, is the state of the cause: socialism incessantly

denounces the crimes of civilization, verifies daily the

powerlessness of political economy to satisfy the harmonic

attractions of man, and presents petition after petition;

political economy fills its brief with socialistic systems, all

of which, one after another, pass away and die, despised by

common sense. The persistence of evil nourishes the complaint of

the one, while the constant succession of reformatory checks

feeds the malicious irony of the other. When will judgment be

given? The tribunal is deserted; meanwhile, political economy

improves its opportunities, and, without furnishing bail,

continues to lord it over the world; possideo quia possideo.

If we descend from the sphere of ideas to the realities of the

world, the antagonism will appear still more grave and

threatening.

When, in these recent years, socialism, instigated by prolonged

convulsions, made its fantastic appearance in our midst, men whom

all controversy had found until then indifferent and lukewarm

went back in fright to monarchical and religious ideas;

democracy, which was charged with being developed at last to its

ultimate, was cursed and driven back. This accusation of the

conservatives against the democrats was a libel. Democracy is by

nature as hostile to the socialistic idea as incapable of filling

the place of royalty, against which it is its destiny endlessly

to conspire. This soon became evident, and we are witnesses of

it daily in the professions of Christian and proprietary faith by

democratic publicists, whose abandonment by the people began at

that moment.

On the other hand, philosophy proves no less distinct from

socialism, no less hostile to it, than politics and religion.

For just as in politics the principle of democracy is the

sovereignty of numbers, and that of monarchy the sovereignty of

the prince; just as likewise in affairs of conscience religion is

nothing but submission to a mystical being, called God, and to

the priests who represent him; just as finally in the economic

world property--that is, exclusive control by the individual of

the instruments of labor--is the point of departure of every

theory,--so philosophy, in basing itself upon the a priori

assumptions of reason, is inevitably led to attribute to the ME

alone the generation and autocracy of ideas, and to deny the

metaphysical value of experience; that is, universally to

substitute, for the objective law, absolutism, despotism.

Now, a doctrine which, springing up suddenly in the heart of

society, without antecedents and without ancestors, rejected from

every department of conscience and society the arbitrary

principle, in order to substitute as sole truth the relation of

facts; which broke with tradition, and consented to make use of

the past only as a point from which to launch forth into the

future,--such a doctrine could not fail to stir up against it the

established AUTHORITIES; and we can see today how, in spite of

their internal discords, the said AUTHORITIES, which are but one,

combine to fight the monster that is ready to swallow them.

To the workingmen who complain of the insufficiency of wages and

the uncertainty of labor, political economy opposes the liberty

of commerce; to the citizens who are seeking for the conditions

of liberty and order, the ideologists respond with representative

systems; to the tender souls who, having lost their ancient

faith, ask the reason and end of their existence, religion

proposes the unfathomable secrets of Providence, and philosophy

holds doubt in reserve. Subterfuges always; complete ideas,

in which heart and mind find rest, never! Socialism cries that

it is time to set sail for the mainland, and to enter port: but,

say the antisocialists, there is no port; humanity sails onward

in God's care, under the command of priests, philosophers,

orators, economists, and our circumnavigation is eternal.

Thus society finds itself, at its origin, divided into two great

parties: the one traditional and essentially hierarchical, which,

according to the object it is considering, calls itself by turns

royalty or democracy, philosophy or religion, in short, property;

the other socialism, which, coming to life at every crisis of

civilization, proclaims itself preeminently ANARCHICAL and

ATHEISTIC; that is, rebellious against all authority, human and

divine.

Now, modern civilization has demonstrated that in a conflict of

this nature the truth is found, not in the exclusion of one of

the opposites, but wholly and solely in the reconciliation of the

two; it is, I say, a fact of science that every antagonism,

whether in Nature or in ideas, is resolvable in a more general

fact or in a complex formula, which harmonizes the opposing

factors by absorbing them, so to speak, in each other. Can we

not, then, men of common sense, while awaiting the solution which

the future will undoubtedly bring forth, prepare ourselves for

this great transition by an analysis of the struggling powers, as

well as their positive and negative qualities? Such a work,

performed with accuracy and conscientiousness, even though it

should not lead us directly to the solution, would have at least

the inestimable advantage of revealing to us the conditions of

the problem, and thereby putting us on our guard against every

form of utopia.

What is there, then, in political economy that is necessary

and true; whither does it tend; what are its powers; what are

its wishes? It is this which I propose to determine in this

work. What is the value of socialism? The same investigation

will answer this question also.

For since, after all, socialism and political economy pursue the

same end,--namely, liberty, order, and well-being among men,--it

is evident that the conditions to be fulfilled--in other words,

the difficulties to be overcome--to attain this end, are also the

same for both, and that it remains only to examine the methods

attempted or proposed by either party. But since, moreover, it

has been given thus far to political economy alone to translate

its ideas into acts, while socialism has scarcely done more than

indulge in perpetual satire, it is no less clear that, in judging

the works of economy according to their merit, we at the same

time shall reduce to its just value the invective of the

socialists: so that our criticism, though apparently special,

will lead to absolute and definitive conclusions.

This it is necessary to make clearer by a few examples, before

entering fully upon the examination of political economy.

% 2.--Inadequacy of theories and criticisms.

We will record first an important observation: the contending

parties agree in acknowledging a common authority, whose support

each claims,--SCIENCE.

Plato, a utopian, organized his ideal republic in the name of

science, which, through modesty and euphemism, he called

philosophy. Aristotle, a practical man, refuted the Platonic

utopia in the name of the same philosophy. Thus the social war

has continued since Plato and Aristotle. The modern socialists

refer all things to science one and indivisible, but without

power to agree either as to its content, its limits, or its

method; the economists, on their side, affirm that social science

in no wise differs from political economy.

It is our first business, then, to ascertain what a science of

society must be.

Science, in general, is the logically arranged and systematic

knowledge of that which IS.

Applying this idea to society, we will say: Social science is

the logically arranged and systematic knowledge, not of that

which society HAS BEEN, nor of that which it WILL BE, but of

that which it IS in its whole life; that is, in the sum total of

its successive manifestations: for there alone can it have reason

and system. Social science must include human order, not alone

in such or such a period of duration, nor in a few of its

elements; but in all its principles and in the totality of its

existence: as if social evolution, spread throughout time and

space, should find itself suddenly gathered and fixed in a

picture which, exhibiting the series of the ages and the sequence

of phenomena, revealed their connection and unity. Such must be

the science of every living and progressive reality; such social

science indisputably is.

It may be, then, that political economy, in spite of its

individualistic tendency and its exclusive affirmations, is a

constituent part of social science, in which the phenomena that

it describes are like the starting-points of a vast

triangulation and the elements of an organic and complex whole.

From this point of view, the progress of humanity, proceeding

from the simple to the complex, would be entirely in harmony with

the progress of science; and the conflicting and so often

desolating facts, which are today the basis and object of

political economy, would have to be considered by us as so

many special hypotheses, successively realized by humanity in

view of a superior hypothesis, whose realization would solve all

difficulties, and satisfy socialism without destroying political

economy. For, as I said in my introduction, in no case can we

admit that humanity, however it expresses itself, is mistaken.

Let us now make this clearer by facts.

The question now most disputed is unquestionably that of the

ORGANIZATION OF LABOR.

As John the Baptist preached in the desert, REPENT YE, so the

socialists go about proclaiming everywhere this novelty old as

the world, ORGANIZE LABOR, though never able to tell what, in

their opinion, this organization should be. However that may be,

the economists have seen that this socialistic clamor was

damaging their theories: it was, indeed, a rebuke to them for

ignoring that which they ought first to recognize,--labor. They

have replied, therefore, to the attack of their adversaries,

first by maintaining that labor is organized, that there is no

other organization of labor than liberty to produce and exchange,

either on one's own personal account, or in association with

others,--in which case the course to be pursued has been

prescribed by the civil and commercial codes. Then, as this

argument served only to make them the laughing-stock of their

antagonists, they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the

socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this

organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by

saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without

sense,--an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are

full of these pitiless conclusions.

Nevertheless, it is certain that the phrase organization of labor

contains as clear and rational a meaning as these that

follow: organization of the workshop, organization of the

army, organization of police, organization of charity,

organization of war. In this respect, the argument of the

economists is deplorably irrational. No less certain is it that

the organization of labor cannot be a utopia and chimera; for at

the moment that labor, the supreme condition of civilization,

begins to exist, it follows that it is already submitted to an

organization, such as it is, which satisfies the economists, but

which the socialists think detestable.

There remains, then, relatively to the proposal to organize labor

formulated by socialism, this objection,--that labor is

organized. Now, this is utterly untenable, since it is notorious

that in labor, supply, demand, division, quantity, proportion,

price, and security, nothing, absolutely nothing is regulated; on

the contrary, everything is given up to the caprices of

free-will; that is, to chance.

As for us, guided by the idea that we have formed of social

science, we shall affirm, against the socialists and against the

economists, not that labor MUST BE ORGANIZED, nor that it is

ORGANIZED but that it IS BEING ORGANIZED.

Labor, we say, is being organized: that is, the process of

organization has been going on from the beginning of the world,

and will continue till the end. Political economy teaches us the

primary elements of this organization; but socialism is right in

asserting that, in its present form, the organization is

inadequate and transitory; and the whole mission of science is

continually to ascertain, in view of the results obtained and the

phenomena in course of development, what innovations can be

immediately effected.

Socialism and political economy, then, while waging a burlesque

war, pursue in reality the same idea,--the organization of labor.

But both are guilty of disloyalty to science and of mutual

calumny, when on the one hand political economy, mistaking for

science its scraps of theory, denies the possibility of further

progress; and when socialism, abandoning tradition, aims at

reestablishing society on undiscoverable bases.

Thus socialism is nothing but a profound criticism and continual

development of political economy; and, to apply here the

celebrated aphorism of the school, Nihil est in intellectu, quod

non prius fuerit in sensu, there is nothing in the socialistic

hypotheses which is not duplicated in economic practice. On the

other hand, political economy is but an impertinent rhapsody, so

long as it affirms as absolutely valid the facts collected by

Adam Smith and J. B. Say.

Another question, no less disputed than the preceding one, is

that of usury, or lending at interest.

Usury, or in other words the price of use, is the emolument, of

whatever nature, which the proprietor derives from the loan of

his property. Quidquid sorti accrescit usura est, say the

theologians. Usury, the foundation of credit, was one of the

first of the means which social spontaneity employed in its work

of organization, and whose analysis discloses the profound laws

of civilization. The ancient philosophers and the Fathers of the

Church, who must be regarded here as the representatives of

socialism in the early centuries of the Christian era, by a

singular fallacy,--which arose however from the paucity of

economic knowledge in their day,--allowed farm-rent and condemned

interest on money, because, as they believed, money was

unproductive. They distinguished consequently between the loan

of things which are consumed by use--among which they included

money--and the loan of things which, without being consumed,

yield a product to the user.

The economists had no difficulty in showing, by generalizing the

idea of rent, that in the economy of society the action of

capital, or its productivity, was the same whether it was

consumed in wages or retained the character of an instrument;

that, consequently, it was necessary either to prohibit the rent

of land or to allow interest on money, since both were by the

same title payment for privilege, indemnity for loan. It

required more than fifteen centuries to get this idea accepted,

and to reassure the consciences that had been terrified by the

anathemas pronounced by Catholicism against usury. But finally

the weight of evidence and the general desire favored the

usurers: they won the battle against socialism; and from this

legitimation of usury society gained some immense and

unquestionable advantages. Under these circumstances socialism,

which had tried to generalize the law enacted by Moses for the

Israelites alone, Non foeneraberis proximo tuo, sed alieno, was

beaten by an idea which it had accepted from the economic

routine,-- namely, farm-rent,--elevated into the theory of the

productivity of capital.

But the economists in their turn were less fortunate, when they

were afterwards called upon to justify farm-rent in itself, and

to establish this theory of the product of capital. It may be

said that, on this point, they have lost all the advantage they

had at first gained against socialism.

Undoubtedly--and I am the first to recognize it--the rent of

land, like that of money and all personal and real property, is a

spontaneous and universal fact, which has its source in the

depths of our nature, and which soon becomes, by its natural

development, one of the most potent means of organization. I

shall prove even that interest on capital is but the

materialization of the aphorism, ALL LABOR SHOULD LEAVE AN

EXCESS. But in the face of this theory, or rather this fiction,

of the productivity of capital, arises another thesis no less

certain, which in these latter days has struck the ablest

economists: it is that all value is born of labor, and is

composed essentially of wages; in other words, that no wealth has

its origin in privilege, or acquires any value except through

work; and that, consequently, labor alone is the source of

revenue among men. How, then, reconcile the theory of farm-rent

or productivity of capital--a theory confirmed by universal

custom, which conservative political economy is forced to accept

but cannot justify--with this other theory which shows that value

is normally composed of wages, and which inevitably ends, as we

shall demonstrate, in an equality in society between net product

and raw product?

The socialists have not wasted the opportunity. Starting with

the principle that labor is the source of all income, they began

to call the holders of capital to account for their farm-rents

and emoluments; and, as the economists won the first victory by

generalizing under a common expression farm-rent and usury, so

the socialists have taken their revenge by causing the seignorial

rights of capital to vanish before the still more general

principle of labor. Property has been demolished from top to

bottom: the economists could only keep silent; but, powerless to

arrest itself in this new descent, socialism has slipped clear to

the farthest boundaries of communistic utopia, and, for want of a

practical solution, society is reduced to a position where it can

neither justify its tradition, nor commit itself to experiments

in which the least mistake would drive it backward several

thousand years.

In such a situation what is the mandate of science?

Certainly not to halt in an arbitrary, inconceivable, and

impossible juste milieu; it is to generalize further, and

discover a third principle, a fact, a superior law, which shall

explain the fiction of capital and the myth of property, and

reconcile them with the theory which makes labor the origin of

all wealth. This is what socialism, if it wishes to proceed

logically, must undertake. In fact, the theory of the real

productivity of labor, and that of the fictitious productivity of

capital, are both essentially economical: socialism has

endeavored only to show the contradiction between them, without

regard to experience or logic; for it appears to be as destitute

of the one as of the other. Now, in law, the litigant who

accepts the authority of a title in one particular must accept it

in all; it is not allowable to divide the documents and proofs.

Had socialism the right to decline the authority of political

economy in relation to usury, when it appealed for support to

this same authority in relation to the analysis of value? By no

means. All that socialism could demand in such a case was,

either that political economy should be directed to reconcile its

theories, or that it might be itself intrusted with this

difficult task.

The more closely we examine these solemn discussions, the more

clearly we see that the whole trouble is due to the fact that one

of the parties does not wish to see, while the other refuses to

advance.

It is a principle of our law that no one can be deprived of his

property except for the sake of general utility, and in

consideration of a fair indemnity payable in advance.

This principle is eminently an economic one; for, on the one

hand, it assumes the right of eminent domain of the citizen

expropriated, whose consent, according to the democratic spirit

of the social compact, is necessarily presupposed. On the other

hand, the indemnity, or the price of the article taken, is

fixed, not by the intrinsic value of the article, but by the

general law of commerce,--supply and demand; in a word, by

opinion. Expropriation in the name of society may be likened to

a contract of convenience, agreed to by each with all; not only

then must the price be paid, but the convenience also must be

paid for: and it is thus, in reality, that the indemnity is

estimated. If the Roman legists had seen this analogy, they

undoubtedly would have hesitated less over the question of

expropriation for the sake of public utility.

Such, then, is the sanction of the social right of expropriation:

indemnity.

Now, practically, not only is the principle of indemnity not

applied in all cases where it ought to be, but it is impossible

that it should be so applied. Thus, the law which established

railways provided indemnity for the lands to be occupied by the

rails; it did nothing for the multitude of industries dependent

upon the previous method of conveyance, whose losses far exceeded

the value of the lands whose owners received compensation.

Similarly, when the question of indemnifying the manufacturers of

beet-root sugar was under consideration, it occurred to no one

that the State ought to indemnify also the large number of

laborers and employees who earned their livelihood in the

beet-root industry, and who were, perhaps, to be reduced to want.

Nevertheless, it is certain, according to the idea of capital and

the theory of production, that as the possessor of land, whose

means of labor is taken from him by the railroad, has a right to

be indemnified, so also the manufacturer, whose capital is

rendered unproductive by the same railroad, is entitled to

indemnification. Why, then, is he not indemnified? Alas!

because to indemnify him is impossible. With such a system of

justice and impartiality society would be, as a general thing,

unable to act, and would return to the fixedness of Roman

justice. There must be victims. The principle of indemnity is

consequently abandoned; to one or more classes of citizens the

State is inevitably bankrupt.

At this point the socialists appear. They charge that the sole

object of political economy is to sacrifice the interests of the

masses and create privileges; then, finding in the law of

expropriation the rudiment of an agrarian law, they suddenly

advocate universal expropriation; that is, production and

consumption in common.

But here socialism relapses from criticism into utopia, and its

incapacity becomes freshly apparent in its contradictions. If

the principle of expropriation for the sake of public utility,

carried to its logical conclusion, leads to a complete

reorganization of society, before commencing the work the

character of this new organization must be understood; now,

socialism, I repeat, has no science save a few bits of physiology

and political economy. Further, it is necessary in accordance

with the principle of indemnity, if not to compensate citizens,

at least to guarantee to them the values which they part with; it

is necessary, in short, to insure them against loss. Now,

outside of the public fortune, the management of which it

demands, where will socialism find security for this same

fortune?

It is impossible, in sound and honest logic, to escape this

circle. Consequently the communists, more open in their dealings

than certain other sectarians of flowing and pacific ideas,

decide the difficulty; and promise, the power once in their

hands, to expropriate all and indemnify and guarantee none. At

bottom, that would be neither unjust nor disloyal.

Unfortunately, to burn is not to reply, as the interesting

Desmoulins said to Robespierre; and such a discussion ends

always in fire and the guillotine. Here, as everywhere, two

rights, equally sacred, stand in the presence of each other, the

right of the citizen and the right of the State; it is enough to

say that there is a superior formula which reconciles the

socialistic utopias and the mutilated theories of political

economy, and that the problem is to discover it. In this

emergency what are the contending parties doing? Nothing. We

might say rather that they raise questions only to get an

opportunity to redress injuries. What do I say? The questions

are not even understood by them; and, while the public is

considering the sublime problems of society and human destiny,

the professors of social science, orthodox and heretics, do not

agree on principles. Witness the question which occasioned these

inquiries, and which its authors certainly understand no better

than its disparagers,--THE RELATION OF PROFITS AND WAGES.

What! an Academy of economists has offered for competition a

question the terms of which it does not understand! How, then,

could it have conceived the idea?

Well! I know that my statement is astonishing and incredible; but

it is true. Like the theologians, who answer metaphysical

problems only by myths and allegories, which always reproduce the

problems but never solve them, the economists reply to the

questions which they ask only by relating how they were led to

ask them: should they conceive that it was possible to go

further, they would cease to be economists.

For example, what is profit? That which remains for the manager

after he has paid all the expenses. Now, the expenses consist of

the labor performed and the materials consumed; or, in fine,

wages. What, then, is the wages of a workingman? The least

that can be given him; that is, we do not know. What should be

the price of the merchandise put upon the market by the manager?

The highest that he can obtain; that is, again, we do not know.

Political economy prohibits the supposition that the prices of

merchandise and labor can be FIXED, although it admits that they

can be ESTIMATED; and that for the reason, say the economists,

that estimation is essentially an arbitrary operation, which

never can lead to sure and certain conclusions. How, then, shall

we find the relation between two unknowns which, according to

political economy, cannot be determined? Thus political economy

proposes insolvable problems; and yet we shall soon see that it

must propose them, and that our century must solve them. That is

why I said that the Academy of Moral Sciences, in offering for

competition the question of the relation of profits and wages,

spoke unconsciously, spoke prophetically.

But it will be said, Is it not true that, if labor is in great

demand and laborers are scarce, wages will rise, while profits on

the other hand will decrease; that if, in the press of

competition, there is an excess of production, there will be a

stoppage and forced sales, consequently no profit for the manager

and a danger of idleness for the laborer; that then the latter

will offer his labor at a reduced price; that, if a machine is

invented, it will first extinguish the fires of its rivals; then,

a monopoly established, and the laborer made dependent on the

employer, profits and wages will be inversely proportional?

Cannot all these causes, and others besides, be studied,

ascertained, counterbalanced, etc.?

Oh, monographs, histories!--we have been saturated with them

since the days of Adam Smith and J. B. Say, and they are scarcely

more than variations of these authors' words. But it is not thus

that the question should be understood, although the Academy has

given it no other meaning. The RELATION OF PROFITS AND WAGES

should be considered in an absolute sense, and not from the

inconclusive point of view of the accidents of commerce and the

division of interests: two things which must ultimately receive

their interpretation. Let me explain myself.

Considering producer and consumer as a single individual, whose

recompense is naturally equal to his product; then dividing this

product into two parts, one which rewards the producer for his

outlay, another which represents his profit, according to the

axiom that all labor should leave an excess,--we have to

determine the relation of one of these parts to the other. This

done, it will be easy to deduce the ratio of the fortunes of

these two classes of men, employers and wage-laborers, as well

as account for all commercial oscillations. This will be a

series of corollaries to add to the demonstration.

Now, that such a relation may exist and be estimated, there must

necessarily be a law, internal or external, which governs wages

and prices; and since, in the present state of things, wages and

prices vary and oscillate continually, we must ask what are the

general facts, the causes, which make value vary and oscillate,

and within what limits this oscillation takes place.

But this very question is contrary to the accepted principles;

for whoever says OSCILLATION necessarily supposes a mean

direction toward which value's centre of gravity continually

tends; and when the Academy asks that we DETERMINE THE

OSCILLATIONS OF PROFIT AND WAGES, it asks thereby that we

DETERMINE VALUE. Now that is precisely what the gentlemen of

the Academy deny: they are unwilling to admit that, if value is

variable, it is for that very reason determinable; that

variability is the sign and condition of determinability. They

pretend that value, ever varying, can never be determined. This

is like maintaining that, given the number of oscillations of a

pendulum per second, their amplitude, and the latitude and

elevation of the spot where the experiment is performed, the

length of the pendulum cannot be determined because the pendulum

is in motion. Such is political economy's first article of

faith.

As for socialism, it does not appear to have understood the

question, or to be concerned about it. Among its many organs,

some simply and merely put aside the problem by substituting

division for distribution,--that is, by banishing number and

measure from the social organism: others relieve themselves of

the embarrassment by applying universal suffrage to the wages

question. It is needless to say that these platitudes find dupes

by thousands and hundreds of thousands.

The condemnation of political economy has been formulated by

Malthus in this famous passage:--

A man who is born into a world already occupied, his family

unable to support him, and society not requiring his labor,--such

a man, I say, has not the least right to claim any nourishment

whatever: he is really one too many on the earth. At the great

banquet of Nature there is no plate laid for him. Nature

commands him to take himself away, and she will not be slow to

put her order into execution.[6]

[6 The passage quoted may not be given in the exact words used by

Malthus, it having reached its present shape through the medium

of a French rendering--Translator.

This then is the necessary, the fatal, conclusion of political

economy,--a conclusion which I shall demonstrate by evidence

hitherto unknown in this field of inquiry,--Death to him who does

not possess!

In order better to grasp the thought of Malthus, let us translate

it into philosophical propositions by stripping it of its

rhetorical gloss:--

"Individual liberty, and property, which is its expression, are

economical data; equality and solidarity are not.

"Under this system, each one by himself, each one for himself:

labor, like all merchandise, is subject to fluctuation: hence the

risks of the proletariat.

"Whoever has neither income nor wages has no right to demand

anything of others: his misfortune falls on his own head; in the

game of fortune, luck has been against him."

From the point of view of political economy these propositions

are irrefutable; and Malthus, who has formulated them with such

alarming exactness, is secure against all reproach. From the

point of view of the conditions of social science, these same

propositions are radically false, and even contradictory.

The error of Malthus, or rather of political economy, does not

consist in saying that a man who has nothing to eat must die; or

in maintaining that, under the system of individual

appropriation, there is no course for him who has neither labor

nor income but to withdraw from life by suicide, unless he

prefers to be driven from it by starvation: such is, on the one

hand, the law of our existence; such is, on the other, the

consequence of property; and M. Rossi has taken altogether too

much trouble to justify the good sense of Malthus on this point.

I suspect, indeed, that M. Rossi, in making so lengthy and loving

an apology for Malthus, intended to recommend political economy

in the same way that his fellow-countryman Machiavel, in his book

entitled "The Prince," recommended despotism to the

admiration of the world. In pointing out misery as the necessary

condition of industrial and commercial absolutism, M. Rossi seems

to say to us: There is your law, your justice, your political

economy; there is property.

But Gallic simplicity does not understand artifice; and it would

have been better to have said to France, in her immaculate

tongue: The error of Malthus, the radical vice of political

economy, consists, in general terms, in affirming as a definitive

state a transitory condition,-- namely, the division of society

into patricians and proletaires; and, particularly, in saying

that in an organized, and consequently solidaire, society, there

may be some who possess, labor, and consume, while others have

neither possession, nor labor, nor bread. Finally Malthus, or

political economy, reasons erroneously when seeing in the faculty

of indefinite reproduction--which the human race enjoys in

neither greater nor less degree than all animal and vegetable

species--a permanent danger of famine; whereas it is only

necessary to show the necessity, and consequently the existence,

of a law of equilibrium between population and production.

In short, the theory of Malthus--and herein lies the great merit

of this writer, a merit which none of his colleagues has dreamed

of attributing to him--is a reductio ad absurdum of all political

economy.

As for socialism, that was summed up long since by Plato and

Thomas More in a single word, UTOPIA,--that is, NO-PLACE, a

chimera.

Nevertheless, for the honor of the human mind and that justice

may be done to all, this must be said: neither could economic and

legislative science have had any other beginning than they

did have, nor can society remain in this original position.

Every science must first define its domain, produce and collect

its materials: before system, facts; before the age of art, the

age of learning. The economic science, subject like every other

to the law of time and the conditions of experience, before

seeking to ascertain how things OUGHT TO TAKE PLACE in society,

had to tell us how things DO TAKE PLACE; and all these processes

which the authors speak of so pompously in their books as LAWS,

PRINCIPLES, and THEORIES, in spite of their incoherence and

inconsistency, had to be gathered up with scrupulous diligence,

and described with strict impartiality. The fulfilment of this

task called for more genius perhaps, certainly for more

self-sacrifice, than will be demanded by the future progress of

the science.

If, then, social economy is even yet rather an aspiration towards

the future than a knowledge of reality, it must be admitted that

the elements of this study are all included in political economy;

and I believe that I express the general sentiment in saying that

this opinion has become that of the vast majority of minds. The

present finds few defenders, it is true; but the disgust with

utopia is no less universal: and everybody understands that the

truth lies in a formula which shall reconcile these two terms:

CONSERVATION and MOTION.

Thus, thanks to Adam Smith, J. B. Say, Ricardo, and Malthus, as

well as their rash opponents, the mysteries of fortune, atria

Ditis, are uncovered; the power of capital, the oppression of the

laborer, the machinations of monopoly, illumined at all points,

shun the public gaze. Concerning the facts observed and

described by the economists, we reason and conjecture:

abusive laws, iniquitous customs, respected so long as the

obscurity which sustained their life lasted, with difficulty

dragged to the daylight, are expiring beneath the general

reprobation; it is suspected that the government of society must

be learned no longer from an empty ideology, after the fashion of

the Contrat social, but, as Montesquieu foresaw, from the

RELATION OF THINGS; and already a Left of eminently socialistic

tendencies, composed of savants, magistrates, legists,

professors, and even capitalists and manufacturers,--all born

representatives and defenders of privilege,--and of a million of

adepts, is forming in the nation above and outside of

PARLIAMENTARY opinions, and seeking, by an analysis of economic

facts, to capture the secrets of the life of societies.

Let us represent political economy, then, as an immense plain,

strewn with materials prepared for an edifice. The laborers

await the signal, full of ardor, and burning to commence the

work: but the architect has disappeared without leaving the plan.

The economists have stored their memories with many things:

unhappily they have not the shadow of an estimate. They know the

origin and history of each piece; what it cost to make it; what

wood makes the best joists, and what clay the best bricks; what

has been expended in tools and carts; how much the carpenters

earned, and how much the stone-cutters: they do not know the

destination and the place of anything. The economists cannot

deny that they have before them the fragments, scattered

pell-mell, of a chef-d'oeuvre, disjecti membra poetae; but it

has been impossible for them as yet to recover the general

design, and, whenever they have attempted any comparisons, they

have met only with incoherence. Driven to despair at last by

their fruitless combinations, they have erected as a dogma the

architectural incongruity of the science, or, as they say, the

INCONVENIENCES of its principles; in a word, they have denied the

science.[7]

[7] "The principle which governs the life of nations is not pure

science: it is the total of the complex data which depend on the

state of enlightenment, on needs and interests." Thus expressed

itself, in December, 1844, one of the clearest minds that France

contained, M. Leon Faucher. Explain, if you can, how a man of

this stamp was led by his economic convictions to declare that

the COMPLEX DATA of society are opposed to PURE SCIENCE.

Thus the division of labor, without which production would be

almost nothing, is subject to a thousand inconveniences, the

worst of which is the demoralization of the laborer; machinery

causes, not only cheapness, but obstruction of the market and

stoppage of business; competition ends in oppression; taxation,

the material bond of society, is generally a scourge dreaded

equally with fire and hail; credit is necessarily accompanied by

bankruptcy; property is a swarm of abuses; commerce degenerates

into a game of chance, in which it is sometimes allowable even to

cheat: in short, disorder existing everywhere to an equal extent

with order, and no one knowing how the latter is to banish the

former, taxis ataxien diokein, the economists have decided that

all is for the best, and regard every reformatory proposition as

hostile to political economy.

The social edifice, then, has been abandoned; the crowd has burst

into the wood-yard; columns, capitals, and plinths, wood, stone,

and metal, have been distributed in portions and drawn by lot:

and, of all these materials collected for a magnificent temple,

property, ignorant and barbarous, has built huts. The work

before us, then, is not only to recover the plan of the edifice,

but to dislodge the occupants, who maintain that their city is

superb, and, at the very mention of restoration, appear in

battle-array at their gates. Such confusion was not seen of old

at Babel: happily we speak French, and are more courageous than

the companions of Nimrod.

But enough of allegory: the historical and descriptive method,

successfully employed so long as the work was one of examination

only, is henceforth useless: after thousands of monographs and

tables, we are no further advanced than in the age of Xenophon

and Hesiod. The Phenicians, the Greeks, the Italians, labored in

their day as we do in ours: they invested their money, paid their

laborers, extended their domains, made their expeditions and

recoveries, kept their books, speculated, dabbled in stocks, and

ruined themselves according to all the rules of economic art;

knowing as well as ourselves how to gain monopolies and fleece

the consumer and laborer. Of all this accounts are only too

numerous; and, though we should rehearse forever our statistics

and our figures, we should always have before our eyes only

chaos,--chaos constant and uniform.

It is thought, indeed, that from the era of mythology to the

present year 57 of our great revolution, the general welfare has

improved: Christianity has long been regarded as the chief cause

of this amelioration, but now the economists claim all the honor

for their own principles. For after all, they say, what has been

the influence of Christianity upon society? Thoroughly utopian

at its birth, it has been able to maintain and extend itself only

by gradually adopting all the economic categories,--labor,

capital, farm-rent, usury, traffic, property; in short, by

consecrating the Roman law, the highest expression of political

economy.

Christianity, a stranger in its theological aspect to the

theories of production and consumption, has been to European

civilization what the trades-unions and free-masons were not long

since to itinerant workmen,--a sort of insurance company and

mutual aid society; in this respect, it owes nothing to political

economy, and the good which it has done cannot be invoked by the

latter in its own support. The effects of charity and

self-sacrifice are outside of the domain of economy, which must

bring about social happiness through justice and the organization

of labor. For the rest, I am ready to admit the beneficial

effects of the system of property; but I observe that these

effects are entirely balanced by the misery which it is the

nature of this system to produce; so that, as an illustrious

minister recently confessed before the English Parliament, and as

we shall soon show, the increase of misery in the present state

of society is parallel and equal to the increase of

wealth,--which completely annuls the merits of political economy.

Thus political economy is justified neither by its maxims nor by

its works; and, as for socialism, its whole value consists in

having established this fact. We are forced, then, to resume the

examination of political economy, since it alone contains, at

least in part, the materials of social science; and to ascertain

whether its theories do not conceal some error, the correction of

which would reconcile fact and right, reveal the organic law of

humanity, and give the positive conception of order.