But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who
narrate, explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life
to this enormous mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations
which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the
real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of
these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of
literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the
universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely
ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put
on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the
historic events--great masses of people, directing and ordering classes,
masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word,
if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval--never
had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work,
unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight
of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was
passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first
discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population
upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the
first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which
developed property and the state, or at least the city,--even then, at
the epoch of all the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed
their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of gods and heroes. So much
so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the
necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they
conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belong to
them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then
more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations
in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the
ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to _The
City of God_ of St. Augustine--from the superstitious credulity in
miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is
to say, down to the _Idea_ which for the _decadents_ of Hegelianism
engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most
incongruous variations of social life in the course of history.
Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation
has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only
in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has
been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and
the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our
doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave
difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific
explanation of the history of the past.
The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new
criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood
as speaking exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and
ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves
with what is delivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars,
and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate
source which is behind the so called documents properly and which,
before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the
spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors
accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit,
that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes
which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that
the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions.
To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very
facts while they are developing--this is to make a new criticism of the
sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal
documentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of
past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and
thereby to reconstruct them anew.
But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme
limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an
occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a
point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors
in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which
they often found both the motives and the justification of their action,
we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure
appearance, a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of
the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his
contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was
but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic
revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court.
He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was
wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement
which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and
a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote
effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of
the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial
dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and
super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent
repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly
proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the
authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation,
particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best
of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the
fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the
circumstantial integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether
subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now,
the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly
in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in the Low
Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the
contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle
against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious
renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light
the passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the
forerunners of capitalism. _Post factum_, and after the tardy
realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real
movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part
unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that
the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on
certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments,
that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement
certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,--in
these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can make
otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the
zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought
some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record
merely the _economic moment_ (often still unknown and often unknowable),
and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with
which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere
trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent.
From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it
the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three
consequences follow:--
First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism,
the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things
conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first
sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this
last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal
philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and
free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in
fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the
motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct
this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive
at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are
derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the
obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism.
It is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way,
we begin with motives religious, political, aesthetic, passionate, etc.,
but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in
the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these
conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not
only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at
that form which reveals them to the consciousness as motives whose
origin is often obliterated.
And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our
doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the
complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the _last
analysis_ (Engels) all the historic facts _by means of the underlying
economic structure_ (Marx), which necessitates analysis and reduction
and then interlinking and construction.
It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the
underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given
history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge
which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do
not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche
nor to the concept of an assumed collective spirit which by its own
laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their
material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in
social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to
those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social
psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a
subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and
forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that
mass of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of
which some attribute to the social being, as Schaeffle does, a brain, a
spinal column, sensibility, sentiment, conscience, will, etc. But I
wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of
those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they
really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of
Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or
those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine's
expression, the "spontaneous anarchy" of 1789, those peasants who
finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to
property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner
into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no
one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely
descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the
romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have
conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology,
which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions,
the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they
appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain
social conditions actually determined;--this class, in this situation,
determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in
which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;--and finally,
these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion
involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution
of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economic
structure. This social psychology, by its nature always circumstantial,
is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the
self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from
specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it
is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but
it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).
But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the
conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history.
This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that
combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the
multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no
fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of
the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which
is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of
consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or
reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.