There is one question which we cannot evade: What has given birth to the
belief in _historic factors_?
That is an expression familiar to many and often found in the writings
of many scholars, scientists and philosophers, and of those commentators
who, by their reasonings or by their combinations, add a little to
simple historic narration and utilize this opinion as an hypothesis to
find a starting point in the immense mass of human facts, which, at
first sight and after first examination, appear so confused and
irreducible. This belief, this current opinion, has become for reasoning
historians, or even for rationalists, a semi-doctrine, which has
recently been urged several times, as a decisive argument, against the
unitary theory of the materialistic conception. And indeed, this belief
is so deeply rooted and this opinion so widespread, of history being
only intelligible as the juncture and the meeting of various factors,
that, in consequence, many of those who speak of social materialism,
whether they be its partisans or adversaries, believe that they save
themselves from embarrassment by affirming that this whole doctrine
consists in the fact that it attributes the preponderance or the
decisive action to the _economic factor_.
It is very important to take account of the fashion in which this
belief, this opinion, or this semi-doctrine takes its rise, because
real and fruitful criticism consists principally in knowing and
understanding the motive of what we declare an error. It does not
suffice to reject an opinion by characterizing it as false doctrine.
Error always arises from some ill-understood side of an incomplete
experience, or from some subjective imperfection. It does not suffice to
reject the error; we must overcome it, explain it and outgrow it.
Every historian, at the beginning of his work, performs, so to speak, an
act of elimination. First, he makes erasures, as it were, in a
continuous series of events; then he dispenses with numerous and varied
suppositions and precedents; more than this, he tears up and decomposes
a complicated tissue. Thus, to begin with, he must fix a point, a line,
a boundary, as he chooses; he must say, for example: I wish to relate
the beginning of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, or to
inquire how Louis XVI. was brought to convene the States General. The
narrator finds himself, in a word, confronted with a _complexus_ of
accomplished facts and of facts on the point of being produced, which in
their totality present a certain aspect. Upon the attitude which he
takes depends the form and the style of every narration, because to
compose it he must take his point of departure from things already
accomplished, in order to see henceforth how they have continued to
develop.
Yet into this _complexus_ he must introduce a certain degree of
analysis, resolving it into groups and into aspects of facts, or into
concurrent elements, which afterwards appear at a certain moment as
independent categories. It is the state in a certain form and with
certain powers; it is the laws, which determine, by what they command or
what they prohibit, certain relations; it is the manners and customs
which reveal to us tendencies, needs, ways of thinking, of believing, of
imagining; altogether it is a multitude of men living and working
together, with a certain distribution of tasks and occupations; he
observes then the thoughts, the ideas, the inclinations, the passions,
the desires, the aspirations which arise and develop from this varied
mode of coexistence and from its frictions. Let a change be produced,
and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the
empirical _complexus_, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter
time; for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its
internal limits as regards society by increasing or diminishing its
powers and its attributes, or by changing the mode of action of one or
the other; or, again, the law modifies its dispositions, or it expresses
and affirms itself through new organs; or, again, finally, behind the
change of exterior and daily habits, we discover a change in the
sentiments, the thoughts and the inclinations of the men variously
distributed in the different social classes, who mingle, change, replace
each other, disappear or reappear. All this may be sufficiently
understood, in its exterior forms and outlines, through the usual
endowments of normal intelligence which is not yet aided, corrected or
completed by science strictly so-called. Assembling within precise
limits a conception of such facts is the true and proper object of
narration, which is so much the clearer, more vivid and more exact, as
it takes the form of a monograph; witness Thucydides in the
Peloponnesian war.
Society already evolved in a certain fashion, society already arrived at
a certain degree of development, society already so complicated that it
conceals the economic substructure which supports all the rest, has not
revealed itself to the simple narrators, except in these visible facts,
in these most apparent results, and in these most significant symptoms
which are the political forms, the legal dispositions and the partisan
passions. The narrator, both because he lacks any theoretical doctrine
regarding the true sources of the historic movement, and by the very
attitude which he takes on the subject of the things which he unites
according to the appearances which they have come to assume, cannot
reduce them to unity, unless it be as a result of a single, immediate
intuition, and if he is an artist, this intuition takes on a color in
his mind and transforms itself there into dramatic action. His task is
finished if he succeeds in massing a certain number of facts and events
in certain limits and confines over which the observer may look as on a
clear perspective; in the same way, purely descriptive geography has
accomplished its task, if it sums up in a vivid and clear design a
concourse of physical causes which determine the immediate aspect of
the Gulf of Naples, for example, without going back to its genesis.
It is in this need of graphic narration that arises the first intuitive,
palpable, and, I might almost say, aesthetic and artistic occasion for
all those abstractions and those generalizations, which are finally
summed up in the semi-doctrine of the so-called factors.
Here are two notable men, the Gracchi, who wished to put an end to the
process of appropriation of the public land and to prevent the
agglomeration of the _latifundium_, which was diminishing or causing to
completely disappear the class of small proprietors, that is to say, of
the free men, who are the foundation and the condition of the democratic
life of the ancient city. What were the causes of their failure? Their
aim is clear, their spirit, their origin, their character, their heroism
are manifest. They have against them other men with other interests and
with other designs. The struggle appears to the mind at first merely as
a struggle of intentions and passions, which unfolds and comes to an end
by the aid of means which are permitted by the political form of the
state and by the use or abuse or the public powers. Here is the
situation: the city ruling in different manners over other cities or
over territories which have lost all character of autonomy; within this
city a very decided differentiation between rich and poor; and facing
the comparatively small group of the oppressors and the all-powerful,
stands the immense mass of the proletarians, who are on the point of
losing or who have already lost the consciousness and the political
strength of a body of citizens, the mass which therefore suffers itself
to be deceived and corrupted, and which will soon decay till it is but a
servile accessory to its aristocratic exploiters. There is the material
of the narrator, and he cannot take account of the fact otherwise than
in the immediate conditions of the fact itself. The complete whole is
directly seen and forms the stage on which the events unfold, but if the
narration is to have solidity, vividness and perspective there must be
points of departure and ways of interpretation.
In this consists the first origin of those abstractions, which little by
little take away from the different parts of a given social _complexus_
their quality of simple sides or aspects of a whole, and it is their
ensuing generalization which little by little leads to the doctrine of
factors.
These factors, to express it in another way, arise in the mind as a
sequence of the abstraction and generalization of the immediate aspects
of the apparent movement, and they have an equal value with that of all
other empirical concepts. Whatever be the domain of knowledge in which
they arise, they persist until they are reduced and eliminated by a new
experience, or until they are absorbed by a conception more general,
genetic, evolutionary or dialectic. Was it not necessary that in the
empirical analysis and in the immediate study of the causes and the
effects of certain definite phenomena, for example the phenomena of
heat, the mind should first stop at this presumption and this
persuasion, that it could and should attribute them to a subject, which
if it was never for any physicist a true and substantial entity, was
certainly considered as a definite and specific force, namely, heat. Now
we see that at a given moment, as a result of new experiences, this heat
is resolved in given conditions into a certain quantity of motion. Still
further, our thought is now on the way toward resolving all these
physical factors into the flux of one universal energy, in which the
hypotheses of the atoms, in the extent to which it is necessary, loses
all residue of metaphysical survival.
Was it not inevitable, as a first step of knowledge in what concerns the
problem of life, to spend a considerable time in the separate study of
the organs and to reduce them to systems? Without this anatomy, which
seems too material and too gross, no progress in these studies would
have been possible; and nevertheless, above the unknown genesis and
co-ordination of such an analytic multiplicity, there were evolving,
uncertain and vague, the generic conceptions of life, soul, etc. In
these mental creations have long been seen that biological unity which
has finally found its object in the certain beginning of the cell and in
its _processus_ of immanent multiplication.
More difficult certainly was the way which the thought had to traverse
to reconstruct the genesis of all the facts of psychic life, from the
most elementary successions up to the most complex derived products. Not
only for reasons of theoretical difficulties, but in consequence of
popular prejudices, the unity and continuity of psychic phenomena
appeared, up to the time of Herbart, as separated and divided into so
many factors, faculties of the soul.
The interpretation of the historico-social _processus_ met the same
difficulties; it also was obliged to stop at first in the provisional
view of factors. And that being so, it is easy for us now to find again
the first origin of that opinion in the necessity that the historians
have of finding in the facts that they relate with more or less artistic
talent and in different professional views, certain points of immediate
orientation, such as may be offered by the study of the apparent
movement of human events.
But in this apparent movement, there are the elements of a more exact
view. These concurrent factors, which abstract thought conceives and
then isolates, have never been seen acting each for itself. On the
contrary, they act in such a manner that it gives birth to the concept
of reciprocal action. Moreover, these factors themselves arise at a
given moment, and it is not until later that they acquired that
physiognomy which they have in the particular narration. This State, it
is well known, arose at a given moment. As for every rule of law, it may
either be remembered or conjectured that it went into effect under such
or such circumstances. As for many customs, it may be remembered that
they were introduced at a given moment; and the simplest comparisons of
the facts in different times or different places would show how society,
as a whole, and in its character of being an aggregation of different
classes, had taken and took continuously various forms.
The reciprocal action of the different factors, without which not even
the simplest narration would be possible, like the more or less exact
information upon the origins and the variations of the factors
themselves, called for research and thought more than did the
constructive narration of those great historians who are real artists.
And, in effect, the problems which arise spontaneously from the data of
history, combined with other theoretical elements, gave birth to the
different so-called practical disciplines, which in a more or less rapid
fashion and with varying success, have developed from the ancients up to
our days, from ethics to the philosophy of law, from politics to
sociology, from law to economics.
Now with the rise and formation of so many disciplines, through the
inevitable division of labor, _points of view_ have been multiplied out
of all proportion. It is certain that for the first and immediate
analysis of the multiple aspects of the social _complexus_, a long labor
of partial abstraction was necessary: which has always inevitably
resulted in one-sided views. This can be shown, in a clearer and more
evident manner than for any other domain, in that of law and its
various generalizations, including the philosophy of law. By reason of
these abstractions, which are inevitable in particular and empirical
analysis, and by the effect of the division of labor, the different
sides and different manifestations of the social _complexus_ were, from
time to time, fixed and stratified in general conceptions and
categories. The works, the effects, the emanations, the effusions of
human activity,--law, economic forms, principles of conduct,
etc.,--were, so to speak, translated and transformed into laws, into
imperatives and into principles which remained placed above man himself.
And from time to time it has been necessary to discover anew this simple
truth: that the only permanent and sure fact, that is to say, the only
datum from which departs and to which returns every practical detail of
discipline, is men grouped in a determined social form by means of
determined connections. The different analytical disciplines, which
illustrate the facts that develop in history, have finally given rise to
the need of a common and general social science, which renders possible
the unification of the historic _processus_, and the materialistic
doctrine marks precisely the final term, the apex of this unification.
But that has not been, nor ever will be, lost time which is expended in
the preliminary and lateral analysis of complex facts. To the methodical
division of labor we owe precise learning, that is to say, the mass of
knowledge passed into the sieve, systematized, without which social
history would always be wandering in a purely abstract domain, in
questions of form and terminology. The separate study of the
historico-social factors has served, like any other empirical study
which does not transcend the apparent movement of things, to improve the
instrument of observation and to permit us to find again in the facts
themselves, which have been artificially abstracted, the keystones which
bind them into the social _complexus_. The different disciplines which
are considered as isolated and independent in the hypotheses of the
concurrent factors in the formation of history, both by reason of the
degree of development which they have reached, the materials which they
have gathered, and the methods which they have elaborated, have to-day
become quite indispensable for us, if one desires to reconstruct any
portion out of past times. Where would our historic science be without
the one-sidedness of philology, which is the fundamental instrument of
all research, and where should we have found the guiding thread of a
history of juridical institutions, which returns again from itself to so
many other facts and to so many other combinations, without the
obstinate faith of the Romanists in the universal excellence of the
Roman law, which engendered with generalized law and with the philosophy
of law so many problems which serve as points of departure for
sociology?
It is thus, after all, that the historic factors, of which so many
speak, and which are mentioned in so many works, indicate something
which is much less than the truth, but much more than simple error, in
the ordinary sense of a blunder, of an illusion. They are the necessary
product of a knowledge which is in the course of development and
formation. They arise from the necessity of finding a point of departure
in the confused spectacle which human events present to him who wishes
to narrate them; and they serve thenceforth, so to speak, as a title,
category or index to that inevitable division of labor, by the extension
of which the historico-social material has, up to this time, been
theoretically elaborated. In this domain of knowledge, as well as in
that of the natural sciences, the unity of real principle and the unity
of formal treatment are never found at the first start, but only after a
long and troublous road. So that again from this point of view the
analogy affirmed by Engels between the discovery of historical
materialism and that of the conservation of energy appears to us
excellent.
The provisional orientation, according to the convenient system of what
are called factors, may, under given circumstances, be useful also to us
who profess an altogether unitary principle of historic interpretation,
if we do not wish simply to rest in the domain of theory, but wish to
illustrate, through personal research, a definite period of history. As
in that case we must proceed to direct and detailed research, we must
first of all follow the groups of facts that seem pre-eminent,
independent, or detached in the aspects of immediate experience. We
should not imagine, in fact, that the unitary principle so well
established, at which we have arrived in the general conception of
history, may, like a talisman, act always and at first sight, as an
infallible method of resolving into simple elements the immense area and
the complicated gearing of society. The underlying economic structure,
which determines all the rest, is not a simple mechanism whence emerge,
as immediate, automatic and mechanical effects, institutions, laws,
customs, thoughts, sentiments, ideologies. From this substructure to all
the rest, the process of derivation and of mediation is very
complicated, often subtile, tortuous and not always legible.
The social organization is, as we already know, constantly unstable,
although that does not seem evident to every one, except at the time
when the instability enters upon that acute period which is called a
revolution. This instability, with the constant struggles in the bosom
of that same organized society, excludes the possibility for men coming
to an agreement which might involve a new start at living an animal
life. It is the antagonisms which are the principal cause of progress
(Marx). But it is equally true, notwithstanding, that in this unstable
organization, in which is given to us the inevitable form of domination
and subjection, intelligence is always developed not only unequally, but
quite imperfectly, incongruously and partially. There has been and there
is still in society what we may call a hierarchy of intelligence,
sentiments and conceptions. To suppose that men, always and in all
cases, have had an approximately clear consciousness of their own
situation, and of what was the most rational thing to do, is to suppose
the improbable and, indeed, the unreal.
Forms of law, political acts and attempts at social organization were,
and they still are, sometimes fortunate, sometimes mistaken, that is to
say, disproportionate and unsuitable. History is full of errors; and
this means that if all was necessary, granted the relative intelligence
of those who have to solve a difficulty or to find a solution for a
given problem, etc., if everything in it has a sufficient reason, yet
everything in it was not reasonable, in the sense which the optimists
give to this word. To state it more fully, the determined causes of all
changes, that is to say the modified economic conditions, have ended and
end by causing to be found, sometimes through tortuous ways, the
suitable forms of law, the appropriate political orders and the more or
less perfect means of social adjustment. But it must not be thought that
the instinctive wisdom of the reasoning animal has been manifested, or
is manifested, definitely and simply, in the complete and clear
understanding of all situations, and that we have left only the very
simple task of following the deductive road from the economic situation
to all the rest. Ignorance--which, in its turn, may be explained--is an
important reason for the manner in which history is made; and, to
ignorance we must add the brutishness which is never completely subdued
and all the passions, and all the injustices, and the various forms of
corruption, which were and are the necessary product of a society
organized in such a way, that the domination of man over man in it is
inevitable, and that from this domination falsehood, hypocrisy,
presumption and baseness were and are inseparable. We may, without being
utopians, but simply because we are critical communists, foresee, as we
do in fact foresee, the coming of a society which, developing from the
present society and from its very contrasts by the laws inherent in its
historic development, will end in an association without class
antagonisms; which will have for its consequence that regulated
production will eliminate from life the element of chance which, thus
far, has been revealed in history as a multiform cause of accidents and
incidents. But that is the future, and it is neither the present nor the
past. If we propose to ourselves, on the contrary, to penetrate into the
historic events which have developed up to our own times, by taking, as
we do, for a guiding thread the variations of the forms of the
underlying economic structure up to the simplest datum in the variations
of the tool of production, we must become fully conscious of the
difficulty of the problem which we are setting ourselves: because here
we have not merely to open our eyes and behold, but to make a supreme
effort of thought, with the aim of triumphing over the multiform
spectacle of immediate experience to reduce its elements into a genetic
series. That is why I said that, in particular investigations, we must
ourselves start from those groups of apparently isolated facts, and
from this heterogeneous mass, in a word, from that empirical study,
whence arose the belief in factors, which afterwards became a
semi-doctrine.
It is useless to attempt at counterbalancing these essential
difficulties by the metaphorical hypothesis, often equivocal, and after
all of a purely analogical value, of the so-called social organism. It
was necessary too that the mind should pass through even this
hypothesis, which so shortly became phraseology pure and simple. It
indeed prepares the way for the comprehension of the historic movement
as springing from the laws immanent in society itself, and thereby
excludes the arbitrary, the transcendental and the irrational. But the
metaphor has no further application; and the particular, critical and
circumstantial research into historic facts is the sole source of that
concrete and positive knowledge which is necessary to the complete
development of economic materialism.