Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream. The
change in the ways of thinking, lately produced by the historic doctrine
which we are here examining and commenting upon, takes place at first
slowly and afterwards with an increasing rapidity, precisely in that
period of human development, in which were realized the great
politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch which,
considered in its political forms, is called liberal, but which,
considered in its basis, by reason of the domination of capital over the
proletarian mass, is the epoch of anarchical production. The change in
ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected
little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions
of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the
mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired
the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct
conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes
upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and
metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic
assertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to
the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the
determined effects. The materialistic conception marks the culminating
point of this new tendency in the investigation of the historic-social
laws, in so far as it is not a particular case of a generic sociology,
or of a generic philosophy of the State, of law, and of history, but the
solution of all doubts and all uncertainties which accompany the other
forms of philosophizing upon human affairs, and the beginning of their
integral interpretation.
It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by
certain shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who
first defined this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it
ever occur to any of their disciples, even of the strictest school, to
represent these two thinkers as miracle-workers? What is more, if we
wish to go on a search after the premises of the logical creation of
Marx and Engels, it will not suffice to stop at those who are called the
precursors of socialism, Saint-Simon for example, and his predecessors,
or the philosophers, particularly Hegel, or the economists who had laid
bare the anatomy of the society which produces commodities; we must go
back to the very formation of modern society, and then at last declare
triumphantly that the theory is a plagiarism from the things that it
explains.
The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts
of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of
itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial
revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great
social upheaval took place in France. These things, _mutatis mutandis_,
have subsequently been reproduced, in various combinations and in milder
forms, throughout the whole civilized world. And what else is our
thought at bottom if not the conscious and systematic complement of
experience, and what is this last if not the reflection and the mental
elaboration of the things and the processes which arise and unfold
either outside our volition, or through the work of our activity; and
what is genius but the individualized, derived and acute form of
thought, which arises through the suggestion of experience, in many men
of the same epoch, but which remains in most of them fragmentary,
incomplete, uncertain, wavering and partial?
Ideas do not fall from heaven; and what is more, like the other products
of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in the
precise fullness of time, through the action of definite needs, thanks
to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the discovery of
such and such other means of proof which are, as it were, the
instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas
involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought
also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought,
of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development,
is to disfigure their nature and their meaning.
To show how the materialistic conception of history arises precisely in
given conditions, not as a personal and tentative opinion of two
writers, but as the new conquest of thought by the inevitable suggestion
of a new world which is in process of birth, that is to say the
proletarian revolution, that was the object of my first essay, "In
Memory of the Communist Manifesto." That is, to repeat, a new historic
situation found its complement in its appropriate mental instrument.
To imagine now that this intellectual production might have been
realized at any time and at any place, would be to take absurdity for
the ruling principle in research. To transport ideas arbitrarily from
the basis and the historic conditions in which they arise to any other
basis whatever, is like taking the irrational for the basis of
reasoning. Why should one not fancy equally that the ancient city, in
which arose Greek art and science and Roman law, remaining all the while
an ancient democratic city, with slavery, might at the same time acquire
and develop all the conditions of modern technique? Why not believe that
the trade guild of the Middle Ages, remaining all the while on its
inflexible mould, should take its way to the conquest of the world
market without the conditions of unlimited competition, which actually
began by its destruction and negation? Why not imagine a fief which,
remaining a fief all the while, should become a factory producing
commodities exclusively? Why could not Michel de Lando have written the
Communist Manifesto? Why could we not also believe that the discoveries
of modern science could have proceeded from the brains of men of no
matter what other time and place, that is to say, before determined
conditions had given rise to determined needs, and before repeated and
accumulated experiences should have provided for the satisfaction of
these needs?
Our doctrine assumes the broad, conscious and continuous development of
modern technique, and with it that society which produces commodities in
the antagonisms of competition, that society which as a first condition
and an indispensable means for its own perpetuation presupposes
capitalist accumulation in the form of private property; that society
which continually produces and reproduces proletarians, and which if it
is to perpetuate itself, must incessantly revolutionize its tools, and
with them the State and its legal gearings. This society, which, by the
very laws of its movement, has laid bare its own anatomy, produces by
its reaction the materialistic conception. Even as it has produced in
socialism its positive negation, so it has engendered in the new
historic doctrine its ideal negation. If history is the product, not
arbitrary, but necessary and normal, of men in so far as they are
developing, and if they are developing in so far as they are making
social experiments, and if they are experimenting in so far as they are
making improvements in their labor, which accumulate and preserve
products and results, the phase of development in which we live cannot
be the last and final phase, and the contrasts which are intimately
bound to it and inherent in it are the productive forces of new
conditions. And this is how the period of the great economic and
political revolutions of these last two centuries has ripened in the
mind these two concepts: the immanence and constancy of the _processus_
in historic facts, and the materialist doctrine, which is at bottom the
objective theory of social revolutions.
It is beyond doubt that to reascend through the centuries and
reconstruct in our thought the development of social ideas to the extent
that we find their documents in writers, is something always very
instructive, and serving especially to add to our critical knowledge of
our concepts as of our ways of thinking. Such a return of the mind over
its historic premises, when it does not lead us astray into the
empiricism of a boundless erudition, and does not lead us to set up
hastily vain analogies, serves without any doubt to give suppleness and
a persuasive force to the forms of our scientific activity. In the sum
of our science we find again, in fact and through the approximative
continuity of tradition, the excellence of all that has been found,
conceived and proved, not only in modern times but even in ancient
Greece, where first begins precisely and in a definite fashion for the
human race the orderly development of conscious, reflective and
methodical thought. It would be impossible to take a single step in
scientific research without employing means long ago found and tried,
such for example as logic and mathematics. To think otherwise would be
to assume that each generation must begin over again all the work done
since the childhood of humanity.
But it was not given either to the ancient authors in the limited circle
of their urban republics, nor to the writers of the Renaissance, always
drifting between an imaginary return to antiquity and the need of
grasping intellectually the new world in process of birth, to arrive at
the precise analysis of the last elements from which society results,
and which the incomparable genius of Aristotle did not see, and did not
understand beyond the limits within which passes the life of the typical
citizen.
The investigation of the social structure, considered in its manners of
origin and _processus_, became active and penetrating and took on
multiform aspects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when
economics took shape and when under the different names of "Natural
Rights," "The Spirit of the Laws," or "The Social Contract," it was
attempted to resolve into causes, into factors and into logical and
psychological data, the multiform and often obscure spectacle of a life
in which was preparing the greatest revolution ever known. These
doctrines, whatever may have been the subjective intention and spirit of
the authors--as in the contrasting cases of the conservative Hobbes and
the proletarian Rousseau--were all revolutionary in their substance and
their effects. Under all of them is always found, as a stimulus and
motive, the material and moral needs of a new age, which, by reason of
historic conditions, were those of the bourgeoisie. Thus it was
necessary to wage war in the name of liberty upon tradition, the Church,
privileges, fixed classes, that is to say, the orders and conditions,
and consequently upon the State which was or appeared to be their
author, and then upon the special privileges of commerce, the arts,
labor and science. And man was studied in an abstract fashion, that is
to say, individuals taken separately, emancipated and delivered by a
logical abstraction from their historic connection and from every social
necessity: in the mind of many the concept of society was reduced to
atoms, and it even seemed natural to the greatest number to believe that
society is only the sum of the individuals composing it. The abstract
categories of individual psychology sufficed for the explanation of all
human facts; and this is how in all these systems, nothing is spoken of
but fear, self-love, egoism, voluntary obedience, tendency toward
happiness, the original goodness of man, the freedom of contract and of
the moral consciousness, and of the moral instinct or sense, and also
many other similar abstract and generic things, as if they were
sufficient to explain history, and to create a new history out of its
fragments.
By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its
horror at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was
traditional and had been organized for centuries, and the presentiment
of a renovation of all human life, finally produced a total eclipse of
the ideas of historic necessity and social necessity, that is to say, of
those ideas which, barely indicated by the ancient philosophers, and so
developed in our century, had at this period of revolutionary
rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico, Montesquieu, and, in
part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave birth to a
literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found the
reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called
individualism. Later some have thought they saw in this word the
expression of a permanent fact in human nature, which especially might
serve as a decisive argument against socialism.
A singular spectacle, and a singular contrast! Capital, however
produced, tended to overcome all previous forms of production, and,
breaking every bond and boundary, to become the direct or indirect
master of society, as, in fact, it has become in the greater part of the
world; hence it resulted, that apart from all forms of modern misery and
the new hierarchy in which we live, there was realized the most acute
antithesis of all history, that is to say, the existing anarchy of
production in the whole of society, and an iron despotism in the mode of
production in each workshop and each factory! And the thinkers, the
philosophers, the economists and the popularizers of the eighteenth
century saw nothing but liberty and equality! All reasoned in the same
way; all started from the same premises, which brought them to conclude
that liberty must be obtained from a government of pure administration,
or that they were democrats or even communists. The approaching reign of
liberty was before the eyes of all as a certain event, provided they
could suppress the bonds and fetters which forced ignorance and the
despotism of church and state had imposed upon men, good by nature.
These fetters did not appear to be conditions and boundaries within
which men were found by the laws of their development, and by the effect
of the antagonistic and thus uncertain and tortuous movement of history,
but simply obstacles from which the methodical use of reason was to
deliver us. In this idealism, which reached its culminating point in
certain heroes of the French Revolution, is the seed of a limitless
faith in the certain progress of the whole human race. For the first
time, the concept of humanity appeared in all its branches, unmingled
with religious ideas or hypotheses. The boldest of these idealists were
the extreme materialists, because, denying every religious fiction, they
assigned this earth as a certain domain to the necessity of happiness
provided that reason might open the way.
Never were ideas abused in so inhuman a fashion as between the close of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The lesson
of things was very hard, the saddest disillusions arose and a radical
upheaval followed in the minds of men. Facts, in a word, proved to be
contrary to all expectations; and this at first produced a profound
discouragement among the disillusioned, which, notwithstanding, gave
rise to the desire and the need of new investigations. We know that
Saint Simon and Fourier, in whom operated precisely at the beginning of
the century, in the exclusive forms of the ideas of premature genius,
the reaction against the immediate results of the politico-economic
revolution, arose resolutely, the first against the jurists, and the
second against the economists.
In fact, when once the obstacles to liberty, which had been
characteristic of other times, had been suppressed, new obstacles,
graver and more painful, had replaced them, and, as equal happiness for
all was not realized, society remained in its political form as it had
been before, an organization of inequalities. It must be, then, that
society is something autonomous, innate, a complex automaton of
relations and conditions, which defies the subjective good intentions of
each of the members who compose it, and which escapes from the illusions
and the designs of the idealists. It thus follows a course of its own
from which we may infer certain laws of process and development, but
does not suffer us to impose laws upon it. By this transformation in the
minds of men, the nineteenth century heralded itself as the century of
historic science and of sociology.
The principle of development has, indeed, since then, invaded all
domains of thought. In this century, the grammar of history has been
discovered, and thus the key has been found to explore the genesis of
myths. The embryonic traces of pre-history have been sought out, and,
for the first time, the processes of political and legal forms have been
arranged into a series. The nineteenth century heralded itself as the
century of sociology in the person of Saint Simon, in whom, as happens
with the self-taught precursors of genius, we find confused together the
germs of so many contradictory tendencies. In this aspect the
materialistic conception is a result; but it is a result which is the
complement of the whole process of formation; and as a result and a
complement it is also the simplification of all historic science and of
all sociology, because it takes us back from things derived and from
complex conditions to elemental functions. And that is brought about by
the direct suggestion of new dynamic experience.
The laws of economics, such as they are of themselves and their own
inherent force, have triumphed over all illusions and have shown
themselves to be the directing power of social life. The great
industrial revolution which was produced made it clear that social
classes, if they are not a fact of nature, are still less a consequence
of chance and of free will; they arise historically and socially in a
determined form of production. And who, in truth, has not seen the birth
under his eyes of new proletarians upon the economic ruin of so many
classes of small proprietors, small peasants and artisans; and who has
not been in a position to discover the method of this new creation of a
new social status, to which so many men were reduced and in which they
were necessarily obliged to live. Who has not been in a position to
discover that money, transformed into capital, had succeeded, in a few
years, in becoming master by the attraction which it exercises over the
labor of free men, in whom the necessity of selling themselves freely as
wage workers had been prepared long before by so many ingenious legal
processes and by violent or indirect expropriation? And who has not seen
the new cities rise around factories and create around their
circumference this desolating poverty, which is no longer the effect of
individual misfortune, but the condition and the source of wealth? And
in this new poverty were numerous women and children, arising for the
first time from an unknown existence to take their place on the page of
history as a sinister illustration of a society of equals. And who did
not feel--even if that had not been announced in the so-called doctrine
of the Rev. Malthus--that the number of guests which this mode of
economic organization can entertain, if it is sometimes insufficient for
him who, by reason of the favorable state of production, has need of
hands, is often also superabundant, and therefore finds no occupation
and becomes a source of danger? It becomes evident, also, that the rapid
and violent economic transformation which was accomplished openly in
England had succeeded there, because that country had been able to build
up for itself, as compared with the rest of Europe, a monopoly till then
unknown, and because to maintain this monopoly an unscrupulous policy
had been rendered necessary, and that permitted all, for one happy
moment, to translate into prose the ideological myth of the state, which
was to be the guardian and the preceptor of the people.
This immediate perception of these consequences of the new life was the
origin of the pessimism, more or less romantic, of the _laudatores
temporis acti_ from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism
invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all
sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology,
which had accumulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the
Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into
contact with the facts which the rapid events of so intensive a
_processus_ imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling.
Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially
for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes
of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the
means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective
criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided
and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions
of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms
of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never
reached the proletarians, either because these had no political
consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden
starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or
they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case
with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however
Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate
and often salutary criticism of economics--a one-sided criticism,
indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical
conception.
All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had
their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective
criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism
which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is
society, itself, which, by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts
upon which it rests, engenders from itself, within itself, the
contradiction, and finally triumphs over this by its passage into a new
form. The solution of the existing antitheses is the proletariat, which
the proletarians themselves know or do not know. Even as their misery
has become the condition of present society, so in their misery is the
justification of the new proletarian revolution. It is in this passage
from the criticism of subjective thought, which examines things outside
and imagines it can correct them at once, to the understanding of the
self-criticism exercised by society over itself in the immanence of its
own _processus_--it is in this only that the dialectic of history
consists, which Marx and Engels, in so far as they were materialists,
drew from the idealism of Hegel. But on the final reckoning it matters
little whether the literary men, who knew no other meaning for
dialectics than that of an artificial sophistry nor whether the doctors
and scholars who are never apt to go beyond the knowledge of particular
facts can ever account themselves for these hidden and complicated forms
of thought.
But the great economic transformation, which has furnished the materials
composing modern society, in which the empire of capitalism has arrived
at the limit of its complete development, would not have been so
immediately and so suggestively instructive, if it had not been
luminously illustrated by the bewildering and catastrophic movement of
the French Revolution. This put in evidence, like a tragedy on the
stage, all the antagonistic forces of modern society, because this
society has developed on the ruins of previous forms, and because, in so
short a time and with so hasty a march, it has traversed the phases of
its birth and its establishment.
The revolution ensued from the obstacles which the bourgeoisie had to
overcome by violence, since it appeared from evidence that the passage
from the old forms to the new forms of production--or of property, if we
borrow the language of jurists--could not be realized by the quieter
ways of successive and gradual reforms. It brought in its train the
upheaval, the friction and the intermingling of all the old classes of
the Ancient Regime, and the rapid and bewildering formation at the same
time of new classes, in the very rapid but very intensive period of ten
years, which, compared with the ordinary history of other times and
other countries, seems to us like centuries. This rapid succession of
monumental events brought to light the most characteristic moments and
aspects of the new or modern society, and that so much the more clearly
since the militant bourgeoisie had already created for itself
intellectual means and organs which had given it with the theory of its
own work the reflex consciousness of its movement.
The violent expropriation of the great part of the old property, that is
to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely
domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived
therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of
things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government,
an extraordinary mass of economic resources; thus, there were, on the
one side, the singular policy of the assignats which finally annulled
themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors
who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to
speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the
ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic title
rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate
circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so many
troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a
creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might
seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the
beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people
given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements
of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were,
driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of
Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent
defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the
Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the
Assembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion
of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The
bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes the
psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf,
which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in
itself all the elements of objective tragedy.
The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a
family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a
commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of
merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in
the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to
such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they
finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a giant,
arising, from all sides, on the shoulders of those most wretched in
their poverty, and through all the devious ways of politics; it was
especially shameless in its way of taking part in war and its glorious
successes. Even the rapid progress of technique, hastened by the urgency
of circumstances, gave material and occasion to the prosperity of
business.
The laws of bourgeois economics, which are those of individual
production in the antagonistic field of competition, revolted furiously,
through violence and ruse, against the idealistic efforts of a
revolutionary government which, strong in its certainty of saving its
country, and stronger still in its illusion of founding for eternity the
liberty of equals, believed it was possible to suppress gambling by the
guillotine, to eliminate Business by closing the Stock Exchange and to
assure existence to the common people by fixing the maximum of prices
for objects of prime necessity. Commodities, prices and Business
reasserted with violence their own liberty against those who wished to
preach to them and impose ethics upon them.
Thermidor, whatever may have been the original intentions of the
Thermidorians, whether vile, cowardly, or misguided, was, in its hidden
causes as in its apparent effects, the triumph of Business over
democratic idealism. The constitution of 1793, which marks the extreme
limit that can be reached by the democratic ideal, was never put into
practice. The grave pressure of circumstances, the menace of the
foreigner, the different forms of internal rebellion, from the
Girondists to the Vendee, rendered necessary an exceptional government,
which was the Terror, born of fear. In proportion as dangers ceased, the
need of the terror ceased. But the democracy shattered itself against
the Business which was bringing into existence the property of new
proprietors. The constitution of the year III. consecrated the principle
of moderate liberalism, whence proceeds all the constitutionalism of the
European continent; but it was, before all else, the road leading to the
guaranty of property. To change the proprietors while preserving
property--that is the banner, the watchword, the ensign which defied
through the years from Aug. 10, 1792, the violent tumults as well as the
bold designs of those who attempted to found society upon virtue,
equality and Spartan abnegation. But the Directory was the footpath by
which the revolution arrived at the downfall of itself as an idealistic
effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed corruption,
this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but property
is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice,
there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange
adventurer of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially
smiled, and he was the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an
end to this gigantic fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor
trace of moral scruples.
In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for
the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over
surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the
revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the
liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious
suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now
having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and
having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution,
fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life,
which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for
the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the
former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic
struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade
required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it
triumphed over the last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor
also become for it a free commodity.
All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many
million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine
mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a
technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state,
also, was becoming a technical appliance, which substituted bureaucracy
for hierarchy. And as the ancient titles no longer assured their
possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state
could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found
itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the
successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the
new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its
Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon
victorious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the
act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found
it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which
produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized
jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of
a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever
shall be, the typical and classical form of the law of every shopkeeping
society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and
selling.
The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular
circumstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many
other classes and semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost
all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the
most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology,
which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually
supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the
heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure
appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the
interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many
acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of
illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith
in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human
race from superstition, and even from religion, to make of each
individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are
its beginnings:--and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in
the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the
most idealistic of to-day as the work of several centuries to come--that
is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy
of the guillotine?
That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that
was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned
their property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly
rich purveyors, marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of
letters; it was the prose of the court of that strange man to whom the
qualities of military genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had,
without any doubt, conferred the right of treating as an ideologist
whoever did not admire the bare fact which, in life, as it was with him,
can be nothing else than the simple brutality of success.
The French Revolution hastened the course of history in a large part of
Europe. To it attaches, on the Continent, all that we call liberalism
and modern democracy, except in the case of the false imitation of
England, and up to the establishment of Italian unity, which was and
will remain perhaps the last act of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. This
revolution was the most vivid and most instructive example of the
fashion in which a society transforms itself and how new economic
conditions develop, and in developing co-ordinate the members of society
into groups and classes. It was the palpable proof of the fashion in
which law is found, when it is necessary for the expression and the
defense of definite relations, and how the state is created, and how
disposal is made of its means, its forces and its organs. Here is seen
how ideas arise from the fields of social institutions, and how
characters, tendencies, sentiments, volitions, that is to say, in a
word, moral forces, are produced and develop into conditions governed by
circumstances. In a word, the data of social science were, so to speak,
prepared by society itself, and it is no wonder if the revolution,
which was preceded ideologically by the most acute form of rationalistic
doctrinairism ever known, ended finally by leaving behind it the
intellectual need of an anti-doctrinaire historical and sociological
science, like that which our own century has attempted to construct.
And here, both by what we have seen and by what is known generally, it
is useless to recall anew, how Owen forms one of the same group with
Saint Simon and Fourier, and to repeat through what ways scientific
socialism took its birth. The important thing is in these two points;
that historical materialism could not arise but from the theoretical
consciousness of socialism; and that it can henceforth explain its own
origin with its own principles, which is the greatest proof of its
maturity.
Thus I have justified the phrase at the beginning of this chapter: ideas
do not descend from heaven.