In employing this doctrine as a new principle of research, as a precise
means of defining our position, and as a visual angle, will it really be
possible finally to arrive at a new narrative history? It is not
possible to make an affirmative answer in general to this generic
demand. Because, in fact, if we assume that the critical communist, the
sociologist of economic materialism, or as he is commonly called, the
Marxist, has the necessary critical preparation, the habit of historical
study, and also the gift required for an orderly and vivacious
narration, there is no reason for affirming that he cannot write
history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political schools have
written it.
We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which
admits of no reply. But he was the first and the principal author of the
decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an
instrument of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable
publicist, during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he
applied it with the greatest precision in that essay entitled Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great
distance, and after so many publications, if we except certain
infinitesimal details and certain false forecasts, that it would be
possible to make neither corrections nor important complements. I will
not repeat, since I am not writing a bibliography, the list of the
different writings of Marx or Engels--of which we have so many attempts
from the Peasants' War (1850) down to his posthumous writings on The
Present Unity of Germany--which are an application of the doctrine, nor
those of their successors and of the popularizers of scientific
socialism. Even in the socialist press we may read, from time to time,
valuable attempts at explanation of certain political events, in which
is found, precisely by reason of historic materialism, a clearness of
vision which would be sought in vain among the writers and the
disputants who have not yet torn away the fantastic veils and
ideological envelopes of history.
Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as
an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories
which have been written up to the present time, that there is always at
bottom, if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in
their spirit, a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so
this doctrine, which has enabled us to study the social structure in an
objective manner, must finally direct with precision the researches of
history, and must end in a narrative complete, transparent and integral.
Helps are not lacking.
_Economics_, which, as everyone sees it today, had its birth and
development as the science of bourgeois production, after being puffed
up with the illusion of representing the absolute laws of all forms of
production, has through the dear school of experience entered since, as
everyone knows, upon a period of self-criticism. Just as this
self-criticism gave birth, on one side, to critical communism, so on the
other side it has given birth, through the labor of the calmest, the
wisest and the most prudent of the academic tradition, to the
_historical school of economic phenomena_. Thanks to this school, and
through the effect of the application of the descriptive and comparative
methods, we are henceforth in possession of a vast sum of knowledge on
the different historical forms of _economics_, from the most complex
facts and those best specified through essential differences of types,
down to the special domain of a cloister or a trade guild of the Middle
Ages. The same thing has taken place with _statistics_, which, by the
indefinite combination of its sources, succeeds now in throwing light,
with a sufficient approximation, upon the movement of population in past
centuries.
These studies, certainly, are not made in the interest of our doctrine,
and oftener than not they are made in a spirit hostile to socialism;
something not observed, we may say in passing, by those foolish readers
of printed papers who so often confuse _economic history_, _historical
economics_, and _historical materialism_. But these studies, apart from
the materials which they gather, are remarkable in that they witness the
progress which is in course of making the _internal history_ which,
little by little, is taking the place of the _external history_ with
which, for centuries, the men of letters and artists were occupied.
A good part of these materials that have been gathered must always be
submitted to new corrections, as for that matter happens in every domain
of empirical knowledge, which oscillates continually between what is
held for certain and what is simply probable, and what must, later, be
integrated or eliminated.
The deductions and the combinations of the historians of economics, or
of those who relate history in general, availing themselves of the
guiding thread of economic phenomena, are not always so plausible or so
conclusive, that one does not feel the need of saying to them: All this
must be taken back and worked over. But that which is undoubted is the
fact that in this present time all writing of history tends to become a
science, or, better, a social discipline; and when that movement, now
uncertain and multiform, shall be accomplished, the efforts of the
scholars and inquirers will lead inevitably to the acceptance of
economic materialism. By this incidence of efforts and of scientific
labors, which start from points so opposite, the materialistic
conception of all history will end by penetrating men's minds as a
definite conquest of thought; and this will finally take away from
partisans and adversaries the attempt to speak _pro_ and _con_ as for
partisan theses.
Apart from the direct helps just enumerated, our doctrine has many
indirect helps, so that it can profitably employ the results of many
disciplines, in which by reason of the greater simplicity of the
relations, it has been possible more easily to make the application of
the genetic method. The typical case is furnished by glottology, and in
a more special fashion by the study which has for its object the ancient
languages.
The application of historical materialism is certainly, hitherto, very
far from that evidence and that clearness of _processus_ of analysis and
of reconstruction. It would be consequently a vain attempt to try, at
this moment, to write a summary of universal history, which should
propose to develop all the varied forms of production in order to deduce
from them afterwards all the rest of human activity, in a particular and
circumstantial fashion. In the present state of knowledge, he who should
try to give this _compendium_ of a new _Kulturgeschichte_ would do
nothing but translate into economic phraseology the points of general
orientation which, in other books, for example, in Hellwald, give it in
Darwinian phraseology.
It is a long step from the acceptance of the principle to its complete
and particular application to the whole of a vast province of facts, or
to a great succession of phenomena.
So the application of our doctrine must be kept for a moment to the
exposition and the study of definite parts of history. The modern forms
are clear to all. The economic developments of the bourgeoisie, the
manifest knowledge of the different obstacles which it has had to
overcome in the different countries, and, consequently, the development
of the different revolutions, taking this word in its broadest sense,
contribute to make our understanding of it easy. To our eyes the
pre-history of the bourgeoisie, at the moment of the decline of the
Middle Ages, is equally clear, and it would not be difficult to find,
for example, in the development of the city of Florence, an attested
series of developments, in which the economic and statistical movement
finds a perfect correspondence in the political relations and a
sufficient illustration in the contemporary development of intelligence
already reduced into prose and stripped, in great part, of ideological
illusions. Nor would it be impossible to reduce, now, under the definite
visual angle of materialism, the whole of ancient Roman history. But for
that, and particularly, for the primitive period, there are no direct
sources; they are, on the contrary, abundant in Greece, from popular
tradition, the epic, and the authentic juridical inscriptions, down to
the pragmatic studies of the historical social relations. At Rome, on
the other hand, the struggles for political rights carry with them
almost always the economic reasons upon which they rest. Thus, the
decline of definite classes, the formation of new classes, the movement
of conquest, the change of the laws and of the forms of political array,
appear to us with perfect clearness. This Roman history is hard and
prosaic; it was never clad with these ideological complements which
were suited to Greek life. The rigid prose of conquest, of planned
colonization, of institutions and of the forms of law, conquered and
devised for solving the problems arising from definite frictions and
contrasts, makes all Roman history a chain of events which follow each
other in a sequence which is grossly evident.
The true problem consists, indeed, not in substituting sociology for
history, as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind
it a secret reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its
intuitive manifestations, and in understanding it through the aid of
economic sociology. It is not a question of separating the accident from
the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the
intrinsic kernel, or applying any other formula used by the partisans of
any species of scholasticism, but of explaining the connection and the
_complexus_ precisely in so far as it is a connection and a _complexus_.
It is not merely a question of discovering and determining the social
groundwork, and then of making men appear upon it like so many
marionettes, whose threads are held and moved, no longer by Providence
but by economic categories. These categories have themselves developed
and are developing, like all the rest--because men change as to the
capacity and the art of vanquishing, subduing, transforming and
utilizing natural conditions; because men change in spirit and attitude
through the reaction of their tools upon themselves; because men change
in their respective and co-associated relations; and therefore as
individuals depending in various degrees upon one another. We have, in
fine, to do with history, and not with its skeleton. We are dealing with
narration and not with abstraction, with the explaining and treating of
the whole, and not merely with resolving and analyzing it; we have to
do, in a word, now, as always, with an art.
It may be that the sociologist who follows the principles of economic
materialism proposes to keep himself simply to the analysis, for
example, of what the classes were at the moment when the French
Revolution broke out, and to pass then to the classes that result from
the Revolution and survive it. In that case the titles, the indications
and the classifications of the materials to analyze are definite; they
are, for example, the city and the country, the artisan and the laborer,
the nobles and the serfs, the land which is freed from feudal charges,
and the small proprietors who came into being, commerce which frees
itself from so many restrictions, money which accumulates, industry
which prospers, etc. There is nothing to object to in the choice of this
method, which, because it follows the track of embryonic origins, was
indispensable to the preparation of historical research according to the
direction of the new doctrine.[29]
But we know that the study of embryonic origins does not suffice to
make us understand animal life, which is not a scheme, but is composed
of living beings which struggle, and in their struggle employ forces,
instincts and passions. And it is the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with men
also, in so far as they live historically. These particular men, moved
by certain passions, urged by certain circumstances, with such and such
designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an
illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who,
martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and
reciprocal suppressions of each other--there is the real history of the
French Revolution. If, however, it is true that all history is but the
unfolding of definite economic conditions, it is equally true that it
develops only in definite forms of human activity,--whether the latter
be passionate or reflective, fortunate or unsuccessful, blindly
instinctive or deliberately heroic.
To understand the interlacings and the _complexus_ in its inner
connection and its outer manifestations; to descend from the surface to
the foundation, and then to return from the foundation to the surface;
to analyze the passions and the intentions, in their motives, from the
closest to the most remote, and then to bring back the data of the
passions and of the intentions and of their causes to the most remote
elements of a definite economic situation; there is the difficult art
which the materialistic conception must realize.
And as we must not imitate that teacher who on the bank taught his
pupils to swim by the definition of swimming, I beg the reader to await
the examples which I shall give in other essays in a real historical
narration, working over into a book which for some time I have already
been doing in my teaching.
In this way certain secondary and derivative questions are once for all
cleared up.
What, for example, is the meaning of the lives of the great men?
In these later times, answers have been given, which, in one sense or
another, have an extreme character. On the one side, there are the
extreme sociologists, on the other side the individualists who, after
the fashion of Carlyle, put the heroes into the first rank of their
history. According to some it is sufficient to show what were the
reasons, for example, of Caesarism, and Caesar matters little. According
to others, there are no objective reasons of classes and social
interests which suffice to explain anything; it is the great minds which
give the impulse to the whole historic movement; and history has, so to
speak, its lords and its monarchs. The empiricists of narration extract
themselves from embarrassment in a very simple fashion, putting together
at hazard men and things, objective necessities of fact and subjective
influences.
Historical materialism goes beyond the antithetical views of the
sociologists and the individualists, and at the same time it eliminates
the eclecticism of the empirical narrators.
First of all the _factum_.
Let this particular Caesar, as Napoleon was, be born in such a year, let
him follow such a career, and find himself ready for the Eighteenth
Brumaire. All this is completely accidental with relation to the general
course of things which was pushing the new class, mistress of the field,
to save from the Revolution that which appeared to it necessary to save,
and that necessitated the creation of a bureaucratico-military
government. It was, however, necessary to find the man, or the men. But
what actually happened came about in the fashion that we know. It
depended on this fact, that it was Napoleon who directed the enterprise
and not a pitiable Monk, or a ridiculous Boulanger. And from that moment
the accident ceases to be accident, precisely because it is this
definite person who gives his imprint and physiognomy to the events,
determining the fashion or the manner in which they have unfolded.
The very fact that all history rests upon antitheses, contrasts,
struggles and wars, explains the decisive influence of certain men in
definite occasions. These men are neither a negligible accident of the
social mechanism, nor miraculous creators of what society, without them,
could have made in no other fashion. It is the very interlacings of the
antithetic conditions, which causes the fact that definite individuals,
generous, heroic, fortunate, mischievous, are called at critical moments
to say the decisive word. As long as the particular interests of the
different social groups are in such a state of tension, that all the
parties in the struggle reciprocally paralyze each other, then to make
the political gearing move, there is need of the individual
consciousness of a definite individual.
The social antitheses, which make of every human community an unstable
organization, give to history, especially when it is seen and examined
rapidly and in its main features, the character of a drama. This drama
in all its relations is repeated from community to community, from
nation to nation, from state to state, because the inner inequalities
concurring with the external differentiations, have produced and produce
the whole movement of wars, conquests, treaties, colonizations, etc. In
this drama have always appeared, in the role of leaders of society, the
men who are characterized as eminent, as great, and empiricism has
concluded from their presence that they were the principal authors of
history. To carry back the explanation of their appearance to the
general causes and the common conditions of the social structure, is a
thing which harmonizes perfectly with the data of our doctrine; but to
try to eliminate them, as certain affected objectivists of sociology
would willingly do, is pure capriciousness.
And to conclude, the partisan of historical materialism who sets himself
the task of explaining, or relating, cannot do it through schemes.
History has always received a definite form, with an infinite number of
accidents and variations. It has a certain grouping, it has a certain
perspective.
It is not enough to have eliminated preventively the hypothesis of
factors, because the narrator constantly finds himself in the presence
of things which seem incongruous, independent, and self-directing. To
present the whole as a whole, and to discover in it the continuous
relations of the events which border on each other, there is the
difficulty.
The sum of events narrowly consecutive and precise gives the whole of
history; and this is equivalent to saying that it is all that we know of
our being, in so far as we are social beings and not simply natural
beings.