in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and
again in 1815, during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaims the alliance
of France with England, and then of both these countries with Germany,
as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of
Europe. To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors
of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight.
If in Saint Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue
of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists, that are not
strictly economic, are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a
criticism of the existing conditions of society genuinely French and
witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes
the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and
their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare
remorsely the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He
confronts it with the earlier philosophers' dazzling promises of a
society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which
happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility,
and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of
his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality
corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms
this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.
Fourier is not only a critic; his imperturbably serene nature makes
him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all
time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling
speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution,
and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French
commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the
bourgeois form of the relations between the sexes, and the position of
woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any
given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural
measure of the general emancipation.
But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of
society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of
evolution--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This
last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of
to-day--_i.e._, with the social order that came in with the sixteenth
century. He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice
practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion, into a form of existence,
complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical"--that civilization moves
in "a vicious circle," in contradictions which it constantly
reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly
arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or
pretends to want to attain, so that, _e.g._, "under civilization
poverty is born of superabundance itself."
Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way
as his contemporary Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues,
against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility that every
historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of
descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole
human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the
ultimate destruction of the earth, Fourier introduced into historical
science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.
Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land,
in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous,
revolution was going on. Steam and the new tool-making machinery were
transforming manufacture into modern industry, and thus
revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The
sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period changed into
a veritable storm and stress period of production. With constantly
increasing swiftness the splitting-up of society into large
capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these,
instead of the former stable middle-class, an unstable mass of
artisans and small shopkeepers, the most fluctuating portion of the
population, now led a precarious existence.
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its
period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of
production--the only one possible under existing conditions.
Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses--the
herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the
large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of
patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially
of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization
of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions,
from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry,
from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed
from day to day.
At this juncture there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29
years old--a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character,
and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen
had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that
man's character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity, on the
other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and
especially during his period of development. In the industrial
revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the
opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large
fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into
practice his favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos.
He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than
five hundred men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he
directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing
partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and
with a success that made him a European reputation. A population,
originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very
demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he
turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates,
lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by
placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and
especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the
founder of infant schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At
the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed
themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst
his competitors worked their people thirteen or fourteen hours a day,
in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a
crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received
their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more
than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its
proprietors.
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he
secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy
of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively
favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from
allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect
in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their
faculties. "And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500
persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less
than half a century before, it would have required the working part of
a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the
difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which
would have been consumed by 600,000?"[2]
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the
establishment 5 per cent. on the capital they had laid out, in
addition to over L300,000 clear profit. And that which held for New
Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in
England. "If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,
imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of Europe, in opposition
to Napoleon, and to support the aristocratic principles of society,
could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the
creation of the working-classes."[3] To them, therefore, the fruits of
this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic productive forces,
hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses,
offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they
were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the
common good of all.
Owen's Communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the
outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it
maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the
relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up
complete estimates of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and
probable revenue. And in his definite plan for the future, the
technical working out of details is managed with such practical
knowledge--ground plan, front and side and bird's-eye views all
included--that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there
is from the practical point of view little to be said against the
actual arrangement of details.
His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in
Owen's life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was
rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was
the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but
statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came
out with his Communist theories, that was quite another thing. Three
great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social
reform: private property, religion, the present form of marriage. He
knew what confronted him if he attacked these--outlawry,
excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social
position. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them
without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen happened.
Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against
him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in
America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to
the working-class and continued working in their midst for thirty
years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf
of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced
through in 1819, after five years' fighting, the first law limiting
the hours of labor of women and children in factories. He was
president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of
England united in a single great trade association. He introduced as
transition measures to the complete communistic organization of
society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and
production. These have since that time, at least, given practical
proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite
unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the
exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes,
whose unit was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed
to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange
of a much later period, and differing entirely from this in that it
did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first
step towards a much more radical revolution of society.
The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the
socialist ideas of the nineteenth century, and still governs some of
them. Until very recently all French and English Socialists did homage
to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was
of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of
absolute truth, reason, and justice, and has only to be discovered to
conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute
truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development
of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With
all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the
founder of each different school. And as each one's special kind of
absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his
subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of
his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending
possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be
mutually exclusive one of the other. Hence, from this nothing could
come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of
fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the
socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing
of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of such critical
statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the
founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a
mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more the definite sharp
edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of
debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.
To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real
basis.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This is the passage on the French Revolution: "Thought, the
concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old
scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law,
therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth
everything must be based upon this. Since the sun had been in the
firmament, and the planets circled round him, the sight had never been
seen of man standing upon his head--_i.e._, on the Idea--and building
reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, reason,
rules the world; but now, for the first time, had man come to
recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a
magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in
celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time,
an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the
reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world." [Hegel:
"Philosophy of History," 1840, p. 535.] Is it not high time to set the
anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to
the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?
[2] From "The Revolution in Mind and Practice," p. 21, a memorial
addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe," and sent to the provisional government of France, 1848, and
also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers."
[3] Note, l. c., p. 70.
II
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating
in Hegel. Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as
the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all
born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic
intellect of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of
dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although
in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (_e.g._ Descartes and
Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and
more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by
which also the French of the eighteenth century were almost wholly
dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside
philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced
masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's "Le
Neveu de Rameau," and Rousseau's "Discours sur l'origine et les
fondements de l'inegalite parmi les hommes." We give here, in brief,
the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon nature at large, or the history of
mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture
of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations
and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was,
but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We
see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual
parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the
movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move,
combine, and are connected. This primitive, naive, but intrinsically
correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy,
and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is
not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly
coming into being and passing away.
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character
of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain
the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not
understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In
order to understand these details we must detach them from their
natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its
nature, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of
natural science and historical research; branches of science which the
Greeks of classical times, on very good grounds, relegated to a
subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect
materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount of natural
and historical material must be collected before there can be any
critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and
species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were,
therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period,
and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science
dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward
it has advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of
Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different
natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the
internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms--these
were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our
knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last four hundred
years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of
observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their
connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in
motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death,
not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was
transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it
begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last
century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are
isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from
each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for
all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. "His
communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay;' for whatsoever is more than
these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not
exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else.
Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect
stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.
At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous,
because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound
commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his
own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out
into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought,
justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent
varies according to the nature of the particular object of
investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it
becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets
the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence,
it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose,
it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.
For everyday purposes we know and can say _e.g._, whether an animal is
alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many
cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They
have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit
beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder.
It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death,
for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary
phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not
the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without,
and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die
and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the
matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other
molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself,
and yet something other than itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an
antithesis, positive and negative, _e.g._, are as inseparable as they
are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually
interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are
conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual
cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their
general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each
other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal
action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing
places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and
then, and _vice versa_.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework
of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends
things and their representations, ideas, in their essential
connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes
as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its
own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern
science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials
increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature
works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in
the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes
through a real historical evolution. In this connection Darwin must be
named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of
Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants,
animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution
going on through millions of years. But the naturalists who have
learned to think dialectically are few and far between, and this
conflict of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of
thinking explains the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical
natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of
authors and readers alike.