OF THE SOCIAL REPUBLIC.
The Social Republic promises to solve the difficulty.
“All systems, all governments,” it declares, “have been tried and found
wanting. My ideas alone are new, and have not yet been put to the test.
My day is come.”
This is a mistake. The ideas propounded by the Social Republic are not
new. They are as old as the world. They have risen up in the midst of
all the great moral and social crises, whether in the East or the West,
in the ancient or the modern world. The second and third centuries in
Africa, and especially in Egypt, during the agitations caused by the
propagation of Christianity--the middle ages during their confused,
stormy fermentation--the sixteenth century in Germany, in the course of
the Reformation--and the seventeenth in England during the political
revolution,--had their Socialists and their Communists, thinking,
speaking, and acting precisely like those of our own day. It is a phase
of human nature that reappears at epochs when society is like a boiling
caldron, in which every ingredient is thrown to the surface and exposed
to view.
Till now, it is true, these ideas had only been enounced on a small
scale, obscurely and timidly, and were repelled and execrated almost as
soon as they saw the light. But now they boldly exhibit themselves, and
put forth all their pretensions before the public. It signifies little
whether this is by their own strength, by the fault of the public
itself, or from causes inherent in the present state of society. Since
the Social Republic is proclaimed aloud, we must look at it steadily and
endeavour to fathom its lowest depths.
I wish to avoid all circumlocution, to throw aside all disguises, and to
go straight to the heart of the idol. Nor is this impossible. For as all
the efforts of the Social Republic tend to one end, so all its ideas are
the offspring of one fundamental idea.
This fundamental idea is to be found, explicitly or implicitly, in the
language of all the leaders of the Social Republic, though all do not
avow, and some are perhaps not even conscious that they entertain it. M.
Proudhon appears to me the one among them who knows best what he thinks
and what he wishes: he appears to show the firmest and most consistent
understanding in his detestable dreams.
It is not, however, so firm nor so consistent as it appears, or probably
as he himself thinks it. He has not declared, and I doubt if he have
perceived, to what his system leads.
His system, nakedly and rigorously stated, is this:--
All men have a right--and the same right--to happiness.
Happiness is the enjoyment (without any limit but that prescribed by the
want and the faculty of enjoying) of all the good things existing or
possible in this world; whether natural and primitive, or progressively
created by the intelligence and the labour of man.
Certain men, certain families, or certain classes have acquired the
exclusive enjoyment of some (indeed the greater part) of the most
essential and productive of these good things; or, in other words, these
things, or the means of procuring them, are become the special and
perpetual property of certain men, families, and classes.
Such a confiscation of a part of the fund common to mankind, for the
advantage of a few, is essentially contrary to justice; contrary to the
rights of the men of the same generation, who ought all to enjoy it
equally; and contrary to the rights of successive generations, each of
which, on its entrance into life, ought to find the good things of life
equally accessible, and to enjoy them in its turn like its predecessors.
Therefore all special and perpetual appropriation of the good things
which confer happiness, and of the means of procuring those good things,
must be abolished, in order to insure the universal enjoyment and the
equal distribution of them amongst all men, and all successive
generations of men.
But how is it possible to abolish property? or, at least, so to
transform it, that, as regards its social and permanent effects, it may
be as if it were abolished?
Here the leaders of the Social Republic differ greatly among themselves.
Some recommend slow and gentle measures; others urge prompt and decisive
ones. Some have recourse to political means--for example, a certain
organization of existence and labour in common; others try to invent
economical and financial expedients--for example, a series of measures
designed gradually to destroy the net revenue of property, whether in
land or capital, and thus to render property itself useless and
illusory. But all these schemes originate in the same design and tend to
the same result; the abolition or the nullification of personal,
domestic, and hereditary property; and of all institutions, social or
political, which are based upon personal, domestic, and hereditary
property.
Such, through all the diversity, obscurity, ambiguity, and contradiction
of the ideas which circulate among the adherents of the Social
Republic, is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of all
these systems; such is the end they pursue, and hope to attain.
But the following truths are forgotten by M. Proudhon and his friends.
Mankind is not merely a series of individuals called men; it is a race,
which has a common life, and a general and progressive destiny. This is
the distinctive character of man, which he alone of created beings
possesses.
And why is this? It is because human individuals are not isolated, nor
confined to themselves, and to the point they occupy in space or time.
They are connected with each other; they act upon each other, by ties
and by means which do not require their presence, and which outlive
them. Hence the successive generations of men are linked together in
unbroken succession.
The permanent union and progressive development which are the
consequences of this unbroken succession of man to man, and generation
to generation, characterize the human race. They constitute its
peculiarity and its greatness, and mark man for sovereignty in this
world, and for immortality beyond it.
From this are derived, and by this are founded, the family and the
state, property and inheritance, country, history, glory, all the facts
and all the sentiments which constitute the extended and perpetual life
of mankind, amidst the bounded appearance and rapid disappearance of
individual men.
In the Social Republic all this ceases to exist. Men are mere isolated
and ephemeral beings, who appear in this life, and on this earth the
scene of life, only to take their subsistence and their pleasure, each
for himself alone, each by the same right, and without any end or
purpose beyond.
This is precisely the condition of the lower animals. Among them there
exists no tie, no influence, which survives the individual, and extends
to the race. There is no permanent appropriation, no hereditary
transmission, no unity nor progress in the life of the species;--nothing
but individuals who appear and then vanish, seizing on their passage
their portion of the good things of the earth and the pleasures of life,
according to the combined measure of their wants and their strength,
which, according to them, constitute their right.
Thus, in order to secure to every individual of the human species the
equal and incessantly fluctuating share of the goods and pleasures of
sense, the doctrines of the Social Republic bring men down to the level
of the lower animals. They obliterate the human race.
They do worse.
There is in the mind of man an imperishable instinct that God presides
over his destiny, and that it is not wholly accomplished in this world.
Naturally and universally, man believes in God and invokes him as his
support in the present, his hope in the future.
According to the doctrines of the Social Republic, God is an unknown
imaginary power, upon whom the visible and real rulers of men upon earth
throw the weight of their own responsibility, and by thus directing the
eyes of the suffering towards another master and another state of
existence, dispose them to acquiesce in their afflictions, whilst they
secure themselves in the maintenance of their usurpations. According
then to this doctrine, God is evil, for it is in his name that men are
persuaded to acquiesce in evil. To banish evil from the earth, it
therefore is necessary to banish God from the mind of man. Men left
alone with their earthly masters, and reduced to an earthly existence,
will demand the enjoyments of this life and the equal distribution of
these enjoyments; and as soon as those who are without them insist on
having them, they will have them, for they are the strongest.
Thus God and the human race will disappear together. In their place will
remain animals still bearing the name of men, more intelligent and more
powerful than other animals, but having the same condition and the same
destiny; and like them seizing, on their passage through life, their
portion of the goods of earth and the pleasures of sense, according to
the combined measure of their wants and their strength, which constitute
their right.
Such is the philosophy of the Social Republic; such, therefore, is the
basis of its policy. We have traced its origin and its end.
I will not insult the good sense or the dignity of mankind by dwelling
on it longer. It is the degradation of man, and the destruction of
society.
Not only of society as at present constituted, but of all human society
whatsoever: for all society rests on foundations which it is the object
of the Social Republic to overthrow. It is not a mere invasion of the
social edifice by intruders, whether barbarian or not; it is the utter
ruin of the edifice itself that is contemplated. If M. Proudhon had the
absolute disposal of society in its present state, with all that it
possesses or enjoys, and were to change the distribution and the
possessors of property at his own good pleasure, he would be guilty of
great iniquity, and occasion great suffering. He would not, however,
destroy society. But if he pretended to give the ideas with which he
tries to batter down the present structure of society, as laws to one
newly framed, it would infallibly perish. Instead of a State and a
People, there would be only a chaos of human beings, without a tie and
without repose. Nor would it be possible to reduce that chaos to order
without abandoning or evading the ideas of the Social Republic, and
returning to the natural conditions of social order.
The Social Republic is then at once odious and impossible. It is the
most absurd, and at the same time the most perverse, of all chimeras.
But we must not presume upon this. Nothing is more dangerous than what
is at once strong and impossible. The Social Republic is strong; indeed
how can it be otherwise? Availing themselves with ardour of every kind
of liberty granted for the promulgation of ideas, its advocates are
incessantly labouring to diffuse their principles and their promises
through the densest ranks of society. There they find masses of men easy
to delude, easy to inflame. They offer them rights in conformity with
their desires. They excite their passions in the name of justice and
truth. For it would be puerile to deny (and for the honour of human
nature we must admit) that the ideas of the Social Republic have, to
many minds, the character and the force of truth. In questions so
complex and so exciting, the smallest gleam of truth is sufficient to
dazzle the eyes and inflame the hearts of men, and to dispose them to
embrace with transport the grossest and most fatal errors with which
that truth is blended. Fanaticism is kindled at the same time that
selfishness is awakened; sincere devotedness joins hands with brutal
passions; and, in the terrible fermentation which ensues, evil
predominates; the portion of good mingled with it acts only as its veil
and its instrument.
We have no right to complain, for it is we ourselves who incessantly add
fuel to the fire--and this is the most deep-seated of our maladies. It
is we who give to the Social Republic its chief strength. It is the
chaos of our political ideas and our political morality--that chaos
disguised sometimes under the word _democracy_, sometimes under that of
_equality_, sometimes under that of _people_--which opens all the gates,
and throws down all the ramparts of society before it. We say that
Democracy is everything. The men of the Social Republic reply,
“Democracy is ourselves.” We proclaim, in language of infinite
confusion, the absolute equality of rights and the sovereign right of
numbers. The men of the Social Republic come forward and say, “Count our
numbers.” The perpetual confusion of the true and the false, the good
and the bad, the possible and the chimerical, which prevails in our own
policy, our own language, our own acts--this it is which has enfeebled
our arm for defence, and given to the Social Republic a confidence, an
arrogance, and an influence for attack, which of itself it would never
possess.
When this confusion shall be dissipated; when we shall arrive at that
period of maturity in which free nations, instead of blindly following
their first impressions, whithersoever they may lead, see things as they
really are, assign to the different elements of society their just
measure, and to words their true meaning, and regulate their ideas as
they do their affairs, with that firm moderation which rejects all
fantasies, admits all necessities, respects all rights, has regard to
all interests, and represses all usurpations;--those from below no less
than those from above--those of fanaticism no less than those of
selfishness: when we shall have reached this point, although the Social
Republic may not entirely disappear, and although we may not have
entirely crushed its efforts nor annihilated its dangers (for it derives
its ambition and its strength from sources that none can dry up), still
it will be controlled by the union and the order of society; all that is
most absurd and perverse in its doctrines will be incessantly combated
and defeated, and it will in time take its due place in that vast and
imposing development of the human race which is passing before our
eyes.