Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx
by Benedetto Croce
translated by C.M. Meredith
and with an introduction by A.D. Lindsay
1914

INTRODUCTION




The Essays in this volume, as will be apparent, have all of them had an

occasional origin. They bear evident traces of particular controversy and

contain much criticism of authors who are hardly, if at all, known in this

country. Their author thought it worth while to collect them in one volume

and it has been, I am sure, worth while to have them translated into English,

because though written on different occasions and in different controversies

they have all the same purpose. They are an attempt to make clear by philosophical

criticism the real purpose and value of Marx's work.






It is often said that it is the business of philosophy to examine and

criticise the assumptions of the sciences and philosophy claims that in this

work it is not an unnecessary meddler stepping in where it is not wanted.

For time and again for want of philosophical criticism the sciences have

overstepped their bounds and produced confusion and contradiction. The distinction

between the proper spheres of science and history and moral judgment is not

the work of either science or history or moral judgment but can only be accomplished

by philosophical reflection, and the philosopher will justify his work, if

he can show the various contending parties that his distinctions will disentangle

the puzzles into which they have fallen and help them to understand one another.






The present state of the controversy about the value of the writings of

Karl Marx obviously calls for some such work of disentangling. No honest

student can deny that his work has been of great historic importance and

it is hard to believe that a book like Das Kapital which has been the inspiration

of a great movement can be nothing but a tissue of false reasoning as some

of its critics have affirmed. The doctrine of the economic interpretation

of history has revivified and influenced almost all modern historical research.

In a great part of his analysis of the nature and natural development of

a capitalist society Marx has shown himself a prophet of extraordinary insight.

The more debatable doctrine of the class war has at least shown the sterility

of the earlier political theory which thought only in terms of the individual

and his state. The wonderful vitality of the Marxian theory of labour value

in spite of all the apparent refutations it has suffered at the hands of

orthodox political economists is an insoluble puzzle if it had no more in

it than the obvious fallacy which these refutations expose. Only a great

book could become ' the Bible of the working classes.'






But the process of becoming a Bible is a fatal process. No one can read

much current Marxian literature or discuss politics or economics with those

who style themselves orthodox Marxians without coming to the conclusion that

the spirit of ecclesiastical dogmatism daily growing weaker in its own home

has been transplanted into the religion of revolutionary socialism. Many

of those whose eyes have been opened to the truth as expounded by Marx seem

to have been thereby granted that faith which is the faculty of believing

what we should otherwise know to be untrue, and with them the economic interpretation

of history is transformed into a metaphysical dogma of deterministic materialism.

The philosopher naturally finds a stumbling-block in a doctrine which is

proclaimed but not argued. The historian however grateful he may be for the

light which economic interpretation has given him, is up in arms against

a theory which denies the individuality and uniqueness of history and reduces

it to an automatic repetition of abstract formulae. The politician when he

is told of the universal nature of the class war points triumphantly to the

fact that it is a war which those who should be the chief combatants are

slow to recognise or we should not find the working classes more ready to

vote for a Liberal or a Conservative than for a Socialist. The Socialist

must on consideration become impatient with a doctrine that by its fatalistic

determinism makes all effort unnecessary. If Socialism must come inevitably

by the automatic working out of economic law, why all this striving to bring

it about ? The answer that political efforts can make no difference, but

may bring about the revolution sooner, is too transparently inadequate a

solution of the difficulty to deceive anyone for long. Lastly the economist

can hardly tolerate a theory of value that seems to ignore entirely the law

of supply and demand, and concludes with some justice that either the theory

of labour value is nonsense or that Marx was talking about something quite

apart in its nature from the value which economics discusses. All these objections

are continually being made to Marxianism, and are met by no adequate answer.

And just as the sceptical lecturer of the street corner argues that a religion

which can make men believe in the story of Balaam's ass must be as nonsensical

as that story, so with as little justice the academic critic or the anti-socialist

politician concludes that Socialism or at least Marxianism is a tissue of

nonsensical statements if these ridiculous dogmas are its fruit.






A disentangles of true and false in so-called Marxianism is obviously

needed, and Senatore Croce is eminently fitted for the work. Much of the

difficulty of Marx comes from his relation to Hegel. He was greatly influenced

by and yet had reacted from Hegel's philosophy without making clear to others

or possibly to himself what his final position in regard to Hegel really

was. Senatore Croce is a Hegelian, but a critical one. His chief criticism

of Hegel is that his philosophy tends to obscure the individuality and uniqueness

of history, and Croce seeks to avoid that obscurity by distinguishing clearly

the methods of history, of science and of philosophy. He holds that all science

deals with abstractions, with what he has elsewhere called pseudo-concepts.

These abstractions have no real existence, and it is fatal to confuse the

system of abstraction which science builds up with the concrete living reality.

'All scientific laws are abstract laws,' as he says in one of these essays,

(III p. 57), 'and there is no bridge over which to pass from the concrete

to the abstract; just because the abstract is not a reality but a form of

thought, one of our, so to speak, abbreviated ways of thinking. And although

a knowledge of the laws may light up our perception of reality, it cannot

become that perception itself.'






The application to the doctrine of historic materialism is obvious. It

calls attention to one of the factors of the historical process, the economic.

This factor it quite rightly treats in abstraction and isolation. A knowledge

of the laws of economic forces so obtained may 'light up our perception '

of the real historical process, but only darkness and confusion can result

from mistaking the abstraction for reality and from the production of those

a priori histories of the stages of civilisation or the development of the

family which have discredited Marxianism in the eyes of historians. In the

first essay and the third part of the third Croce explains this distinction

between economic science and history and their proper relation to one another.

The second essay reinforces the distinction by criticism of another attempt

to construct a science which shall take the place of history. A science in

the strict sense history is not and never can be.






Once this is clearly understood it is possible to appreciate the services

rendered to history by Marx. For Croce holds that economics is a real science.

The economic factors in history can be isolated and treated by themselves.

Without such isolated treatment they cannot be understood, and if they are

not understood, our view of history is bound to be unnecessarily narrow and

one-sided. On the relative importance of the economic and the political and

the religious factors in history he has nothing to say. There is no a priori

answer to the question whether any school of writers has unduly diminished

or exaggerated the importance of any one of these factors. Their importance

has varied at different times, and can at any time only be estimated empirically.

It remains a service of great value to have distinguished a factor of such

importance which had been previously neglected.






If then the economic factor in history should be isolated and treated

separately, how is it to be distinguished? For it is essential to Croce's

view of science that each science has its own concepts it.' which can be

distinguished clearly from those of other sciences. This question is discussed

in Essay III Q. 5 and more specifically in Essay VI. Croce is specially anxious

to distinguish between the spheres of economics and ethics. Much confusion

has been caused in political economy in the past by the assumption that economics

takes for granted that men behave egoistically, i.e. in an immoral way. As

a result of this assumption men have had to choose between the condemnation

of economics or of mankind. The believer in humanity has been full of denunciation

of that monstrosity the economic man, while the thorough-going believer in

economics has assumed that the success of the economic interpretation of

history proves that men are always selfish. The only alternative view seemed

to be the rather cynical compromise that though men were sometimes unselfish,

their actions were so prevailingly selfish that for political purposes the

unselfish actions might be ignored. Croce insists, and surely with justice,

that economic actions are not moral or immoral, but in so far as they are

economic, non-moral. The moral worth of actions cannot be determined by their

success or failure in giving men satisfaction. For there are some things

in which men find satisfaction which they yet judge to be bad. We must distinguish

therefore the moral question whether such and such an action is good or bad

from the economic whether it is or is not useful, whether it is a way by

which men get what they, rightly or wrongly want.In economics then we are

merely discussing the efficiency or utility of actions. We can ask of any

action whether it ought or ought not to be done at all. That is a moral question.

We may also ask whether it is done competently or efficiently: that is an

economic question. It might be contended that it is immoral to keep a public

house, but it would also have to be allowed that the discussion of the most

efficient way by keeping a public house was outside the scope of the moral

enquiry. Mrs Weir of Hermiston was confusing economics with ethics when she

answered Lord Braxfield's complaints of his ill-cooked dinner by saying that

the cook was a very pious woman. Economic action according to Croce is the

condition of moral action. If action has no economic value, it is merely

aimless, but it may have economic value without being moral, and the consideration

of economic value must therefore be independent of ethics.






Marx, Croce holds was an economist and not a moralist, and the moral judgments

of socialists are not and cannot be derived from any scientific examination

of economic processes.






So much for criticisms of Marx or rather of exaggerated developments of

Marxianism, which though just and important, are comparatively obvious. The

most interesting part of Signor Croce's criticism is his interpretation of

the shibboleth of orthodox Marxians and the stumbling block of economists,

the Marxian theory of labour-value with its corollary of surplus value. Marx's

exposition of the doctrine in Das Kapital is the extreme of abstract reasoning.

Yet it is found in a book full of concrete descriptions of the evils of the

factory system and of moral denunciation and satire. If Marx's theory be

taken as an account of what determines the actual value of concrete things

it is obviously untrue. The very use of the term surplus value is sufficient

to show that it might be and sometimes is taken to be the value which commodities

ought to have, but none can read Marx's arguments and think that he was concerned

with a value which should but did not exist. He is clearly engaged on a scientific

not a Utopian question.






Croce attempts to find a solution by pointing out that the society which

Marx is describing is not this or that actual society, but an ideal, in the

sense of a hypothetical society, capitalist society as such. Marx has much

to say of the development of capitalism in England, but he is not primarily

concerned to give an industrial history of England or of any other existing

society. He is a scientist and deals with abstractions or types and considers

England only in so far as in it the characteristics of the abstract capitalist

society are manifested. The capitalism which he is analysing does not exist

because no society is completely capitalist. Further it is to be noticed

that in his analysis of value Marx is dealing with objects only in so far

as they are commodities produced by labour. This is evident enough in his

argument. The basis of his contention that all value is 'congealed labour

time' is that all things which have economic value have in common only the

fact that labour has been expended on them, and yet afterwards he admits

that there are things in which no labour has been expended which yet have

economic value. He seems to regard this as an incidental unimportant fact.

Yet obviously it is a contradiction which vitiates his whole argument. If

all things which have economic value have not had labour expended on them,

we must look elsewhere for their common characteristic. We should probably

say that they all have in common the fact that they are desired and that

there is not an unlimited supply of them. The pure economist finds the key

to this analysis of value in the consideration of the laws of supply and

demand, which alone affect all things that have economic value, and finds

little difficulty in refuting Marx's theory, on the basis which his investigation

assumes.






A consideration of Marx's own argument forces us therefore to the conclusion

that either Marx was an incapable bungler or that he thought the fact that

some things have economic value and are yet not the product of labour irrelevant

to his argument because he was talking of economic value in two senses, firstly

in the sense of price, and secondly in a peculiar sense of his own. This

indeed is borne out by his distinction of value and price. Croce developing

this hint, suggests that the importance of Marx's theory lies in a comparison

between a capitalist society and another abstract economic society in which

there are no commodities on which labour is not expended, and no monopoly.

We thus have two abstract societies, the capitalist society which though

abstract is very largely actualised in modern civilisation, and another quite

imaginary economic society of unfettered competition, which is continually

assumed by the classical economist, but which, as Marx said, could only exist

where there was no private property in capital, i.e. in the collectivist

state.






Now in a society of that kind in which there was no monopoly and capital

was at everyone's disposal equally, the value of commodities would represent

the value of the labour put into them, and that value might be represented

in Wits of socially necessary labour time. It would still have to be admitted

that an hour of one man's labour might be of much greater value to the community

than two hours of another man, but that Marx has already allowed for. The

unit of socially necessary labour time is an abstraction, and the hour of

one man might contain two or any number of such abstract units of labour

time. What Marx has done is to take the individualist economist at his word:

he has accepted the notion of an economic society as a number of competing

individuals. Only he has insisted that they shall start fair and therefore

that they shall have nothing to buy or sell but their labour. The discrepancy

between the values which would exist in such a society and actual prices

represent the disturbance created by the fact that actual society is not

a society of equal competitors, but one in which certain competitors start

with some kind of advantage or monopoly.






If this is really the kernel of Marx's doctrine, it bears a close relation

to a simpler and more familiar contention, that in a society where free economic

competition holds sway, each man gets what he deserves, for his income represents

the sum that society is prepared to pay for his services, the social value

of his work. In this form the hours worked are supposed to be uniform, and

the differences in value are taken to represent different amounts of social

service. In Marx's argument the social necessity is taken as uniform, and

the difference in value taken to represent differences in hours of work.

While the main abstract contention remains the same, most of those who argue

that in a system of unfettered economic competition most men get what they

deserve, rather readily ignore the existence of monopoly, and assume that

this argument justifies the existing distribution of wealth. The chief purpose

of Marx's argument is to emphasise the difference between such an economic

system and a capitalist society. He is here, as so often, turning the logic

of the classical economists against themselves, and arguing that the conditions

under which a purely economic distribution of wealth could take place, could

only exist in a community where monopoly had been completely abolished and

all capital collectivised.






Croce maintains that Marx's theory of value is economic and not moral.

Yet it is hard to read Marx and certainly Marxians without finding in them

the implication that the values produced in such an economic society would

be just. If that implication be examined, we come on an important difficulty

still remaining in this theory. The contention that in a system of unfettered

economic competition, men get the reward they deserve, assumes that it is

just that if one man has a greater power of serving society than another

he should be more highly rewarded for his work. This the individualist argument

with which we compared Marx's assumes without question. But the Marxian theory

of value is frequently interpreted to imply that amount of work is the only

claim to reward. For differences in value it is held are created by differences

in the amount of labour. But the word amount may here be used in two senses.

When men say that the amount of work a man does should determine a man's

reward; they commonly mean that if one man works two hours and another one,

the first ought to get twice the reward of the second. 'Amount ' here means

the actual time spent in labour. But in Marx's theory of value amount means

something quite different, for an hour of one man's work may, he admits,

be equal to two of another man's. He means by amount a sum of abstract labour

time units. Marx's scientific theory of value is quite consistent with different

abilities getting different rewards, the moral contention that men should

get more reward if they work more and for no other reason is not. The equation

of work done by men of different abilities by expressing them in abstract

labour time units is essential to Marx's theory but fatal to the moral claim

sometimes founded upon it.






Further the great difficulty in allowing that it is just that men of different

abilities should have different rewards, comes from the fact that differences

of ability are of the nature of monopolies. In a pure economic society high

rewards would be given to rare ability and although it is possible to equate

work of rare ability with work of ordinary ability by expressing both as

amounts of abstract labour time units, it surely remains true that the value

is determined not by the amount of abstract labour time congealed in it but

by the law of supply and demand. Where there are differences of ability there

is some kind of monopoly, and where there is monopoly, you cannot eliminate

the influence of the relation of supply and demand in the determination of

value. What you imagine you have eliminated by the elimination of capital,

which you can collectivise, remains obstinately in individual differences

of ability which cannot be collectivised.






But here I have entered beyond the limits of Croce's argument. His critical

appraisement of Marx's work must be left to others to judge who have more

knowledge of Marx and of economics than I can lay claim to. I am confident

only that all students of Marx whether they be disciples or critics, will

find in these essays illumination in a field where much bitter controversy

has resulted in little but confusion and obscurity.






A. D. LINDSAY.










CHAPTER 1. CONCERNING THE SCIENTIFIC FORM OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM






Historical materialism is what is called a fashionable subject. The theory

came into being fifty years ago, and for a time remained obscure and limited;

but during the last six or seven years it has rapidly attained great fame

and an extensive literature, which is daily increasing, has grown up around

it. It is not my intention to write once again the account, already given

many times, of the origin of this doctrine; nor to restate and criticise

the now well-known passages in which Marx and Engels asserted the theory,

nor the different views of its opponents, its supporters, its exponents,

and its correctors and corruptors. My object is merely to submit to my colleagues

some few remarks concerning the doctrine, taking it in the form in which

it appears in a recent book by Professor Antonio Labriola, of the University

of Rome.(1*)






For many reasons, it does not come within my province to praise Labriola's

book. But I cannot help saying as a needful explanation, that it appears

to me to be the fullest and most adequate treatment of the question. The

book is free from pedantry and learned tattle, whilst it shows in every line

signs of the author's complete knowledge of all that has been written on

the subject: a book, in short, which saves the annoyance of controversy with

erroneous and exaggerated opinions, which in it appear as superseded. It

has a grand opportunity in Italy, where the materialistic theory of history

is known almost solely in the spurious form bestowed on it by an ingenious

professor of economics, who even pretends to be its inventor.(2*)






I






Any reader of Labriola's book who tries to obtain from it a precise concept

of the new theory of history, will reach in the first instance a conclusion

which must appear to him evident and incontestable, and which I sum up in

the following statement: 'historical materialism, so-called, is not a philosophy

of history.' Labriola does not state this denial explicitly; it may even

be granted that, in words, he sometimes says exactly the opposite.(3*) But,

if I am not mistaken, the denial is contained implicitly in the restrictions

which he places on the meaning of the theory.






The philosophical reaction of realism overthrew the systems built up by

teleology and metaphysical dogmatism, which had limited the field of the

historian. The old philosophy of history was destroyed. And, as if in contempt

and depreciation, the phrase, 'to construct a philosophy of history,' came

to be used with the meaning: 'to construct a fanciful and artificial and

perhaps prejudiced history.'






It is true that of late books have begun to reappear actually having as

their title the 'philosophy of history.' This might seem to be a revival,

but it is not. In fact their subject is a very different one. These recent

productions do not aim at supplying a new philosophy of history, they simply

offer some philosophising about history. The distinction deserves to be explained.






The possibility of a philosophy of history presupposes the possibility

of reducing the sequence of history to general concepts. Now, whilst it is

possible to reduce to general concepts the particular factors of reality

which appear in history and hence to construct a philosophy of morality or

of law, of science or of art, and a general philosophy, it is not possible

to work up into general concepts the single complex whole formed by these

factors, i.e. the concrete fact, in which the historical sequence consists.

To divide it into its factors is to destroy it, to annihilate it. In its

complex totality, historical change is incapable of reduction except to one

concept, that of development: a concept empty of everything that forms the

peculiar content of history. The old philosophy of history regarded a conceptual

working out of history as possible; either because by introducing the idea

of God or of Providence, it read into the facts the aims of a divine intelligence;

or because it treated the formal concept of development as including within

itself, logically, the contingent determinations. The case of positivism

is strange in that, being neither so boldly imaginative as to yield to the

conceptions of teleology and rational philosophy, nor so strictly realistic

and intellectually disciplined as to attack the error at its roots, it has

halted half way, i.e. at the actual concept of development and of evolution,

and has announced the philosophy of evolution as the true philosophy of history:

development itself -- as the law which explains development! Were this tautology

only in question little harm would result; but the misfortune is that, by

a too easy confusion, the concept of evolution often emerges, in the hands

of the positivists, from the formal emptiness which belongs to it in truth,

and acquires a meaning or rather a pretended meaning, very like the meanings

of teleology and metaphysics. The almost religious unction and reverence

with which one hears the sacred mystery of evolution spoken of gives sufficient

proof of this.






From such realistic standpoints, now as always, any and every philosophy

of history has been criticised. But the very reservations and criticisms

of the old mistaken constructions demand a discussion of concepts, that is

a process of philosophising: although it may be a philosophising which leads

properly to the denial of a philosophy of history. Disputes about method,

arising out of the needs of the historian, are added. The works published

in recent years embody different investigations of this kind, and in a plainly

realistic sense, under the title of philosophy of history. Amongst these

I will mention as an example a German pamphlet by Simmel, and, amongst ourselves

a compendious introduction by Labriola himself. There are, undoubtedly, still

philosophies of history which continue to be produced in the old way: voices

clamantium in deserto, to whom may be granted the consolation of believing

themselves the only apostles of an unrecognised truth.






Now the materialistic theory of history, in the form in which Labriola

states it, involves an entire abandonment of all attempt to establish a law

of history, to discover a general concept under which all the complex facts

of history can be included.






I say 'in the form in which he states it,' because Labriola is aware that

several sections of the materialistic school of history tend to approximate

to these obsolete ideas.






One of these sections, which might be called that of the monists, or abstract

materialists, is characterised by the introduction of metaphysical materialism

into the conception of history.






As the reader knows, Marx, when discussing the relation between his opinions

and Hegelianism employed a pointed phrase which has been taken too often

beside the point. He said that with Hegel history was standing on its head

and that it must be turned right side up again in order to replace it on

its feet. For Hegel the idea is the real world, whereas for him (Marx) 'the

ideal is nothing else than the material world' reflected and translated by

the human mind. Hence the statement so often repeated, that the materialistic

view of history is the negation or antithesis of the idealistic view. It

would perhaps be convenient to study once again, accurately and critically,

these asserted relations between scientific socialism and Hegelianism. To

state the opinion which I have formed on the matter; the link between the

two views seems to me to be, in the main, simply psychological. Hegelianism

was the early inspiration of the youthful Marx, and it is natural that everyone

should link up the new ideas with the old as a development, an amendment,

an antithesis. In fact, Hegel's Ideas and Marx knew this perfectly well --

are not human ideas, and to turn the Hegelian philosophy of history upside

down cannot give us the statement that ideas arise as reflections of material

conditions. The inverted form would logically be this: history is not a process

of the Idea, i.e. of a rational reality, but a system of forces: to the rational

view is opposed the dynamic view. As to the Hegelian dialectic of concepts

it seems to me to bear a purely external and approximate resemblance to the

historical notion of economic eras and of the antithetical conditions of

society. Whatever may be the value of this suggestion, which I express with

hesitation, recognising the difficulty of the problems connected with the

interpretation and origin of history; -- this much is evident, that metaphysical

materialism, at which Marx and Engels, starting from the extreme Hegelian

left, easily arrived, supplied the name and some of the components of their

view of history. But both the name and these components are really extraneous

to the true character of their conception. This can be neither materialistic

nor spiritualistic, nor dualistic nor monadistic: within its limited field

the elements of things are not presented in such a way as to admit of a philosophical

discussion whether they are reducible one to another, and are united in one

ultimate source. What we have before us are concrete objects, the earth,

natural production, animals; we have before us man, in whom the so-called

psychical processes appear as differentiated from the so-called physiological

processes. To talk in this case of monism and materialism is to talk nonsense.

Some socialist writers have expressed surprise because Lange, in his classic

History of Materialism, does not discuss historical materialism. It is needless

to remark that Lange was familiar with Marxian socialism. He was, how ever,

too cautious to confuse the metaphysical materialism with which he was concerned,

with historical materialism which has no essential connection with it, and

is merely a way of speaking.






But the metaphysical materialism of the authors of the new historical

doctrine, and the name given to the latter, have been not a little misleading.

I will refer as an example to a recent and bad little book, which seems to

me symptomatic, by a sufficiently accredited socialist writer, Plechanow.(4*)

The author, designing to study historical materialism, thinks it needful

to go back to Holbach and Helvetius. And he waxes indignant at metaphysical

dualism and pluralism, declaring that 'the most important philosophical systems

were always monistic, that is they interpreted matter and spirit as merely

two classes of phenomena having a single and indivisible cause.' And in reference

to those who maintain the distinction between the factors in history, he

exclaims: 'We see here the old story, always recurring, of the struggle between

eclecticism and monism, the story of the dividing walls; here nature, there

spirit, etc.' Many will be amazed at this unexpected leap from the materialistic

study of history into the arms of monism, in which they were unaware that

they ought to have such confidence.






Labriola is most careful to avoid this confusion: 'Society is a datum,'

he says, 'history is nothing more than the history of society.' And he controverts

with equal energy and success the naturalists, who wish to reduce the history

of man to the history of nature, and the verbalists, who claim to deduce

from the name materialism the real nature of the new view of history. But

it must appear, even to him, that the name might have been more happily chosen,

and that the confusion lies, so to speak, inherent in it. It is true that

old words can be bent to new meanings, but within limits and after due consideration.






In regard to the tendency to reconstruct a materialistic philosophy of

history, substituting an omnipresent Matter for an omnipresent idea, it suffices

to re-assert the impossibility of any such construction, which must become

merely superfluous and tautologous unless it abandoned itself to dogmatism.

But there is another error, which is remarked among the followers of the

materialistic school of history, and which is connected with the former,

viz., to anticipate harm not only in the interpretation of history but also

in the guidance of practical activities. I refer to the teleological tendencies

(abstract teleology), which also Labriola opposes with a cutting attack.

The very idea of progress, which has seemed to many the only law of history

worth saving out of the many devised by philosophical and non-philosophical

thinkers, is by him deprived of the dignity of a law, and reduced to a sufficiently

narrow significance. The idea of it, says Labriola, is 'not only empirical,

but always incidental and hence limited': progress 'does not influence the

sequence of human affairs like destiny or fate, nor like the command of a

law.' History teaches us that man is capable of progress; and we can look

at all the different series of events from this point of view: that is all.

No less incidental and empirical is the idea of historical necessity, which

must be freed from all remnants of rationalism and of transcendentalism,

so that we see in it the mere recognition of the very small share left in

the sequence of events, to individuals and personal free will.






It must be admitted that a little of the blame for the teleological and

fatalistic misunderstandings fall on Marx himself. Marx, as he once had to

explain, liked to 'coquette' with the Hegelian terminology: a dangerous weapon,

with which it would have been better not to trifle. Hence it is now thought

necessary to give to several of his statements a somewhat broad interpretation

in agreement with the general trend of his theories.(5*) Another excuse lies

in the impetuous confidence which, as in the case of any practical work,

accompanies the practical activities of socialism, and engenders beliefs

and expectations which do not always agree with prudent critical and scientific

thought. It is strange to see how the positivists, newly converted to socialism,

exceed all the others (see the effect of a good school!) in their teleological

beliefs, and their facile predeterminations. They swallow again what is worst

in Hegelianism, which they once so violently opposed without recognising

it. Labriola has finely said that the very forecasts of socialism are merely

morphological in nature; and, in fact, neither Marx nor Engels would ever

have asserted in the abstract that communism must come about by an unavoidable

necessity, in the manner in which they foresaw it. If history is always accidental,

why in this western Europe of ours, might not a new barbarism arise owing

to the effect of incalculable circumstances? Why should not the coming of

communism be either rendered superfluous or hastened by some of those technical

discoveries, which, as Marx himself has proved, have hitherto produced the

greatest revolutions in the course of history?






I think then that better homage would be rendered to the materialistic

view of history, not by calling it the final and definite philosophy of history

but rather by declaring that properly speaking it is not a philosophy of

history. This intrinsic nature which is evident to those who understand it

properly, explains the difficulty which exists in finding for it a satisfactory

theoretical statement; and why to Labriola it appears to be only in its beginnings

and yet to need much development. It explains too why Engels said (and Labriola

accepts the remark), that it is nothing more than a new method; which means

a denial that it is a new theory. But is it indeed a new method? I must acknowledge

that this name method does not seem to me altogether accurate. When the philosophical

idealists tried to arrive at the facts of history by inference, this was

truly a new method; and there may still exist some fossil of those blessed

times, who makes such attempts at history. But the historians of the materialistic

school employ the same intellectual weapons and follow the same paths as,

let us say, the philological historians. They only introduce into their work

some new data, some new experiences. The content is different, not the nature

of the method.






II






I have now reached the point which for me is fundamental. Historical materialism

is not and cannot be a new philosophy of history or a new method; but it

is properly this; a mass of new data, of new experiences, of which the historian

becomes conscious.






It is hardly necessary to mention the overthrow a short time ago of the

naive opinion of the ordinary man regarding the objectivity of history; almost

as though events spoke, and the historian was there to hear and to record

their statements. Anyone who sets out to write history has before him documents

and narratives, i.e. small fragments and traces of what has actually happened.

In order to attempt to reconstruct the complete process, he must fall back

on a series of assumptions, which are in fact the ideas and information which

he possesses concerning the affairs of nature, of man, of society. The pieces

needed to complete the whole, of which he has only the fragments before him,

he must find within himself. His worth and skill as a historian is shown

by the accuracy of his adaptation. Whence it clearly follows that the enrichment

of these views and experiences is essential to progress in historical narration.






What are these points of view and experiences which are offered by the

materialistic theory of history?






That section of Labriola's book which discusses this appears to me excellent

and sufficient. Labriola points out how historical narration in the course

of its development, might have arrived at the theory of historical-factors;

i.e., the notion that the sequence of history is the result of a number of

forces, known as physical conditions, social organizations, political institutions,

personal influences. Historical materialism goes beyond, to investigate the

interaction of these factors; or rather it studies them all together as parts

of a single process. According to this theory -- as is now well known, and

as Marx expressed it in a classical passage -- the foundations of history

are the methods of production, i.e. the economic conditions which give rise

to class distinctions, to the constitution of rank and of law, and to those

beliefs which make up social and moral customs and sentiments, the reflection

whereof is found in art, science and religion.






To understand this point of view accurately is not easy, and it is misunderstood

by all those who, rather than take it in the concrete, state it absolutely

after the manner of an absolute philosophical truth. The theory cannot be

maintained in the abstract without destroying it, i.e. without turning it

into the theory of the factors, which is according to my view, the final

word in abstract analysis.(6*) Some have supposed that historical materialism

asserts that history is nothing more than economic history, and all the rest

is simply a mask, an appearance without reality. And then they labour to

discover the true god of history, whether it be the productive tool or the

earth, using arguments which call to mind the proverbial discussion about

the egg and the hen. Friedrich Engels was attacked by someone who applied

to him to ask how the influence of such and such other historical factors

ought to be understood in reference to the economic factor. In the numerous

letters which he wrote in reply, and which now, since his death, are coming

out in the reviews, he let it be understood that, when together with Marx,

upon the prompting of the facts, he conceived this new view of history, he

had not meant to state an exact theory. In one of these letters he apologists

for whatever exaggeration he and Marx may have put into the controversial

statements of their ideas, and begs that attention may be paid to the practical

applications made of them rather than to the theoretical expressions employed.

It would be a fine thing, he exclaims, if a formula could be given for the

interpretation of all the facts of history! By applying this formula, it

would be as easy to understand any period of history as to solve a simple

equation.(7*)






Labriola grants that the supposed reduction of history to the economic

factor is a ridiculous notion, which may have occurred to one of the too

hasty defenders of the theory, or to one of its no less hasty opponents.(8*)

He acknowledges the complexity of history, how the products of the first

degree first establish themselves, and then isolate themselves and become

independent; the ideals which harden into traditions, the persistent survivals,

the elasticity of the psychical mechanism which makes the individual irreducible

to a type of his class or social position, the unconsciousness and ignorance

of their own situations often observed in men, the stupidity and unintelligibility

of the beliefs and superstitions arising out of unusual accidents and complexities.

And since man lives a natural as well as a social existence, he admits the

influence of race, of temperament and of the promptings of nature. And, finally,

he does not overlook the influence of the individual, i.e. of the work of

those who are called great men, who if they are not the creators, are certainly

collaborators of history.






With all these concessions he realises, if I am not mistaken, that it

is useless to look for a theory, in any strict sense of the word, in historical

materialism; and even that it is not what can properly be called a theory

at all. He confirms us in this view by his fine account of its origin, under

the stimulus of the French Revolution, that great school of sociology --

as he calls it. The materialistic view of history arose out of the need to

account for a definite social phenomenon, not from an abstract inquiry into

the factors of historical life. It was created in the minds of politicians

and revolutionists, not of cold and calculating savants of the library.






At this stage someone will say: -- But if the theory, in the strict sense,

is not true, wherein then lies the discovery? In what does the novelty consist?

To speak in this way is to betray a belief that intellectual progress consists

solely in the perfecting of the forms and abstract categories of thought.






Have approximate observations no value in addition to theories? The knowledge

of what has usually happened, everything in short that is called experience

of life, and which can be expressed in general but not in strictly accurate

terms? Granting this limitation and understanding always an almost and an

about, there are discoveries to be made which are fruitful in the interpretation

of life and of history. Such are the assertions of the dependence of all

parts of life upon each other, and of their origin in the economic subsoil,

so that it can be said that there is but one single history; the discovery

of the true nature of the State (as it appears in the empirical world), regarded

as an institution for the defence of the ruling class; the proved dependence

of ideals upon class interests; the coincidence of the great epochs of history

with the great economic eras; and the many other observations by which the

school of historical materialism is enriched. Always with the aforesaid limitations,

it may be said with Engels: 'that men make their history themselves, but

within a given limited range, on a basis of conditions actually pre-existent,

amongst which the economic conditions, although they may be influenced by

the others, the political and ideal, are yet, in the final analysis, decisive,

and form the red thread which runs through the whole of history and guides

us to an understanding thereof.






From this point of view too, I entirely agree with Labriola in regarding

as somewhat strange the inquiries made concerning the supposed forerunners

and remote authors of historical materialism, and as quite mistaken the inferences

that these inquiries will detract from the importance and originality of

the theory. The Italian professor of economics to whom I referred at the

beginning, when convicted of a plagiarism, thought to defend himself by saying

that, at bottom, Marx's idea was not peculiar to Marx; hence, at worst, he

had robbed a thief. He gave a list of forerunners, reaching back as far as

Aristotle. Just lately, another Italian professor reproved a colleague with

much less justice for having forgotten that the economic interpretation had

been explained by Lorenzo Stein before Marx. I could multiply such examples.

All this reminds me of one of Jean Paul Richter's sayings: that we hoard

our thoughts as a miser does his money; and only slowly do we exchange the

money for possessions, and thoughts for experiences and feelings. Mental

observations attain real importance through the realisation in thought and

an insight into the fulness of their possibilities. This realisation and

insight have been granted to the modern socialist movement and to its intellectual

leaders Marx and Engels. We may read even in Thomas More that the State is

a conspiracy of the rich who make plots for their own convenience: gunedam

conspiratio divitum, de suds commodis reipublicae nomine tituloque tractantium,

and call their intrigues laws: machinamenta jam leges fiunt.(9*) And, leaving

Sir Thomas More -- who, after all, it will be said, was a communist -- who

does not know by heart Marzoni's lines: Un' odiosa Forza il mondo possiede

e fa nomarsi Dritto....(10*) But the materialist and socialist interpretation

of the State is not therefore any the less new. The common proverb, indeed,

tells us that interest is the most powerful motive for human actions and

conceals itself under the most varied forms; but it is none the less true

that the student of history who has previously examined the teachings of

socialist criticism, is like a short-sighted man who has provided himself

with a good pair of spectacles: he sees quite differently and many mysterious

shadows reveal their exact shape.






In regard to historical narrative then, the materialistic view of history

resolves itself into a warning to keep its observations in mind as a new

aid to the understanding of history. Few problems are harder than that which

the historian has to solve. In one particular it resembles the problem of

the statesman, and consists in understanding the conditions of a given nation

at a given time in respect to their causes and functioning; but with this

difference: the historian confines himself to exposition, the statesman proceeds

further to modification; the former pays no penalty for misunderstanding,

whereas the latter is subjected to the severe correction of facts. Confronted

by such a problem, the majority of historians -- I refer in particular to

the conditions of the study in Italy -- proceed at a disadvantage, almost

like the savants of the old school who constructed philology and researched

into etymology. Aids to a closer and deeper understanding, have come at length

from different sides, and frequently. But the one which is now offered by

the materialistic view of history is great, and suited to the importance

of the modern socialist movement. It is true that the historian must render

exact and definite in each particular instance, that co-ordination and subordination

of factors which is indicated by historical materialism, in general, for

the greater number of cases, and approximately; herein lies his task and

his difficulties, which may sometimes be insurmountable. But now the road

has been pointed out, along which the solution must be sought, of some of

the greatest problems of history apart from those which have been already

elucidated.






I will say nothing of the recent attempts at an historical application

of the materialistic conception, because it is not a subject to hurry over

in passing, and I intend to deal with it on another occasion. I will content

myself with echoing Labriola, who gives a warning against a mistake, common

to many of these attempts. This consists in retranslating, as he says, into

economic phraseology, the old historical perspective which of late has so

often been translated into Darwinian phraseology. Certainly it would not

be worth while to create a new movement in historical studies in order to

attain such a result.






III






Two things seem to me to deserve some further explanation. What is the

relation between historical materialism and socialism? Labriola, if I am

not mistaken, is inclined to connect closely and almost to identify the two

things. The whole of socialism lies in the materialistic interpretation of

history, which is the truth itself of socialism; to accept one and reject

the other is to understand neither. I consider this statement to be somewhat

exaggerated, or, at least, to need explanation. If historical materialism

is stripped of every survival of finality and of the benignities of providence,

it can afford no apology for either socialism or any other practical guidance

for life. On the other hand, in its special historical application, in the

assertion which can be made by its means, its real and close connection with

socialism is to be found. This assertion is as follows: -- Society is now

so constituted that socialism is the only possible solution which it contains

within itself. An assertion and forecast of this kind moreover will need

to be filled out before it can be a basis for practical action. It must be

completed by motives of interest, or by ethical and sentimental motives,

moral judgments and the enthusiasms of faith. The assertion in itself is

cold and powerless. It will be insufficient to move the cynic, the sceptic,

the pessimist. But it will suffice to put on their guard all those classes

of society who see their ruin in the sequence of history and to pledge them

to a long struggle, although the final outcome may be useless. Amongst these

classes is the proletariat, which indeed aims at the extinction of its class.

Moral conviction and the force of sentiment must be added to give positive

guidance and to supply an imperative ideal for those who neither feel the

blind impulse of class interest, nor allow themselves to be swept along by

the whirling current of the times.






The final point which I think demands explanation, although in this case

also the difference between myself and Labriola does not appear to be serious,

is this: to what conclusions does historical materialism lead in regard to

the ideal values of man, in regard that is to intellectual truth and to what

is called moral truth?






The history of the origin of intellectual truth is undoubtedly made clearer

by historical materialism, which aims at showing the influence of actual

material conditions upon the opening out, and the very development of the

human intellect. Thus the history of opinions, like that of science, needs

to be for the most part re-written from this point of view. But those who,

on account of such considerations concerning historical origins, return in

triumph to the old relativity and scepticism, are confusing two quite distinct

classes of problem. Geometry owes its origin no doubt to given conditions

which are worth determining; but it does not follow that geometrical truth

is something merely historical and relative. The warning seems superfluous,

but even here misunderstandings are frequent and remarkable. Have I not read

in some socialist author that Marx's discoveries themselves are of merely

historical importance and must necessarily be disowned. I do not know what

meaning this can have unless it has the very trivial one of a recognition

of the limitation of all human work, or unless it resolves itself into the

no less idle remark that Marx's thought is the offspring of his age. This

one-sided history is still more dangerous in reference to moral truth. The

science of morality is evidently now In a transformation stage. The ethical

imperative, whose classics are Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and Herbart's

Allgemeine praktische Philosophie, appears no longer adequate. In addition

to it an historical and a formal science of morality are making their appearance,

which regard morality as a fact, and study its universal nature apart from

all preoccupations as to creeds and rules. This tendency shows itself not

only in socialistic circles, but also elsewhere, and it will be sufficient

for me to refer to Simmel's clever writings. Labriola is thus justified in

his defence of new methods of regarding morality. 'Ethics, he says, for us

resolves itself into an historical study of the subjective and objective

conditions according to which morality develops or finds hindrances to its

development.' But he adds cautiously, 'in this way alone, i.e., within these

limits, is there value in the statement that morality corresponds to the

social situation, i.e., in the Anal analysis to the economic conditions.'

The question of the intrinsic and absolute worth of the moral ideal, of its

reducibility or irreducibility to intellectual truth, remains untouched.






It would perhaps have been well if Labriola had dwelt a little more on

this point. A strong tendency is found in socialistic literature towards

a moral relativity, not indeed historical, but substantial, which regards

morality as a vain imagination. This tendency is chiefly due to the necessity

in which Marx and Engels found themselves, in face of the various types of

Utopians, of asserting that the so-called social question is not a moral

question,i.e. as this must be interpreted, it cannot be solved by sermons

and so-called moral methods and to their bitter criticism of class ideals

and hypocrisies.(11*) This result was helped on, as it seems to me, by the

Hegelian source of the views of Marx and Engels; it being obvious that in

the Hegelian philosophy ethics loses the rigidity given to it by Kant and

preserved by Herbart. And lastly the name materialism is perhaps not without

influence here, since it brings to mind at once well-understood interests

and the calculating comparison of pleasures. It is, however, evident that

idealism or absolute morality is a necessary postulate of socialism. Is not

the interest which prompts the formation of a concept of surplus-value a

moral interest, or social if it is preferred? Can surplus value be spoken

of in pure economics? Does not the labourer sell his labour-power for exactly

what it is worth, given his position in existing society? And, without the

moral postulate, how could we ever explain Marx's political activity, and

that note of violent indignation and bitter satire which is felt in every

page of Das Kapital? But enough of this, for I find myself making quite elementary

statements such as can only be overlooked owing to ambiguous or exaggerated

phraseology.






And in conclusion, I repeat my regret, already expressed, concerning this

name materialism, which is not justified in this case, gives rise to numerous

misunderstandings, and is a cause of derision to opponents. So far as history

is concerned, I would gladly keep to the name realistic view of history,

which denotes the opposition to all teleology and metaphysics within the

sphere of history, and combines both the contribution made by socialism to

historical knowledge and those contributions which may subsequently be brought

from elsewhere. Hence my friend Labriola ought not to attach too much importance,

in his serious thoughts, to the adjectives final and definite, which have

slipped from his pen. Did he not once tell me himself that Engels still hoped

for other discoveries which might help us to understand that mystery, made

by ourselves, and which is History?






May, 1896.






NOTES:






1. Del materialismo storico, dilacidazione prefiminare, Rome, E. Loescher,

1896. See the earlier work by the same author: In memoria del 'Manifesto

dei communisti,' and ed. Rome, E. Loescher, 1895.






2. I refer to the works of Professor Achille Loria.






3. He calls it on one occasion: 'the final and definite philosophy of

history.'






4. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus, Stuttgart, 1896.






5. See, for example, the comments upon some of Marx's statements, in the

article Progrés et dévelopment in the Devenir Social for March,

1896.






6. For this reason I do not, like Labriola, call the theory of the factors

a half-theory; nor do I like the comparison with the ancient doctrine, now

abandoned in physics, physiology and psychology, of physical forces, vital

forces and mental faculties.






7. See a letter dated 21st September 1890, published in the Berlin review,

Der Socialistische Akademiker, No 19, 1st October 1895. Another, dated 25th

January 1894, is printed in No 20, 16th October, of the same review.






8. He even distinguishes between the economic interpretation and the materialistic

view of history. By the first term he means 'those attempts at analysis,

which taking separately on the one hand the economic forms and categories,

and on the other for example, law, legislation, politics, custom, proceed

to study the mutual influences of the different sides of life, thus abstractly

and subjectively distinguished.' By the second, on the contrary, 'the organic

view of history' of the 'totality and unity of social life,' where economics

itself 'is melted into the tide of a process to appear afterwards in so many

morphological stages, in each of which it forms the basis relatively to the

rest which corresponds to and agrees with it.'






9. Utopia, L. II (THOMAE MORI angli Opera, Louvain 1566, 18.)






10. 'Hateful Force rules the world and calls itself Justice.'






11. From this point of view it is worth while to note the antipathy which

leaks out in socialist writings towards Schiller, the poet of the Kantian

morality aesthetically modified, who has become the favourite poet of the

German middle classes.








CHAPTER II. CONCERNING HISTORICAL MATERIALISM VIEWED AS A SCIENCE OF SOCIAL

ECONOMICS






The attentive reader of Professor Stammler's book,(1*) realises at the

outset that it treats of the materialistic theory of history not as a fruitful

guide to the interpretation of historical fact, but as a science or philosophy

of society.






A number of attempts have been made, based in the first instance on Marx's

statements, to build up on these statements a general theory of history or

of society. It is on these attempts then, and not on the least bold amongst

them, that Stammler bases his work, making them the starting point of his

criticism and reconstruction. It may be precisely on this account that he

chooses to discuss historical materialism in the form given to it by Engels,

-- which he calls the most complete, the authentic(!) statement of the principles

of social materialism. He prefers this form to that of Marx, which he thinks

too disconnected; and which is, indeed, less easily reduced to abstract generalities;

whereas Engels was one of the first to give to historical materialism a meaning

more important than its original one. To Engels, also, as is well known,

is due the very name materialism as applied to this view of history.






We cannot, indeed, deny that the materialistic view of history has in

fact developed in two directions, distinct in kind if not in practice, viz.:

(1) a movement relating to the writing of history, and (2) a science and

philosophy of society. Hence there is no ground for objecting to Stammler's

procedure, when he confines himself to this second problem, and takes it

up at the point to which he thinks that the followers of historical materialism

have brought it. But it should be clearly pointed out that he does not concern

himself at all with the problems of historical method. He leaves out of account

that is, what, for some people -- and for me amongst them -- is the side

of this movement of thought which is of living and scientific interest.






Professor Stammler remarks how in the propositions employed by the believers

in historical materialism: 'the economic factor dominates the other factors

of social life,' 'the economic factor is fundamental and the others are dependent,'

and the like, the concept economic has never been defined. He is justified

in making this remark, and in attaching the greatest importance to it, if

he regards and interprets those propositions as assertions of laws, as strict

propositions of social science. To use as essential in statements of this

kind, a concept which could neither be defined nor explained, and which therefore

remained a mere word, would indeed be somewhat odd. But his remark is entirely

irrelevant when these propositions are understood as: 'summaries of empirical

observations, by the help of which concrete social facts may be explained.'

I do not think that any sensible person has ever expected to find in those

expressions an accurate and philosophical definition of concepts; yet all

sensible people readily understand to what class of facts they refer. The

word economic here, as in ordinary language, corresponds, not to a concept,

but to a group of rather diverse representations, some of which are not even

qualitative in content, but quantitative. When it is asserted, that in interpreting

history we must look chiefly at the economic factors, we think at once of

technical conditions, of the distribution of wealth, of classes and sub-classes

bound together by definite common interests, and so on. It is true these

different representations cannot be reduced to a single concept, but no matter,

there is no question of that: here we are in an entirely different sphere

from that in which abstract questions are discussed.






This point is not without interest and may be explained more in detail.

If economic be understood in its strict sense, for example, in the sense

in which it is employed in pure economics, i.e., if by it be meant the axiom

according to which all men seek the greatest satisfaction with the least

possible effort, it is plain that to say that this factor plays a part (essential,

dominant, or equal to that of the others) in social life, would tell us nothing

concrete. The economic axiom is a very general and purely a formal principle

of conduct. It is inconceivable that anyone should act without applying,

well or ill, the very principle of every action, i.e., the economic principle.

Worse still if economic be taken in the sense which, as we shall see, Professor

Stammler gives to it. He understands by this word: 'all concrete social facts';

in which sense it would at once become absurd to assert that the economic

factor, i.e., all social-facts in the concrete dominated, a part of these

facts! Thus in order to give a meaning to the word economic in this proposition,

it is necessary to leave the abstract and formal; to assign definite ends

to human action; to have in mind an 'historical man,' or rather the average

man of history, or of a longer or shorter period of history; to think, for

example, of the need for bread, for clothes, for sexual relations, for the

so-called moral satisfactions, esteem, vanity, power and so on. The phrase

economic factor now refers to groups of concrete facts, which are built up

in common speech, and which have been better defined from the actual application

made of the above-mentioned propositions in historical narrative and in the

practical programmes of Marx and his followers.






In the main, this is recognised by Professor Stammler himself when he

gives an admirable explanation of the current meaning of the expressions:

economic facts and political facts, revolutions more political than economic

and vice versa. Such distinctions, he says, can only be understood in the

concrete, in reference to the aims pursued by the different sections of society,

and to the special problems of social life. According to him, however, Marx's

work does not deal with such trifling matters: as, for instance, that so-called

economic life influences ideas, science, art and so on: old lumber of little

consequence. Just as philosophical materialism does not consist in the assertion

that bodily facts have an influence over spiritual, but rather in the making

of these latter a mere appearance, without reality, of the former: so historical

materialism must consist in asserting that economics is the true reality

and that law is a fallacious appearance.






But, with all deference to Professor Stammler, we believe that these trifling

matters, to which he contemptuously refers, are precisely what are dealt

with in Marx's propositions; and, moreover, we think them neither so trifling

nor of such little consequence. Hence Professor Stammler's book does not

appear to us a criticism of the most vital part of historical materialism,

viz., of a movement or school of historians. The criticism of history is

made by history; and historical materialism is history made or in the making.






Nor does it provide the starting point for a criticism of socialism, as

the programme of a definite social movement. Stammler deceives himself when

he thinks that socialism is based on the materialistic philosophy of history

as he expounds it: on which philosophy are based, on the contrary, the illusions

and caprices of some or of many socialists. Socialism cannot depend on an

abstract sociological theory, since the basis would be inadequate precisely

because it was abstract; nor can it depend on a philosophy of history as

rhythmical or of little stability, because the basis would be transitory.

On the contrary, it is a complex fact and results from different elements;

and, so tar as concerns history, socialism does not presuppose a philosophy

of history, but an historical conception determined by the existing conditions

of society and the manner in which this has come about. If we put on one

side the doctrines superimposed subsequently, and read again Marx s pages

without prejudice, we shall then see that he had, at bottom, no other meaning

when he referred to history as one of the factors justifying socialism.






'The necessity for the socialization of the means of production is not

proved scientifically.' Stammler means that the concept of necessity as employed

by many Marxians, is erroneous; that the denial of teleology is absurd, and

that hence the assertion of the socialization of the means of production

as the social programme is not logically accounted for. This does not hinder

this assertion from being possibly quite true. Either because, in addition

to logical demonstrations there are fortunate intuitions, or because a conclusion

can be true although derived from a false premise: it suffices, obviously,

that there should be two errors which cancel one another. And this would

be so in our case. The denial of teleology; the tacit acceptance of this

same teleology: here is a method scientifically in. correct with a conclusion

that may be valid. It remains to examine the whole tissue of experiences,

deductions, aspirations and forecasts in which socialism really consists;

and over which Stammler passes indifferently, content to have brought to

light an error in the philosophical statement of a remote postulate, an error

which some, or it may be many, of the supporters and politicians of socialism

commit.






All these reservations are needed in order to fix the scope of Stammler's

investigation; but it would be a mistake to infer from them that we reject

the starting point of the inquiry itself. Historical materialism says Professor

Stammler has proved unable to give us a valid science of society: we, however,

believe that this was not its main or original object. The two statements

come practically to the same thing: the science of society is not contained

in the literature of the materialistic theory. Professor Stammler adds that

although historical materialism does not offer an acceptable social theory,

it nevertheless gives a stimulus of the utmost intensity towards the formation

of such a theory. This seems to us a matter of merely individual psychology:

suggestions and stimuli, as everyone knows, differ according to the mind

that receives them. The literature of historical materialism has always aroused

in us a desire to study history in the concrete, i.e., to reconstruct the

actual historical process. In Professor Stammler, on the contrary, it arouses

a desire to throw aside this meagre empirical history, and to work with abstractions

in order to establish concepts and general points of view. The problems which

he sets before himself, might be arrived at psychologically by many other

paths.






There is a tendency, at present, to enlarge unduly the boundaries of social

studies. But Stammler rightly claims a definite and special subject for what

ought to be called social science; that is definite social data. Social science

must include nothing which has not sociability as its determining cause.

How can ethics ever be social science, since it is based on cases of conscience

which evade all social rules? Custom is the social fact, not morality'. How

can pure economics or technology ever be social science, since those concepts

are equally applicable to the isolated individual and to societies? Thus

in studying social data we shall see that, considered in general, they give

rise to two distinct theories. The first theory regards the concept society

from the causal standpoint; the second regards it from the teleological standpoint.

Causality and teleology cannot be substituted the one for the other; but

one forms the complement of the other.






If, then, we pass from the general and abstract to the concrete, we have

society as existing in history. The study of the facts which develop in concrete

society Stammler consigns to a science which he calls social (or political,

or national) economics. From such facts may still be abstracted the mere

form, i.e., the collection of rules supplied by history by which they are

governed; and this may be studied independently of the matter. Thus we get

jurisprudence, or the technical science of law; which is always bound up

inseparably with a given actual historical material, which it works up by

scientific method, endeavouring to give it unity and coherence. Finally,

amongst social studies are also included those investigations which aim at

judging and determining whether a given social order is as it ought to be;

and whether attempts to preserve or change it are objectively justified.

This section may be called that of practical social problems. By such definitions

and divisions Professor Stammler exhausts every possible form of social study.

Thus we should have the following scheme:






SOCIAL SCIENCE.


1. General Study of Society.


a. Causal.


b. Teleological.


2. Study of Concrete Society.


a. of the form (technical science of law).


b. of the matter (social economics).


c. of the possible (practical problems).








We believe that this table correctly represents his views, although given

in our own way, and in words somewhat different from those used by him. A

new treatment of the social sciences, the work of serious and keen ability,

such as Stammler seems to possess, cannot fail to receive the earnest attention

of all students of a subject which is still so vague and controversial. Let

us examine it then section by section.






The first investigation relating to society, that concerned with causality,

would be directed to solving the problem of the nature of society. Many definitions

have been given of this up to the present: and none of them can be said to

be generally accepted, or even to claim wide support. Stammler indeed, rejects,

after criticism, the definitions of Spencer or Rümelin, which appear

to him to be the most important and to be representative of all the others.

Society is not an organism (Spencer), nor is it merely something opposed

to legalised society (Rümelin): Society, says Stammler, is 'life lived

by men in common, subject to rules which are externally binding.' These rules

must be understood in a very wide sense, as all those which bind men living

together to something which is satisfied by outward performance. They are

divided, however, into two large classes: rules properly speaking legal,

and rules of convention. The second class includes the precepts of propriety

and of custom, the code of knightly honour, and so on. The distinctive test

lies in the fact that the latter class are merely hypothetical, while the

former are imposed without being desired by those subjected to them. The

whole assemblage of rules, legal and conventional, Stammler calls social

form. Under these rules, obeying them, limiting them and even breaking them

men act in order to satisfy their desires; in this, and in this alone, human

life consists. The assemblage of concrete facts which men produce when working

together in society, i.e., under the assumption of social rules, Stammler

calls social matter, or social economics. Rules, and actions under rules;

these are the two elements of which every social datum consists. If the rules

were lacking, we should be outside society; we should be animals or gods,

as says the old proverb: if the actions were lacking there would remain only

an empty form, built up hypothetically by thought, and no portion of which

was actually real. Thus social life appears as a single fact: to separate

its two constituent factors means either to destroy it, or to reduce it to

empty form. The law governing changes within society cannot be found in something

which is extra social; not in technique and discovery, nor in the workings

of supposed natural laws, nor in the influence of great men, of mysterious

racial and national spirit; but it must be sought in the very centre of the

social fact itself. Hence it is wrong to speak of a causal bond between law

and economics or vice versa: the relation between law and economics is that

between the rule and the things ruled, not one of cause and effect. The determining

cause of social movements and changes is then ultimately to be found in the

actual working out of social rules, which precede such changes. This concrete

working out, these actions accomplished wider rules, may produce (1) social

mutations which are entirely quantitative (in the number of social facts

of one or another kind); (2) mutations which are also qualitative, consisting

that is in changes in the rules themselves. Hence the circle of social life:

rules, social facts arising under them; ideas, opinions, desires, efforts

resulting from the facts; changes in the rules. When and how this circle

originated, that is to say when and how social life arose on the earth, is

a question for history, which does not concern the theorist. Between social

life and non-social life there are no gradations, theoretically there is

a gulf. But as long as social life exists, there is no escape from the circle

described above.






The form and matter of social life thus come into conflict, and from this

conflict arises change. By what test can the issue of the conflict be decided?

To appeal to facts, to invent a causal necessity which may agree with some

ideal necessity is absurd. In addition to the law of social causality, which

has been expounded, there must be a law of ends and ideals, i.e., a social

teleologic. According to Stammler, historical materialism identifies, nor

would it be the only theory to attempt such an identification, causality

and teleology; but it, too, cannot escape from the logical contradictions

which such assertions contain. Much praise has been given to that section

of Professor Stammler's book in which he shows how teleological assumptions

are constantly implied by historical materialism in all its assertions of

a practical nature. But we confess that the discovery seems to us exceedingly

easy, not to be compared to that of Columbus about the egg. Here again we

must point out that the pivot of the Marxian doctrine lies in the practical

problem and not in the abstract theory. The denial of finality is, at bottom,

the denial of a merely subjective and peculiar finality. And here, too, although

the criticism as applied to historical materialism seems to us hardly accurate,

we agree with Stammler's conclusion, i.e., that it is necessary to construct,

or better to reconstruct, with fresh material, a theory of social teleology.






Let us omit, for the present, an examination of Stammler's construction

of teleology, which includes some very fine passages (e.g. the criticism

of the anarchist doctrine) and ask instead: What is this social science of

Stammler, of which we have stated the striking and characteristic features?

The reader will have little difficulty in discovering that the second investigation,

that concerning social teleology, is nothing but a modernised philosophy

of law. And the first? Is it that long desired and hitherto vainly sought

general sociology? Does it give us a new and acceptable concept of society?

To us it appears evident that the first investigation is nothing but a formal

science of law. In it Professor Stammler studies law as a fact, and hence

he cannot find it except in societal subjected to rules imposed from without.

In the second, he studies law as an ideal and constructs the philosophy (imperative)

of law. We are not here questioning the value of the investigation, but its

nature. The present writer is convinced that social data leave no place for

en abstract independent science. Society is a living together; the kind of

phenomena which appear in this life together is the concern of descriptive

history. But it is perfectly possible to study this life together from a

given point of view, e.g., from the legal point of view, or, in general,

from that of the legal and nonlegal rules to which it can be subjected; and

this Stammler has done. And, in so doing, he has examined the nature of law,

separating the concrete individual laws and the ideal type of law; which

he has then studied apart. This is the reason why Stammler's investigation

seems to us a truly scientific investigation and very well carried out, but

not an abstract end general science of society. Such a science is for us

inconceivable, just as a formal science of law is, on the contrary, perfectly

conceivable.






As to the second investigation, that concerning teleology, there would

be some difficulty in including it in the number of sciences if it be admitted

that ideals are not subjects for science. But here Professor Stammler himself

comes to our assistance by assigning the foundation of social teleology to

philosophy, which he defines as the science of the True and of the Good,

the science of the Absolute, and understands in a non-formal sense.






Professor Stammler speaks readily of a monism of the social life, and

accepts as suitable and accurate the name materialism as applied to Marx's

conception of history, and connects this materialism with metaphysical materialism,

applying to it also Lange's statement, viz., that 'materialism may be the

first and lowest step of philosophy, but it is also the most substantial

and solid.' For him historical materialism offers truth, but not the whole

truth, since it regards as real the matter only and not the form of social

life; hence the necessity of completing it by restoring the form to its place,

and fixing the relation between form and matter, combining the two in the

unity of social life. We doubt whether Engels and his followers ever understood

the phrase social materialism in the sense which Stammler assigns to it.

The parallel drawn between it and metaphysical materialism seems to us somewhat

arbitrary.






We come to the group of concrete sciences, i.e., those which have for

their subject society as given in history. No one who has had occasion to

consider the problem of the classification of the sciences, will be inclined

to give the character of independent and autonomous sciences to studies of

the practical problems of this or that society, and to jurisprudence, and

the technical study of law. This latter is only an interpretation or explanation

of a given existing legal system, made either for practical reasons, or as

simple historical knowledge. But what we think merits attention more than

these questions of terminology and classification, is the conception of social

economics, advanced by Stammler; of the second, that is, of the concrete

social sciences, enumerated above. The difficulties arising out of this conception

are more serious, and centre on the following points; whether it is a new

and valid conception, or whether it should be reduced to something already

known; or finally whether it is not actually erroneous.






Stammler holds forth at length against economics regarded as a science

in itself, which has its own laws and which has its source in an original

and irreducible economic principle. It is a mistake, he says, to put forward

an abstract economic science and subdivide it into economic science relating

to the individual and social economic science. There is no ground of union

between these two sciences, because the economics of the isolated individual

offers us only concepts which are dealt with by the natural sciences and

by technology, and is nothing but an assemblage of simple natural observations,

explained by means of physiology and individual psychology. Social economics,

on the other hand, offers the peculiar and characteristic conditions of the

externally binding rules, wider which activities develop. And what can an

economic principle be if not a hypothetical maxim: the man who wishes to

secure this or that object of subjective satisfaction must employ these or

those means, 'a maxim which is more or less generally obeyed, and sometimes

violated'? The dilemma lies then between the natural and technological consideration

and the social one: there is no third thing. 'Ein Drittes ist nicht da!'

This Stammler frequently reiterates, and always in the same words. But the

dilemma (whose unfortunate inspiration he owes to Kant) does not hold, it

is a case of a trilemma. Besides the concrete social facts, and besides the

technological and natural knowledge, there is a third thing, viz., the economic

principle, or hedonistic postulate, as it is preferred to call it. Stammler

asserts that this third thing is not equal in value to the two first ones,

that it comes as a secondary consideration, and we confess that we do not

clearly understand what this means. What he ought to prove is that this principle

can be reduced to the two former ones, viz., to the technical or to the social

conditions. This he has not done, and indeed we do not know how it could

be done. That economics, thus understood, is not social science, we are so

much the more inclined to agree since he himself says as much in calling

it pure economics, i.e., something built up by abstraction from particular

facts and hence also from the social fact. But this does not mean that it

is not applicable to society, and cannot give rise to inferences in social

economics. The social factor is then assumed as a medium through which the

economic principle displays its influence and produces definite results.

Granted the economic principle, and granted, for example, the legal regulation

of private property in land, and the existence of land differing in quality,

and granted other conditions, then the fact of rent of land arises of necessity.

In this and other like examples, which could easily be brought forward, we

have laws of social and political economics, i.e., deductions from the economic

principle acting under given legal conditions. It is true that, under other

legal conditions, the effects would be different; but none of the effects

would occur were it not for the economic nature of man, which is a necessary

postulate, and not to be identified with the postulate of technical knowledge,

or with any other of the social rules. To know is not to will; and to will

in accordance with objective rules is not to will in accordance with ideals

which are merely subjective and individual (economic).






Stammler might say that if the science of economics thus interpreted is

not properly a social science, he leaves it on one side, because his object

is to construct a science which may be fully entitled to the name of social

economics. But -- let us, too, construct a dilemma! -- this social economics,

to which he aspires, will either be just economic science applied to definite

social conditions, in the sense now indicated, or it will be a form of historical

knowledge. No third thing exists. Ein Drittes ist nicht da!






And indeed, for Stammler an economic phenomenon is not any single social

fact whatever, but a group of homogeneous facts, which offer the marks of

necessity. The number of economic facts required to form the group and give

rise to an economic phenomenon cannot be determined in general; but can be

seen in each case. By the formation of these groups, he says, social economics

does not degenerate into a register of data concerning fact, nor does it

become purely mechanical statistics of material already given which it has

merely to enumerate. Social economics should not merely examine into the

change in the actual working out of one and the same social order, but remains,

now as formerly, the seat of all knowledge of actual social life. It must

start from the knowledge of a given social existence, both in regard to its

form and in regard to its content; and enlarge and deepen it up to the most

minute peculiarity of its actual working out, with the accuracy of a technical

science, the conditions and concrete objects of which are clearly indicated;

and thus free the reality of social life from every obscurity. Hence it must

make for itself a series of concepts, which will serve the purpose of such

an explanation.






Now this account of the concept of social economics is capable of two

interpretations. The first is that it is intended to describe a science,

which has indeed for its object (as is proper for sciences) necessary connections,

in the strict sense of the word. But how establish this necessity? How make

the concepts suitable to social economics? Evidently by allowing ourselves

to be guided by a principle, by abstracting a single side from concrete reality;

and if it is to be for economics this principle can be none other than the

economic principle, and social economics will consider only the economic

side of a given social life. Profits, rent, interest, labour value, usury,

wages, crises, will then appear as economic phenomena necessary under given

conditions of the social order, through which the economic principle exerts

its influence.






The other interpretation is that Stammler's social economics does not

indeed accomplish the dissolving work of analysis but considers this or that

social life in the concrete. In this case it could do nothing but describe

a given society. To describe does not mean to describe in externals and superficially;

but, more accurately, to free that group of facts from every obscurity, showing

what it actually is, and describing it, as far as possible in its naked reality.

But this is, in fact, historical knowledge, which may assume varied forms,

or rather may define in various ways its own subject. It may study a society

in all its aspects during a given period of fume, or at a given moment of

its existence, or it may even take up one or more aspects of social life

and study them as they present themselves in different societies and at different

times, and so on. It is history always, even when it avails itself of comparison

as an instrument of research. And such a study will not have to make concepts,

but will take them as it needs them from those sciences, which do, in fact,

elaborate concepts.






Thus it would have been of great interest to see the working out of this

new social economics of Stammler a little more clearly, so that we might

determine exactly in which of the aforesaid two classes it ought to be placed.

Whether it is merely political economy in the ordinary sense, or whether

it is the concrete study of single societies and of groups of them. In the

latter case Stammler has added another name or rather two names; science

of the matter of social life and social economics, to the many phrases by

which of late the old History has been disguised (social history, history

of civilization, concrete sociology, comparative sociology, psychology of

the populace and of the classes, etc.). And the gain, if we may be allowed

to say so, will not be great.






September 1898.






NOTES:






1. Wirthschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung,

eine socialphilosophische Untersuchung, DR RUDOLPH STAMMLER, Professor at

the University of Halle, A.S., Leipzig, Veit U.C., 1896, pp. viii-668.






CHAPTER III. CONCERNING THE INTERPRETATION AND CRITICISM OF SOME CONCEPTS

OF MARXISM






I. OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM IN MARX'S DAS KAPITAL






Notwithstanding the many expositions, criticisms, summaries and even abbreviated

extracts in little works of popular propaganda, which have been made of Karl

Marx s work, it is far from easy, and demands no small effort of philosophical

and abstract thought, to understand the exact nature of the investigation

which Marx carried out. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of the subject,

it does not appear that the author himself always realised fully the peculiar

character of his investigation, that is to say its theoretical distinctness

from all other investigations which may be made with his economic material;

and, throughout, he despised and neglected all such preliminary and exact

explanations as might have made his task plain. Then, moreover, account must

be taken of the strange composition of the book, a mixture of general theory,

of bitter controversy and satire, and of historical illustrations or digressions,

and so arranged that only Loria, (fortunate man!), can declare Das Kapital

to be the finest and most symmetrical of existing books; it being, in reality,

unsymmetrical, badly arranged and out of proportion, sinning against all

the laws of good taste; resembling in some particulars Vico's Scienza nueva.

Then too there is the Hegelian phraseology beloved by Marx, of which the

tradition is now lost, and which, even within that tradition he adapted with

a freedom that at times seems not to lack an element of mockery. Hence it

is not surprising that Das Kapital has been regarded, at one time or another,

as an economic treatise, as a philosophy of history, as a collection of sociological

laws, so-called, as a moral and political book of reference, and even, by

some, as a bit of narrative history.






Nevertheless the inquirer who asks himself what is the method and what

the scope of Marx's investigation, and puts on one side, of course, all the

historical, controversial and descriptive portions (which certainly form

an organic part of the book but not of the fundamental investigation), can

at once reject most of the above-mentioned definitions, and decide clearly

these two points:






(1) As regards method, Das Kapital is without doubt an abstract investigation;

the capitalist society studied by Marx, is not this or that society, historically

existing, in France or in England, nor the modern society of the most civilised

nations, that of Western Europe and America. It is an ideal and formal society,

deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred as

actual facts in the course of history. It is true that these hypotheses correspond

to a great extent to the historical conditions of the modern civilised world;

but this, although it may establish the importance and interest of Marx's

investigation because the latter helps us to an understanding of the workings

of the social organisms which closely concern us, does not alter its nature.

Nowhere in the world will Marx's categories be met with as living and real

existences, simply because they are abstract categories, which, in order

to live must lose some of their qualities and acquire others.






(a) As regards scope, Marx's investigation does not cover the whole field

of economic fact, nor even that one ultimate and dominant portion, whence

all economic facts have their source, like rivers flowing from a mountain.

It limits itself, on the contrary, to one special economic system, that which

occurs in a society with private property in capital, or, as Marx says, in

the phrase peculiar to him, capitalist. There remained untouched, not only

the other systems which have existed in history and are possible in theory,

such as monopolist society, or society with collective capital, but also

the series of economic phenomena common to the different societies and to

individual economics. To sum up, as regards method, Das Kapital is not an

historical description, and as regards scope, it is not an economic treatise,

much less an encyclopedia.






But, even when these two points are settled, the real essence of Marx's

investigation is not yet explained. Were Das Kapital nothing but what we

have so far defined, it would be merely an economic monograph on the laws

of capitalist society.(1*) Such a monograph Marx could only have made in

one way: by deciding on these laws, and explaining them by general laws,

or by the fundamental concepts of economics; by reducing, in short, the complex

to the simple, or passing, by deductive reasoning, and with the addition

of fresh hypotheses, from the simple to the complex. He would thus have shown,

by precise exposition, how the apparently most diverse facts of the economic

world are ultimately governed by one and the same law; or, what is the same

thing, how this law is differently refracted as it takes effect through different

organizations, without changing itself, since otherwise the means and indeed

the test of the explanation would be lacking. Work of this nature had been

already carried out, to a great extent, in Marx's time, and since then it

has been developed yet further by economists, and has attained a high degree

of perfection, as may be seen, for instance, in the economic treatises of

our Italian writers, Pantaleoni and Pareto. But I much doubt whether Marx

would have become an economist in order to devote himself to a species of

research of almost solely theoretical, or even scholastic, interest. His

whole personality as a practical man and a revolutionist, impatient of abstract

investigation which had no close connection with the interests of actual

life, would have recoiled from such a course. If Das Kapital was to have

been merely an economic monograph, it would be safe to wager that it would

never have come into existence.






What then did Marx accomplish, and to what treatment did he subject the

phenomena of capitalist society, if not to that of pure economic theory?

Marx assumed, outside the field of pure economic theory, a proposition; the

famous equivalence between value and labour; i.e. the proposition that the

value of the commodities produced by labour is equal to the quantity of labour

socially necessary to produce them. It is only with this assumption that

his special investigation begins.






But what connection has this proposition with the laws of capitalist society?

or what part does it play in the investigation? This Marx never explicitly

states; and it is on this point that the greatest confusions have arisen,

and that the interpreters and critics have been most at a loss.






Some of them have explained the law of labour-value as an historical law,

peculiar to capitalist society, all of whose manifestions it determines;(2*)

others rightly seeing that the manifestations of capitalist society are by

no means determined by such a law, but comply with the general economic motives

characteristic of the economic nature of man, have rejected the law as an

absurdity at which Marx arrived by pressing to its extreme consequences an

unfortunate concept of Ricardo.






Criticism was thus bewildered between entire acceptance, combined with

a clearly erroneous interpretation, and entire and summary rejection of Marx's

treatment; until, in recent years, and especially after the appearance of

the third and posthumous volume of Das Kapital, it began to seek out and

follow a better path. In truth, despite its eager defenders, the Marxian

doctrine has always remained obscure; and, despite contemptuous and summary

condemnation, it has always displayed also an obstinate vitality not usually

possessed by nonsense and sophistry. For this reason it is to the credit

of Professor Werner Sombart, of Breslau University, that he has declared,

in one of his lucid writings, that Marx's practical conclusions may be refuted

from a political standpoint, but that, scientifically, it is above all important

to understand his ideas.(3*)






Sombart, then, breaking openly with the interpretation of Marx's law of

value as a real law of economic phenomena, and giving a fuller, and I may

say, a bolder expression to the timid opinions already stated by another

(C. Schmidt), says, that Marx's law of value is not an empirical but a conceptual

fact (Keine empirische, sondern eine gedankliche Thatsache); that Marx's

value is a logical fact (eine logische Thatsache), which aids our thought

in understanding the actual realities of economic life.(4*)






This interpretation, in its general sense, was accepted by Engels, in

an article written some months before his death and published posthumously.

To Engels it appeared that 'it could not be condemned as inaccurate, but

that, nevertheless, it was too vague and might be expressed with greater

precision."(5*)






The acute and courteous remarks on the theory of value, published lately

in an article in the Journal des Economistes by an able French Marxian, Sorel,

indicate a movement in the same direction. In these remarks he acknowledges

that there is no way of passing from Marx's theory to actual phenomena of

economic life, and that, although it may offer elucidation, in a somewhat

limited sense, it does not appear further that it could ever explain, in

the scientific meaning of the word.(6*)






And now too Professor Labriola, in a hasty glance at the same subject,

referring clearly to Sombart, and partly agreeing and partly criticising,

writes: 'the theory of value does not denote an empirical factum nor does

it express a merely logical proposition, as some have imagined; but it is

the typical premise without which all the rest would be unthinkable.'(7*)






Labriola's phrase appears to me, in fact, somewhat more accurate than

Sombart's; who, moreover, shows himself dissatisfied with his own term, like

someone who has not yet a quite definite concept in view, and hence cannot

find a satisfactory phrase.






'Conceptual fact,' 'logical fact' expresses much too little since it is

evident that all sciences are interwoven from logical facts, that is from

concepts. Marx's labour-value is not only a logical generalisation, it is

also a fact conceived and postulated as typical, i.e. something more than

a mere logical concept. Indeed it has not the inertia of the abstract but

the force of a concrete fact,(8*) which has in regard to capitalist society,

in Marx's investigation, the function of a term of comparison, of a standard,

of a type.(9*)






This standard or type being postulated, the investigation, for Marx, takes

the following form. Granted that value is equal to the labour socially necessary,

it is required to show with what divergencies from this standard the prices

of commodities are fixed in capitalist society, and how labour-power itself

acquires a price and becomes a commodity. To speak plainly, Marx stated the

problem in unappropriate language; he represented this typical value itself,

postulated by him as a standard, as being the law governing the economic

phenomena of capitalist society. And it is the law, if he likes, but in the

sphere of his conceptions, not in economic reality. We may conceive the divergencies

from a standard as the revolt of reality when confronted by this standard

which we have endowed with the dignity of law.






From a formal point of view there is nothing absurd about the investigation

undertaken by Marx. It is a usual method of scientific analysis to regard

a phenomenon not only as it exists, but also as it would be if one of its

factors were altered, and, in comparing the hypothetical with the real phenomenon,

to conceive the first as diverging from the second, which is postulated as

fundamental, or the second as diverging from the first, which is postulated

in the same manner. If I build up by deductive reasoning the moral rules

which develop in two social groups which are at war one against another,

and if I show how they differ from the moral rules which develop in a state

of peace, I should be making something analogous to the comparison worked

out by Marx. Nor would there be great harm (although the expression would

be neither fortunate nor accurate) in saying, in a figurative sense, that

the law of the moral rules in time of war is the same as that of the rules

in time of peace, modified to the new conditions, and altered in a way which

seems, ultimately, inconsistent with itself. As long as he confines himself

to the limits of his hypothesis Marx proceeds quite correctly. Error could

come in only when he or others confuse the hypothetical with the real, and

the manner of conceiving and of judging with that of existing. As long as

this mistake is avoided, the method is unassailable.






But the formal justification is insufficient: we need another. With a

formally correct method results may be obtained which are meaningless and

unimportant, or mere mental tricks may be performed. To set up an arbitrary

standard of comparison, to compare, and deduce, and to end by establishing

a series of divergencies from this standard; to what will this lead? It is

then, the standard itself which needs justification: i.e. we need to decide

what meaning and importance it may have for us.






This question too, although not stated exactly in this way, has occurred

to Marx's critics; and an answer to it has been already given some time ago

and by many, by saying that the equivalence of value and labour is an ideal

of social ethics, a moral ideal. But nothing could be imagined more mistaken

in itself and farther from Marx's thought than this interpretation. What

moral inference can ever be drawn from the premise that value is equal to

the labour socially necessary? If we reflect a little, absolutely none. The

establishment of this fact tells us nothing about the needs of the society,

which needs will make necessary one or another ethical-legal system of property

and of methods of distribution. Value may certainly equal labour, nevertheless

special historical conditions will make necessary society organised in castes

or in classes, divided into governing and governed, rulers and ruled; with

a resulting unequal distribution of the products of labour. Value may certainly

equal labour; but even supposing that fresh historical conditions ever make

possible the disappearance of society organised in classes and the advent

of a communistic society, and even supposing that in this society distribution

could take place according to the quantity of labour contributed by each

person, this distribution would still not be a deduction from the established

equivalence between value and labour, but a standard adopted for special

reasons of social convenience.(10*) Nor can it be said that such an equivalence

supplies in itself an idea of perfect justice (even though unrealizable),

since the criterion of justice has no relation to the difference often due

to purely natural causes, in the ability to do more or less social labour

and to produce a greater or smaller value. Thus neither a rule of abstract

justice nor one of convenience and social utility can be derived from the

equivalence between value and labour. Rules of either kind can only be based

on consideration of a quite different grade from that of a simple economic

equation.






Sombart, avoiding this vulgar confusion, has been better advised in looking

for the meaning of the standard set up by Marx in the nature of society itself,

and apart from our moral judgments. Thus he says that labour is the economic

fact of greater objective importance, and that value, in Marx's view, is

nothing 'if not the economic expression of the fact of the socially productive

power of labour, as the basis of economic existence.'






But this investigation appears to me to be merely begun and not yet worked

out to a conclusion; and if I might suggest wherein it needs completion,

I should remark that it is necessary to attempt to give clearness and precision

to this word objective, which is either ambiguous or metaphorical. What is

meant by an economically objective fact? Do not these words suggest rather

a mere presentiment of a concept instead of the distinct vision of this concept

itself?






I will add, merely tentatively, that the word objective (whose correlative

term is subjective) does not seem to be in place here. Let us, instead, take

account, in a society, only of what is properly economic life, i.e. out of

the whole society, only of economic society. Let us abstract from this latter

all goods which cannot be increased by labour. Let us abstract further all

class distinctions, which may be regarded as accidental in reference to the

general concept of economic society. Let us leave out of account all modes

of distributing the wealth produced, which, as we have said, can only be

determined on grounds of convenience or perhaps of justice, but in any case

upon considerations belonging to society as a whole, and never from considerations

belonging exclusively to economic society. What is left after these successive

abstractions have been made? Nothing but economic society in so far as it

is a working society.(11*) And in this society without class distinctions,

i.e. in an economic society as such and whose only commodities are the products

of labour, what can value be? Obviously the sun, of the efforts, i.e. the

quantity of labour, which the production of the various kinds of commodities

demands. And, since we are here speaking of the economic social organism,

and not of the individual persons living in it, it follows that this labour

cannot be reckoned except by averages, and hence as labour socially (it is

with society, I repeat, that we are here dealing) necessary.






Thus labour-value would appear as that determination of value peculiar

to economic society as such, when regarded only in so far as it produces

commodities capable of being increased by labour.






From this definition the following corollary may be drawn: the determination

of labour value will have a positive conformity with facts as long as a society

exists, which produces goods by means of labour. It is evident that in the

imaginary county of Cocaigne this determination would have no conformity

with facts, since all goods would exist in quantities exceeding the demand;

similarly it is also evident that the same determination could not take effect

in a society in which goods were inadequate to the demand, but could not

be increased by labour.






But hitherto history has shown us only societies which, in addition to

the enjoyment of goods not increasable by labour, have satisfied their needs

by labour. Hence this equivalence between value and labour has hitherto had

and will continue for an indefinite time to have, a conformity with facts;

but, of what kind is this conformity? Having ruled out (1) that it is a question

of a moral ideal, and (2) that it is a question of scientific law; and having

nevertheless concluded that this equivalence is a fact (which Marx uses as

a type), we are obliged to say, as the only alternative, that it is a fact,

lout a fact which exists in the midst of other facts; i.e. a fact that appears

to us empirically as opposed, limited, distorted loy other facts, almost

like a force amongst other forces, which produces a resultant different from

what it would produce if the other forces ceased to act. It is not a completely

dominant fact but neither is it non-existent and merely imaginary.(12*)






It is still necessary to remark that in the course of history this fact

has undergone various alterations, i.e., has been more or less obscured;

and here it is proper to do justice to Engels' remark in reference to Sombart;

that as regards the way in which the latter defines the law of value 'he

does not bring out the full importance which this law possesses during the

stages of economic development in which it is supreme.' Engels makes a digression

into the field of economic history to show that Marx's law of value, i.e.

the equivalence between value and the labour socially necessary, has been

supreme for several thousand years.(13*) Supreme is too strong a term; but

it is true that the opposed influences of other facts to this law have been

fewer in number and less intense under primitive communism and under medieval

and domestic economic conditions, whilst they have reached a maximum in the

society based on privately owned capital and more or less free universal

competition, i.e. in the society which produces almost exclusively commodities.(14*)






Marx, then, in postulating as typical the equivalence between value and

labour and in applying it to capitalist society, was, as it were, making

a comparison between capitalist society and a part of itself, isolated and

raised up to an independent existence: i.e. a comparison between capitalist

society and economic society as such (but only in so far as at is a working

society). In other words, he was studying the social problem of labour and

was showing by the test implicitly established by him, the special way in

which this problem is solved in capitalist society. This is the justification,

no longer formal but real, of his method.






It was in virtue of this method, and by the light thrown by the type which

he postulated, that Marx was able to discover and define the social origin

of profit, i.e. of surplus value. Surplus value in pure economics is a meaningless

word, as is evident from the term itself; since a surplus value is an extra

value, and thus falls outside the sphere of pure economics. But it rightly

has meaning and is no absurdity, as a concept of difference, in comparing

one economic society with another, one fact with another, or two hypotheses

with one another.






It is also in virtue of the same premise that he was able to arrive at

the proposition: that the products of labour in a capitalist society do not

sell, unless by exception, for their value, but usually for more or less,

and sometimes with great deviations from their value; which is to say, to

put it shortly, value does not coincide with price. Suppose, by hypothesis

the organisation of production were suddenly changed from a capitalist to

a communistic system, we should see at once, not only that alteration in

the fortunes of men which appeals so much to popular imagination, but also

a more remarkable change: a change in the fortunes of things. A scale of

valuation of goods would then fashion itself, very different for the most

part, from that which now exists. The way in which Marx proves this proposition,

by an analysis of the different components of the capital employed in different

industries, i.e. of the proportion of fixed capital (machines, etc.) and

of floating capital (wages), need not be explained here in detail.






And, in the same way, i.e. by proving that fixed capital increases continually

in comparison with floating capital, Marx tries to establish another law

of capitalist society, the law of the tendency of the rate of profits to

fall. Technical improvement, which in an abstract economic society would

show itself in the decreased labour required to produce the same wealth,

shows itself in capitalist society in a gradual decline in the rate of profits.(15*)

But this section of Volume III of Das Kapital is one of the least developed

in this little worked-out posthumous book; and it seems to me to be worth

a special critical essay, which I hope to write at another time, not wishing

to treat the subject here incidentally.(16*)






II






MARX'S PROBLEM AND PURE ECONOMICS (GENERAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE)






Marxian economics is thus a study of abstract working society showing

the variations which this undergoes in the different social economic organisations.

This investigation Marx carried out only in reference to one of these organizations,

i.e. the capitalist; contenting himself with mere hints in regard to the

slave and serf organizations, primitive communism, the domestic system and

to savage conditions.(17*)






In this sense he and Engels declared that economics (the economics studied

by them), was an historical science.(18*) But here, too, their definition

has been less happy than the investigation itself; we know that Marx's researches

are not historical, but hypothetical and abstract, i.e. theoretical.(19*)

They might better be called researches into sociological economics, if the

word sociological were not one which is employed most variously and arbitrarily.






If Marx's investigation is thus limited, if the law of value postulated

by him is the special law of an abstract working society, which only partially

takes effect in economic society as given in history, and in other hypothetical

or possible economic societies, the following results seem to follow evidently

and readily: (1) That Marxian economics is not general economic science;

(2) that labour-value is not a general concept of value. Alongside, then,

of the Marxian investigation, there can, or rather must, exist and flourish

a general economic science, which may determine a concept of value, deducing

it from quite different and more comprehensive principles than the special

ones of Marx. And, if the pure economists, confined to their own special

province, have been wrong to show an ungenerous intellectual dislike for

Marx's investigations, his followers, in their turn, have been wrong to regard

ungratefully a branch of research which was alien to them, calling it now

useless, and now frankly absurd.






Such is, in effect, my opinion, and I freely acknowledge that I have never

been able to discover other antithesis or enmity between these two branches

of research except the purely accidental one of the mutual antipathy to and

mental ignorance of each other, of two groups of students. Some have resorted

to a political explanation; but, with no wish to deny that political prepossessions

are often the causes of theoretical errors, I do not consider an explanation

as adequate and appropriate, which resolves itself into accusing a large

number of students of allowing themselves blindly and foolishly to be overcome

by passions alien to science; or, what is worse, of knowingly falsifying

their thought and constructing a whole economic system from motives of practical

opportunism.






Indeed Marx himself had not the time or means to adopt an attitude, so

to speak, towards the purists, or the hedonists, or the utilitarians, or

the deductive or Austrian school, or whatever else they may call themselves.

But he had the greatest contempt for the oeconomia vulgaris, under which

term he was wont to include also the researches of general economics, which

explain what needs no explanation and is intuitively evident, and leave unexplained

what is more difficult and of genuine interest. Nor has Engels discussed

the subject; but an indication of his opinion may be found in his attack

on Dühring. Dühring was struggling to find a general law of value,

which should govern all possible types of economic organisation; and Engels

refuted him: 'Anyone who wishes to bring under the same law the political

economy of Terra del Fuoco and that of modern England, can produce nothing'

but the vulgarest commonplaces.' He scorns the truth of ultimate instance,

the eternal laws of value, the tautologous and empty axioms which Herr Dühring

would have produced by his method.(20*) Fixed and eternal laws are non-existent:

there is then no possibility of constructing a general science of economics,

valid for all times and in all places. If Engels had meant to refer to those

who affirm the eternity and inevitability of the laws characteristic of capitalist

society, he would have been justified; and would have been aiming his blows

at a prejudice which history alone suffices to refute, by showing as it does,

how capitalism has appeared at different times, replacing other types of

economic organization, and has also disappeared, replaced by other types.

But in Dühring's case the criticism was much beside the mark; since

Dühring did not indeed mean to set up the laws of capitalist society

as fixed and eternal; but to determine a general concept of value, which

is quite another matter: or, in other words, to show how, from a purely economic

point of view, capitalist society is explained by the same general concepts

as explain the other types of organization. No effort, not even that of Engels,

will suffice to stop such a problem from being stated and solved; unless

it were possible to destroy the human intellect, which, in addition to particular

facts, recognises universal concepts.






It would be instructive to examine the references which there are in Marx's

Das Kapital to unfinished analyses, extraneous to his special method; for

in this dependence on analysis the researches of pure economics have their

origin. What is, for instance, abstract human labour (abstrakt menschliche

Albeit) a concept which Marx uses like a postulate? By what method is that

reduction of complex to simple labour accomplished, to which he refers as

to an obvious and ordinary matter? And if, in Marx's hypothesis, commodities

appear as congealed labour or crystalised labour, why by another hypothesis,

should not all economic goods and not only commodities, appear as congealed

methods of satisfying needs or as crystalised needs? I read at one point

in Das Kapital: 'Things which in themselves are not commodities, e.g. knowledge,

honour, etc., may be sold by their owners; and thus, by means of their price,

acquire the form of commodities. A thing may formally have a price without

having a value. The expression of the price here becomes imaginary like certain

quantities in mathematics.'(21*) Here is yet another difficulty, indicated

but not overcome. Where are these formal or imaginary prices to be found?

And what are they? By what laws are they governed? Or are they perhaps like

the Greek words in Latin prosody, which according to the school rule, per

Ausoniae fines sine lege vagantur? -- Questions of this kind are answered

by the researches of pure economics.






The philosopher Lange also, who rejected Marx's law of value, which he

regarded as an extravagant production, a child of sorrow, thinking it unsuitable

and in this he was justified, as a general law of value, arrived at the solutions

which have since been given of the latter, a long time before the researches

of the purists came into blossom. 'Some years ago,' he wrote in his book

on labour problems, 'I too worked at a new theory of value, which should

be of such a character as to show the most extreme cases of variation in

value as special cases of the same formula.' And, whilst adding that he had

not completed it, he intimated that the course which he attempted was the

same as that hastily glanced at by Jevons in his Theory of political economy,

published in 1871.(22*)






To any of the more cautious and moderate Marxians it is plainly evident

that the researches of the Hedonists are not merely to be rejected as erroneous

or unfounded; and hence an attempt has been made to vindicate them in reference

to the Marxian doctrine as an economic psychology, having its place alongside

of true economics itself. But this definition contains a curious equivocation.

Pure economics is quite apart from psychology. indeed, to begin with, it

is hard to fix the meaning of the words economic psychology. The science

of psychology is divided into formal and descriptive. In formal psychology

there is no place either for economic fact nor for any other fact which may

represent a particular content. In descriptive psychology, it is true, are

included representations, sentiments and desires of an economic content,

but included as they appear in reality, mixed with the other psychical phenomena

of different content, and inseparable from them. Thus descriptive economic

psychology can be, at most, an approximate limitation, by which we take as

a subject of special description the way in which men (at a given time and

place, or even in the mass as hitherto they have appeared in history) think,

feel and desire in respect to a certain class of goods which are usually

called material or economic, and which, however, stand in need of specification

and definition. Subject-matter, in truth, better suited to history than to

science, which regards such matters only as empty and unimportant generalizations.

This may be seen in the long discussion of the matter by that most weighty

of pedants, Wagner, in his manual, which, of all that has been written on

the question, I think the most worthy of notice, and which is yet, in itself,

a thing very little worthy of notice or conclusive.(23*) An enumeration and

description of the various tendencies which exist in men as they appear in

ordinary life: egoistical and altruistic tendencies, love of self-advantage

and fear of disadvantage, tear of punishment and hope of reward, sense of

honour and fear of disgrace and public contempt, love of activity and dislike

of idleness, feeling of reverence for the moral code, etc., this is what

Wagner calls economic psychology; and which might better be called : various

observations in descriptive psychology, to be kept in mind whilst studying

the practical questions of economics.(24*)






But what, pray, has pure economics in common with psychology? The purists

start from the hedonistic postulate, i.e. from the economic nature itself

of man, and deduce from it the concepts of utility (economic utility which

Pareto has proposed to call by a special name, ofelimita, from the Greek

{omega phi epsilon lambda iota mu omicron sigma}) of value, and directly,

all the other special laws in accordance with which man behaves in so far

as he is an abstract homo oeconomicus. They do exactly what the science of

ethics does with the moral nature; and the science of logic with the logical

nature; and so on. At this rate then would ethics be a psychology of ethics

and logic a psychology of logic? And, since all that we know passes through

the human mind, ontology would be a psychology of existence, mathematics

a psychology of mathematics, and we should thus have confused the most diverse

things, ending in a disorder the aim of which would be no longer comprehensible.

Hence we conclude, that with care and the exercise of a little thought, it

will necessarily be agreed that pure economics is not a psychology, but is

the true and essential general science of economic facts.






Professor Labriola, too, shows a certain ill-humour which does not seem

to me entirely justified, towards the pure economists, 'who', he says, 'translate

into psychological conceptualism the influence of risk and other analogous

considerations of ordinary commercial practice! And they do well I answer

because the mind desires to give an account even of the influences of risk

and of commercial practice,and to explain their mechanism and character.

And then, psychological conceptualism; is not this an unfortunate connection

between what your intellect shows you that pure economics really is (science

which takes as its starting point an irreducible concept), and that hazardous

definition of psychology which has been criticised above? Are not the noun

and adjective in opposition to one another? And further, Labriola speaks

contemptuously of the 'abstract atomism' of the hedonists, in which, 'one

no longer knows what history is, and progress is reduced to mere appearance.'(25*)

Here too, it does not seem to me that his contempt is justified; for Labriola

is well aware that in all abstract sciences, concrete and individual things

disappear and that their elements alone remain as objects to be considered:

hence this cannot be made a ground for special complaint against economic

science. But history and progress, even if they are alien to the study of

abstract economics, do not therefore cease to exist and to form the subject

of other studies of the human mind; and this is what matters.






For my part I hold firmly to the economic notion of the hedonistic guide,

to utility-ophelimity, to final utility, and even to the explanation (economic)

of interest on capital as arising from the different degrees of utility possessed

by present and future goods. But this does not satisfy the desire for a sociological,

so to speak, elucidation of interest on capital; and this elucidation, with

others of the same kind, can only be obtained from the comparative considerations

put before us by Marx.(26*)








III






CONCERNING THE LIMITATION OF THE MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF HISTORY






Historical materialism if it is to express something critically acceptable,

can, as I have had occasion to state elsewhere,(27*) be neither a new a priori

notion of the philosophy of history, nor a new method of historical thought;

it must be simply a canon of historical interpretation. This canon recommends

that attention be directed to the so-called economic basis of society, in

order that the forms and mutations of the latter may be better understood.






The concept canon ought not to raise difficulty, especially when it is

remembered that it implies no anticipation of results, but only an aid in

seeking for them; and is entirely of empirical origin. When the critic of

the text of Dante's Comedia uses Witte's well-known canon, which runs: 'the

difficult reading is to be preferred to the easy one,' he is quite aware

that he possesses a mere instrument, which may be useful to him in many cases,

useless in others, and whose correct and advantageous employment depends

entirely on his caution. In like manner and with like meaning it must be

said that historical materialism is a mere canon; although it be in truth

a canon most rich in suggestion.






But was it in this way that Marx and Engels understood it? and is it in

this way that Marx's followers usually understand it?






Let us begin with the first question. Truly a difficult one, and offering

a multiplicity of difficulties. The first of these arises so to speak, from

the nature of the sources. The doctrine of historical materialism is not

embodied in a classical and definite book by those authors, with whom it

is as it were identified; so that, to discuss that book and to discuss the

doctrine might seem all one thing. On the contrary it is scattered through

a series of writings, composed in the course of half a century, at long intervals,

where only the most casual mention is made of it, and where it is sometimes

merely understood or implied. Anyone who desired to reconcile all the forms

with which Marx's and Engels have endowed it, would stumble upon contradictory

expressions, which would make it impossible for the careful and methodical

interpreter to decide what, on the whole, historical materialism meant for

them.






Another difficulty arises in regard to the weight to be attached to their

expressions. I do not think that there has yet been a study of what might

be called Marx's forma mentis; with which Engels had something in common,

partly owing to congeniality, partly owing to imitation or influence. Marx,

as has been already remarked, had a kind of abhorrence for researches of

purely scholastic interest. Eager for knowledge of things (I say, of concrete

and individual things) he attached little weight to discussions of concepts

and the forms of concepts; this sometimes degenerated into an exaggeration

in his own concepts. Thus we find in him a curious opposition between statements

which, interpreted strictly, are erroneous; and yet appear to us, and indeed

are, loaded and pregnant with truth. Marx was addicted, in short, to a kind

of concrete logic.(28*) Is it best then to interpret his expressions literally,

running the risk of giving them a meaning different from what they actually

bore in the writer's inmost thoughts? Or is it best to interpret them broadly,

running the opposite risk of giving them a meaning, theoretically perhaps

more acceptable, but historically less true?






The same difficulty certainly occurs in regard to the writings of numerous

thinkers; but it is especially great in regard to those of Marx. And the

interpreter must proceed with caution: he must do his work bit by bit, book

by book, statement by statement, connecting indeed these various indications

one with another, but taking account of differences of time, of actual circumstances,

of fleeting impressions, of mental and literary habits; and he must submit

to acknowledge ambiguities and incompleteness where either exists, resisting

the temptation to confirm and complete by his own judgment. It may be allowed

for instance, as it appears to me for various reasons, that the way in which

historical materialism is stated above is the same as that in which Marx

and Engels understood it in their inmost thoughts; or at least that which

they would have agreed to as correct if they had had more time available

for such labours of scientific elaboration, and if criticism had reached

them less tardily. And all this is of importance up to a certain point, for

the interpreter and historian of ideas; since for the history of science,

Marx and Engels are neither more nor less than they appear in their books

and works; real, and not hypothetical or possible persons.(29*)






But even for science itself, apart from the history of it, the hypothetical

or possible Marx and Engels have their value. What concerns us theoretically

is to understand the various possible ways of interpreting the problems proposed

and the solutions thought out by Marx and Engels, and to select from the

latter by criticism those which appear theoretically true and welcome. What

was Marx's intellectual standpoint with reference to the Hegelian philosophy

of history? In what consisted the criticism which he gave of it? Is the purport

of this criticism always the same for instance in the article published in

the Deutschfranzösische Jahrbücher, for 1844, in the Heilige Familie

of 1845, in the Misere de la philosophie of 1847, in the appendix to Das

Komnunistische Manifest of 1848, in the preface to the Zur Kritik of 1859,

and in the preface to the 2nd edition of Das Kapital of 1873? Is it so again

in Engels' works in the Antidühring, in the article on Feuerbach, etc.?

Did Marx ever really think of substituting, as some have believed, Matter

or material fact for the Hegelian Idea? And what connection was there in

his mind between the concepts material and economic? Again, can the explanation

given by him, of his position with regard to Hegel: 'the ideas determined

by facts and not the facts by the ideas,' be called an inversion of Hegel's

view, or is it not rather the inversion of that of the ideologists and doctrinaires?(30*)

These are some of the questions pertaining to the history of ideas, which

will be answered some time or other: perhaps at present the time has not

yet arrived to write the history of ideas which are still in the process

of development.(31*)






But, putting aside this historical curiosity, it concerns us now to work

at these ideas in order to advance in theoretical knowledge. How can historical

materialism justify itself scientifically? This is the question I have proposed

to myself, and to which the answer is given by the critical researches referred

to at the beginning of this paragraph. Without returning to them I will give

other examples, taken from the same source, that of the Marxian literature.

How ought we to understand scientifically Marx's neo-dialectic? The final

opinion expressed by Engels on the subject seems to be this: the dialect

is the rhythm of the development of things, i.e. the inner law of things

in their development. This rhythm is not determined a priori, and by metaphysical

deduction, but is rather observed and gathered a posterior), and only through

the repeated observations and verifications that are made of it in various

fields of reality, can it be presupposed that all facts develop through negations,

and negations of negations.(32*) Thus the dialect would be the discovery

of a great natural law, less empty and formal than the so-called law of evolution

and it would have nothing in common with the old Hegelian dialect except

the name, which would preserve for us an historical record of the way in

which Marx arrived at it. But does this natural rhythm of development exist?

This could only be stated from observation, to which indeed, Engels appealed

in order to assert its existence. And what kind of a law is one which is

revealed to us by observation? Can it ever be a law which governs things

absolutely, or is it not one of those which are now called tendencies, or

rather is it not merely a simple and limited generalization this recognition

of rhythm through negations of negations, it is not some rag of the old metaphysics,

from which it may be well to free ourselves.(33*) This is the investigation

needed for the progress of science. In like manner should other statements

of Marx and Engels be criticised. What for example shall we think of Engels'

controversy with Dühring concerning the basis of history: whether this

is political force or economic fact? Will it not seem to us that this controversy

can perhaps retain any value in face of Dühring's assertion that political

fact is that which is essential historically, but in itself has not that

general importance which it is proposed to ascribe to it? We may reflect

for a moment that Engels' thesis: 'force protects (Schubert) but does not

cause (verursacht) usurpation,' might be directly inverted into another that:

'force causes usurpation, but economic interest protects it,' and this by

the well known principle of the interdependence and competition of the social

factors.






And the class war? In what sense is the general statement true that history

is a class war? I should be inclined to say that history is a class war (1)

when there are classes, (2) when they have antagonistic interests, (3) when

they are aware of this antagonism, which would give us, in the main, the

humourous equivalence that history is a class war only when it is a class

war. In fact sometimes classes have not had antagonistic interests, and very

often they are not conscious of them; of which the socialists are well aware

when they endeavour, by efforts not always crowned with success (with the

peasantry, for example, they have not yet succeeded), to arouse this consciousness

in the modern proletariat. As to the possibility of the non-existence of

classes, the socialists who prophesy this non-existence for the society of

the future, must at least admit that it is not a matter intrinsically necessary

to historical development, since in the future, and without classes, history,

it may well be hoped will continue. In short even the particular statement

that 'history is a class war,' has that limited value of a canon and of a

point of view, which we have allowed in general to the materialist conception.(34*)






The second of the two questions proposed at the beginning is: How do the

Marxians understand historical materialism? To me it seems undeniable that

in the Marxian literature, i.e. the writings of the followers and interpreters

of Marx, there exists in truth a metaphysical danger of which it is necessary

to beware. Even in the writings of Professor Labriola some statements are

met with which have recently led a careful and accurate critic to conclude

that Labriola understands historical materialism in the genuine and original

sense of a metaphysic, and that of the worst kind, a metaphysic of the contingent.(35*)

But although I have myself, on another occasion, pointed out those statements

and formulae which seem to me doubtful in Labriola's writings, I still think,

as I thought then, that they are superficial outgrowths on a system of thought

essentially sound; or to speak in a manner agreeing with the considerations

developed above, that Labriola, having educated himself in Marxism, may have

borrowed from it also some of its over-absolute style, and at times a certain

carelessness about the working out of concepts, which are somewhat surprising

in an old Herbartian like himself,(36*) but which he then corrects by observations

and limitations always useful, even if slightly contradictory, because they

bring us back to the ground of reality.






Labriola, moreover, has a special merit, which marks him off from the

ordinary exponents and adapters of historical materialism. Although his theoretical

formulae may here and there expose him to criticism, when he turns to history,

i.e. to concrete facts, he changes his attitude, throws off as it were, the

burden of theory and becomes cautious and circumspect: he possesses, in a

high degree, respect for history. He shows unceasingly his dislike for formulae

of every kind, when concerned to establish and scrutinise definite processes,

nor does he forget to give the warning that there exists 'no theory, however

good and excellent in itself, which will help us to a summary knowledge of

every historical detail.'(37*)






In his last book we may note especially a full inquiry into what could

possibly be the nature of a history of Christianity. Labriola criticises

those who set up as an historical subject the essence of Christianity, of

which it is unknown where or when it has existed; since the history of the

last centuries of the Roman Empire shows us merely the origin and growth

of what constituted the Christian society, or the church, a varying group

of facts amidst varied historical conditions. This critical opinion held

by Labriola seems to me perfectly correct; since it is not meant to deny,

(what I myself, do not deny) the justification of that method of historical

exposition, which for lack of another phrase, I once called histories by

concepts,(38*) thus distinguishing it from the historical exposition of the

life of a given social group in a given place and during a given period of

time. He who writes the history of Christianity, claims in truth, to accomplish

a task somewhat similar to the tasks of the historians of literature, of

philosophy, of art: i.e. to isolate a body of facts which enter into a fixed

concept, and to arrange them in a chronological series, without however denying

or ignoring the source which these facts have in the other facts of life,

but keeping them apart for the convenience of more detailed consideration.

The worst of it is that whereas literature, philosophy, art and so on are

determined or determinable concepts, Christianity is almost solely a bond,

which unites beliefs often intrinsically very diverse; and, in writing the

history of Christianity, there is often a danger of writing in reality the

history of a name, void without substance.(39*)






But what would Labriola say if his cautious criticism were turned against

that history of the origin of the family, of private property and of class

distinctions, which is one of the most extensive historical applications

made by the followers of Marx: desired by Marx, sketched out by Engels on

the lines of Morgan's investigations, carried on by others. Alas, in this

matter, the aim was not merely to write, as could, perhaps, have been done,

a useful manual of the historical facts which enter into these three concepts,

but actually an additional history was produced: A history, to use Labriola's

own phrase, of the essence family, of the essence class and of the essence

private property, with a predetermined cadence. A 'history of the family,'

to confine ourselves to one of the three groups of facts,can only be an enumeration

and description of the particular forms taken by the family amongst different

races and in the course of time: a series of particular histories, which

unite themselves into a general concept. It is this which is offered by Morgan's

theories, expounded by Engels, which theories modern criticism have cut away

on all sides.(40*) Have they not allowed themselves to presuppose, as an

historical stage, through which all races are fated to pass, that chimerical

matriarchate, in which the mere reckoning of descent through the mother is

confused with the predominance of woman in the family and that of woman in

society? Have we not seen the reproofs and even the jeers directed by some

Marxians against those cautious historians who deny that it is possible to

assert, in the present condition of the criticism of sources, the existence

of a primitive communism, or a matriarchate, amongst the Hellenic races?

Indeed, I do not think that throughout this investigation proof has been

given of much critical foresight.






I should also like to call Labriola's attention to another confusion,

very common in Marxian writings, between economic forms of organisation and

economic epochs. Under the influence of evolutionist positivism, those divisions

which Marx expressed in general: the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and

the bourgeois economic organisation, have become four historical epochs:

communism, slave organization, serf organization, and wage-earning organization.

But the modern historian, who is indeed not such a superficial person as

the ordinary Marxians are accustomed to say, thus sparing themselves the

trouble of taking a share in his laborious procedure, is well aware that

there are four forms of economic organization, which succeed and intersect

one another in actual history, often forming the oddest mixtures and sequences.

He recognises an Egyptian mediaevalism or feudalism, as he recognises an

Hellenic mediaevalism or feudalism; he knows too of a German neo-mediaevalism

which followed the flourishing bourgeois organisation of the German cities

before the Reformation and the discovery of the New World; and he willingly

compares the general economic conditions of the Greco-Roman world at its

zenith with those of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.






Connected with this arbitrary conception of historical epochs, is the

other of the inquiry into the cause (note carefully; into the cause) of the

transition from one form to another. Inquiry is made, for instance, into

the cause of the abolition of slavery, which must be the same, whether we

are considering the decline of the Greco-Roman world or modern America; and

so for serfdom, and for primitive communism and the capitalist system: amongst

ourselves the famous Loria has occupied himself with these absurd investigations,

the perpetual revelation of a single cause, of which he himself does not

know exactly whether it be the earth, or population or something else yet

it should not take much to convince us, (it would suffice for the purpose

to read, with a little care, some books of narrative history), that the transition

from one form of economic, or more generally, social, organization, to another,

is not the result of a single cause, nor even of a group of causes which

are always the same; but is due to causes and circumstances which need examination

for each case since they usually vary for each case. Death is death; but

people die of many diseases.






But enough of this; and I may be allowed to conclude this paragraph by

reference to a question which Labriola also brings forward in his recent

work, and which he connects with the criticism of historical materialism.






Labriola distinguishes between historical materialism as an interpretation

of history, and as a general conception of life and of the universe (Lebens-und-Weltanschauang),

and he inquires what is the nature of the philosophy immanent in historical

materialism; and after some remarks, he concludes that this philosophy is

the tendency to monism, and is a formal tendency.






Here I take leave to point out that if into the term historical materialism

two different things are intruded, i.e.: (1) a method of interpretation;

(2) a definite conception of life and of the universe; it is natural to find

a philosophy in it, and moreover with a tendency to monism, because it was

included therein at the outset. What close connection is there between these

two orders of thought? Perhaps a logical connection of mental coherence?

For my part, I confess that I am unable to see it. I believe, on the contrary,

that Labriola, this time, is simply stating a proposition of historical materialism

what he thinks to be the necessary attitude of modern thought with regard

to the problems of ontology; or what, according to him, should be the standpoint

of the socialist opinion in regard to the conceptions of optimism and pessimism;

and so on. I believe, in short, that he is not making an investigation which

will reveal the philosophical conceptions underlying historical materialism;

but merely a digression, even if a digression of interest and importance.

And how many other most noteworthy opinions and impressions and sentiments

are welcomed by socialist opinion! But why christen this assemblage of new

facts by the name of historical materialism, which has hitherto expressed

the well-defined meaning of a way of interpreting history? Is it not the

task of the scientist to distinguish and analyse what in empirical reality

and to ordinary knowledge appears mingled into one?






IV






OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IN FACE OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS






It has become a commonplace that, owing to Marx's work, socialism has

passed from utopia to science, as the title of a popular booklet by Engels

expresses it; and scientific socialism is a current term. Professor Labriola

does not conceal his doubts of such a term; and he is right.






On the other hand, we hear the followers of other leaders, for instance

the extreme free traders (to whom I refer by preference honoris causa, because

they, too, are amongst the idealists of our times), in the name of science

itself, condemn socialism as anti-scientific and declare that free trade

is the only scientific opinion.






Would it not be convenient if both sides retraced their steps and mortified

their pride a little, and acknowledged that socialism and free trade may

certainly be called scientific in metaphor or hyperbole; but that neither

of them are, or ever can be, scientific deductions? And that thus the problem

of socialism, of free trade and of any other practical social programme,

may be transferred to another region; which is not that of pure science,

but which nevertheless is the only one suited to them?






Let us pause for an instant at free trade. It presents itself to us from

two points of view, i.e. with a two-fold justification. In the older aspect

it undeniably has a metaphysical basis, consisting in that conviction of

the goodness of natural laws and that concept of nature (natural law, state

of nature, etc.) which, proceeding from the philosophy of the 18th century,

was predominant in the 18th century.(41*) 'Do not hinder Nature in her work

and all will be for the best.' A similar note is struck, only indirectly,

by a criticism like that of Marx; who, when analysing the concept of nature,

showed that it was the idealogical complement of the historical development

of the middle class, a powerful weapon of which this class availed itself

against the privileges and oppressions which it intended to overthrow.(42*)

Now this concept may indeed have originated as a weapon made occasional use

of historically, and nevertheless be intrinsically true. Natal law in this

case, is equivalent to rational law; it is necessary to deny both the rationality

and the excellence of this law. Now, just because of its metaphysical origin,

this concept can be rejected altogether, but cannot be refuted in detail

it disappears with the metaphysic of which it was a part, and it seems at

length to have really disappeared. Peace to the sublime goodness of natural

laws.






But free trade presents itself to us, among its more recent supporters,

in a very different aspect -- the free traders, abandoning metaphysical postulates,

assert two theses of practical importance: (a) that of an economic hedonistic

maximum, which they suppose identical with the maximum of social desirability;(43*)

and (b) the other, that this hedonistic maximum can only be completely secured

by means of the fullest economic liberty. These two theses certainly take

us outside metaphysics and into the region of reality; but not actually into

the region of science. Indeed the first of them contains a statement of the

ends of social life, which may perhaps be welcome, but is not a deduction

from any scientific proposition. The second thesis cannot be proved except

by reference to experience, i.e. to what we know of human psychology, and

to what, by approximate calculation, we may suppose that psychology will

still probably be in the future. A calculation which can be made, and has

been made with great acumen, with great erudition and with great caution

and which hence may even be called scientific, but only in a metaphorical

and hyperbolical sense, as we have already remarked: hence the knowledge

which it affords us, can never have the value of strictly scientific knowledge.(44*)

Pareto, who is both one of the most intelligent and also one of the most

trustworthy and sincere, of the recent exponents and supporters of free trade,(45*)

does not deny the limited and approximate nature of its conclusions; which

appears to him so much the more clearly in that he uses mathematical formulae,

which show at once the degree of certainty to which statements of this kind

may lay claim.






And, in effect, communism (which has also had its metaphysical period,

and earlier still a theological period) may, with entire justice, set against

the two theses of free trade, two others of its own which consist: (a) in

a different and not purely economic estimate of the maximum of social desirability;

(b) in the assertion that this maximum can be attained, not through extreme

free trade, but rather through the organization of economic forces; which

is the meaning of the famous saying concerning the leap from the reign of

necessity ( = free competition or anarchy) into that of liberty ( = the command

of man over the forces of nature even in the sphere of the social natural

life). But neither can these two theses be proved; and for the same reasons.

Ideals cannot be proved; and empirical calculations and practical convictions

are not science. Pareto clearly recognises this quality in modern socialism;

and agrees that the communistic system, as a system, is perfectly conceivable,

i.e. theoretically it offers no internal contradictions (§ 446). According

to him it clashes, not with scientific laws, but with immense practical difficulties

(l.c.) such as the difficulty of adopting technical improvements without

the trial and selection secured by free competition; the lack of stimuli

to work; the choice of officials, which in a communistic society would be

guided, still according to him, not by wholly technical reasons, as in modern

industry, but on political and social grounds (837). He admits the socialist

criticism of the waste due to free competition; but thinks this inevitable

as a practical way of securing equilibrium of production. The real problem

he says is: whether without the experiments of free competition it is possible

to arrive at a knowledge of the line (the line which he calls mn) of the

complete adaptation of production to demand, and whether the expense of making

a unified (communistic) organisation of work, would not be greater than that

needed to solve the equations or production by experiments (718, 867). He

also acknowledged that there is something parasitical in the capitalist (Marx's

sad-faced knight); but, at the same time, he maintains that the capitalist

renders social services, for which we do not know how otherwise to provide.(46*)

If it be desired to state briefly the contrasts in the two different points

of view, it may be said that human psychology is regarded by the free traders

as for the most part, determined, and by the socialists, as for the most

part changeable and adaptable. Now it is certain that human psychology does

change and adapt itself; but the extent and rapidity of these changes are

incapable of exact determination and are left to conjecture and opinion.

Can they ever become the subject of exact calculation?






If now we pass to considerations of another kind, not of what is desirable,

that is of the ends and means admired and thought good by us; but of what

under present circumstances, history promises us; i.e. of the objective tendencies

of modern society, I really do not know with what meaning many free traders

cast on socialism the reproach of being Utopian. For quite another reason

socialists might cast back the same reproach upon free trade, if it were

considered as it is at present, and not as it was fifty years ago when Marx

composed his criticism upon it. Free Trade and its recommendations turn upon

an entity which now at least, does not exist: i.e. the national or general

interest of society; since existing society is divided into antagonistic

groups and recognizes the interest of each of these groups, but not, or only

very feebly, a general interest. Upon which does free trade reckon? On the

landed proprietors or on the industrial classes, on the workmen or on the

holders of public dignities? Socialism, on the contrary, from Marx onwards,

has placed little reliance on the good sense and good intentions of men,

and has declared that the social revolution must be accomplished chiefly

by the effort of a class directly interested, i.e. the proletariat. And socialism

has made such advances that history must inquire whether the experience that

we have of the past justifies the supposition that a social movement, so

widespread and intense, can be reabsorbed or dispersed without fully testing

itself In the sphere of facts. On this matter too I gladly refer to Pareto,

who acknowledges that even in that country of free traders' dreams, in England,

the system is supported not owing to people's conviction of its intrinsic

excellence, but because it is in the interests of certain entrepreneurs.(47*)

And he recognises, with political acumen, that since social movement takes

place in the same manner as all other movements, along the line of least

resistance, it is very likely that it may be necessary to pass through Socialistic

state,in order to reach a state of free competition (§ 791).






I have said that the extreme free traders, much more than the socialists,

are idealists, or if one prefers it, ideologists. Hence in Italy we are witnesses

of this strange phenomenon, a sort of fraternising and spiritual sympathy

between socialists and free traders, in so far as both are bitter and searching

critics of the same thing, which the former call the bourgeois tyranny and

the latter bourgeois socialism. But in the field of practical activity the

socialists (and here I no longer refer especially to Italy) undoubtedly make

progress whilst the free traders have to limit themselves to the barrenness

of evil-speaking and of aspirations, forming a little group of well-meaning

people of select intelligence, who make audience for one another.(48*) By

this I mean no reproach to these sincere and thoroughly consistent free-traders:

rather I sincerely admire them; their lack of success is not their own fault.






I wish merely to remark that if ideals, as the philosopher says, have

short legs, those of the free traders' ideals are indeed of the shortest.






I could continue this exemplification, bringing forward various other

social programmes, such as that of state socialism, which consists in accepting

the socialist ideal, but as an ultimate end perhaps never fully attainable,

and extending its partial attainment over a long course of centuries; and

in relying for the effective force, not in a revolutionary class, nor simply

in the views of right thinkers, but in the state, conceived as a creative

power, independent of and superior to individual wills. It is certainly undeniable

that the function of the state, like all social functions, owing to a complication

of circumstances, amongst which are tradition, reverence, the consciousness

of something which surpasses individuals, and other impressions and sentiments

which are analysed by collective psychology, acquires a certain independence

and develops a certain peculiar force; but in the estimation of this force

great mistakes are made, as socialist criticism has clearly shown: and, in

any case, whether it be great or small, we are always faced by a calculation;

and one moreover, in the region of opinion, which region science may, in

part, yet bring under its power, but which in a great degree will always

be rebellious to it.






Oh the misuses which are made of this word science! Once these misuses

were the monopoly of metaphysics, to whose despotic nature they appeared

suitable. And the strangest instances could be quoted, even from great philosophers,

from Hegel, from Schopenhauer, from Rosmini, which would show how the humblest

practical conclusions, made by the passions and interests of men, have often

been metaphysically transformed into inferences from the Spirit, from the

Divine Being, from the Nature of things, from the finality of the universe.

Metaphysics hypostatised whet it then triumphantly inferred. The youthful

Marx wittily discovered in the Hegelianism of Bruno Bauer, the pre-established

harmony of critical analysis (Kritische Kritik) under German censorship.

Those who most frequently have the word in their mouths make a sort of Sibyl

or Pythia of a limited intellectual function. But the desirable is not science,

nor is the practicable.(49*)






Is scientific knowledge then in fact superfluous in practical questions?

Are we to assent to this absurdity? The attentive reader will be well aware

that we are not here discussing the utility of science, but the possibility

of inferring, as some claim to do, practical programmes from scientific prepositions;

and it is this possibility only which is denied.






Science, in so far as it consists in knowledge of the laws governing actual

facts, may be a legitimate means of simplifying problems, making it possible

to distinguish in them what can be scientifically ascertained from what can

only be partially known. A great number of things which are commonly disputed,

may be cleared up and accurately decided by this method. To give an example,

when Marx in opposition to Proudhon and his English predecessors (Bray, Gray,

etc.) showed the absurdity of creating labour bonds, i.e. labour-money; and

when Engels directed similar criticisms against Dühring, and then again,

perhaps with less justification, against Rodbertus(50*) or when both established

the close connection between the method of production and the method of distribution,

they were working in the field proper to scientific demonstration, trying

to prove an inconsistency between the conclusions and the premises, i.e.

an internal contradiction in the concepts criticised. The same may be said

of the proof, carefully worked out by the free traders, of the proposition:

that protection of every kind is equivalent to a destruction of wealth. And

if it were possible to establish accurately that law of the tendency of the

rate of profits to decline, with which Marx meant to correct and widen the

Ricardian law deduced from the continuous encroachments of the rent of land,

it could be said, under certain conditions, that the end of the bourgeois

capitalist organisation was a scientific certainty, though it would remain

doubtful what could take its place






This limitation 'uncle' certain conditions' is the point to be noticed.

All scientific laws are abstract laws; and there is no bridge over which

to pass from the concrete to the abstract; just because the abstract is not

a reality, but a form of thought, one of our, so to speak, abbreviated ways

of thinking. And, although a knowledge of the laws may light up our perception

of reality, it cannot become this perception itself.






Here we may agree with what Labiola justly felt, when, showing his dissatisfaction

with the term scientific socialism, he suggested, though without giving any

reasons, that that of critical communism might be substituted.(51*)






If then from abstract laws and concepts we pass to observations of historical

fact, we find, it is true, points of agreement between our ideals and real

things, but at the same time we enter upon those difficult calculations and

conjectures, from which it is always impossible to eliminate, as was remarked

above, the diversity of opinions and propensities.






In face of the future of society, in face of the path to be pursued, we

have occasion to say with Faust -- Who can say I believe? Who can say I do

not believe?






Not indeed that we wish to advocate or in any way justify a vulgar scepticism.

But at the same time we need to be sensible of the relativity of our beliefs,

and to come to a determination in practice where indetermination is an error.

This is the point; and herein lie all the troubles of men of thought; and

hence arises their practical impotence, which art has depicted in Hamlet.

Neither shall we wish, in truth, to imitate that magistrate, famous for miles

around the district where he officiated for the justice of his decisions,

of whom Rabelais tells us, that he used the very simple method, when about

to make up his mind, of offering a prayer to God and settling his decision

by a game of odd and even.(52*) But we must strive to attain personal conviction,

and then bear always in mind that great characters in history have had the

courage to dare. 'Alea jacta est.' said Caesar; 'Gott helfe mir, amen!' said

Luther. The brave deeds of history would not be brave if they had been accompanied

by a clear foresight of the consequences, as in the case of the prophets

and those inspired by God.






Fortunately, logic is not life, and man is not intellect alone. And, whilst

those same men whose critical faculty is warped, are the men of imagination

and passion, in the life of society the intellect plays a very small part,

and with a little exaggeration it may even be said that things go their way

independent of our actions. Let us leave them to their romances, let them

preach, I will not say in the market places where they would not be believed,

but in the university lecture rooms, or the halls of congresses and conferences

the doctrine that science (i.e. their science) is the ruling queen of life.

And we will content ourselves by repeating with Labriola that 'History is

the true mistress of all us men, and we are as it were vitalised by History.'






V






OF ETHICAL JUDGMENT IN FACE OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS






Labriola, with his usual piquancy, lashes those who reduce history to

a case of conscience or to an error in bookkeeping.






With this he recalls us to the two-fold consideration (1) that for Marx

the social question was not a moral question, and (2) that the analysis made

by Marx of capitalism amounts to a proof of the laws which govern a given

society, and not indeed to a proof of theft, as some have understood it,

as though it would suffice to restore to the workman the amount of his wrongfully

exacted surplus labour, so that the accounts may turn out in order, and the

social question be satisfactorily solved.(53*)






Leaving the second consideration, which yet gives us an instance of the

ludicrous travesties which may be made of a scientific theory, let us pause

for a moment over the first formula, which usually gives the greatest offense

to non-socialists; so much so that many of them wish to put a little salt

in the broth and complete socialism by morality.






In actual fact, offense and moral indignation have never been caused less

appropriately.






Those remarks in Marx's writings which savour of moral indifference, bear

a very limited and trivial meaning. Consider a moment, as indeed has been

considered many times, that no social order of any kind can exist without

a basis of slavery, or serfdom, or hired service; that is to say that slavery,

or serfdom, or hired service are natural conditions of social order, and

that without them a thing cannot exist, which is so necessary to man that,

at least since he was man, he has never done without it, viz., society. Faced

by such a fact, what meaning would our moral judgment have, directed against

these governing human beings who call themselves slave owners, feudal lords

and bourgeois capitalists, and in favour of these governed human beings who

call themselves slaves, serfs, free labourers; neither of whom could be different

from what they are, nor could otherwise fulfil the function assigned to them

by the very nature of things.(54*) Our condemnation would be a condemnation

of the inevitable; a Leopardian curse directed against the genital power

which rules in secret to the general harm. But moral praise or blame has

reference always to an act of will, good or bad; and such judgments would

on the contrary be directed against a fact, which has not been willed by

anyone, but is endured by every one because it cannot be different. You,

indeed, may lament it; but by lamenting it, you not only do not destroy it,

you do not even touch it, i.e., you waste your time.






This is what Marx calls the impotence of morality, which is as much as

to say that it is useless to propound questions which no effort can answer

and which are therefore absurd.






But when, on the other hand, these conditions of subjection are not conceived

as necessary for the social order in general, but only as necessary for a

stage in its history; and when new conditions make their appearance which

render it possible to destroy them (as was the case in the industrial advance

toward serfdom, and as the socialists reckon will happen in the final phase

of modern civilisation in regard to wage earners and capitalism); then moral

condemnation is justified, and, up to a certain point, is also effective

in quickening the process ot destruction and in sweeping away the last remnants

of the past.






This is the meaning of Marx's other saying: that morality condemns what

has already been condemned by history.(55*)






I cannot manage to see any difficulty in agreeing to remarks of this kind,

even from the standpoint of the strictest ethical theories. There is here

no question of misunderstanding the nature of morality, and of wishing to

make it into something fortuitous or relative; but simply of determining

the conditions of human progress, turning the attention from the inevitable

effects to the fundamental causes, and seeking remedies in the nature of

things and not in our caprices and pious wishes. It must needs be thought

that the opposition proceeds, not from intellectual error, but rather from

human pride, or vanity it may be, owing to which many desire to retain for

their wretched words a little of the virtue of the divine word, which created

light by its decree.(56*)






The same feeling must perhaps be present as the basis of the horror which

usually greets the other practical maxim of the socialists; that the workman

educates himself by the political struggle. But Labriola is fully justified

in admiring in the advance of German socialism 'the truly new and imposing

instance of social pedagogy; viz. that, amongst such an enormous number of

men, particularly of workmen of the lower middle class, a new consciousness

is developing, within which compete in equal degree, a direct sense of the

economic situation, which incites to the struggle, and the socialist propaganda

understood as the goal or point of arrival.' What means have the preachers

of moral maxims at their disposal, to secure a result equal to this? Who

are these workmen who combine in associations, who read their newspapers,

discuss the acts of their delegates and accept the decisions of their congresses,

if not men who are educating themselves morally?






But there is not only a question of vanity and pride in that feeling of

aversion, which animates many with regard to the practical maxims of the

socialists, and in the desire, which people also show, of undertaking in

the name of morality or religion, the spiritual direction of the education

of the working man; nor shall we wish to be so ingenuous and complacent as

to confine ourselves to such a partial explanation. There is more, there

is, I might almost say, an apprehension and a fear. An apprehension, little

justified, lest the political organisation of the proletariat may lead to

a brutal and unrestrained outbreak of the masses and to I know not what kind

of social ruin: as if such outbreaks were not recorded by history in precisely

those periods in which it is usual to suppose that the dominion of religion

over conscience was greatest, as in the jacqueries of the fourteenth century

in France, and again in the peasants' wars in Germany, and in which there

was no organisation and political culture amongst the common people.(57*)

A fear, which is on the contrary thoroughly justified and arises from the

knowledge that instinctive and blind proletariat movements are conquered

by force; whereas organisation combined with an enlightened consciousness,

is not conquered or only suffers temporary reverses. Does not Mommsen remark,

in reference to the slave revolts in ancient Rome; that states would be very

fortunate if they were in no other dangers besides those which might come

to them from the revolts of the proletariat, which are no greater than the

dangers arising front the claws of hungry bears or wolves?






These statements concerning ethics and socialist pedagogy having been

explained, someone might yet ask: -- But what was the philosophical opinion

of Marx and Engels in regard to morality? Were they relativists, utilitarians,

hedonists, or idealists, absolutists, or what else?






I may be allowed to point out that this question is of no great importance,

and is even somewhat inopportune, since neither Marx nor Engels were philosophers

of ethics, nor bestowed much of their vigorous ability on such questions.

It is indeed of consequence to determine that their conclusions in regard

to the function of morality in social movements and to the method for the

education of the proletariat, contain no contradiction of general ethical

principles, even if here and there they clash with the prejudices of current

pseudo-morality. Their personal opinions upon the principles of ethics did

not take an elaborate scientific form in their books; and some wit and some

sarcasm are not adequate grounds upon which to base a discussion of the subject.






And I will say yet more; in ethical matters, I have not yet succeeded

in freeing myself from the prison of the Kantian Critique, and do not yet

see the position taken up by Kant surpassed; on the contrary, I see it strengthened

by some of the most modern tendencies, and to me the way in which Engels

attacks Dühring with regard to the principles of morality in his well-known

book, does not in truth appear very exhaustive.(58*) Here again the procedure

is repeated which we have already criticised in connection with the discussions

upon the general concept of value. Where Dühring, owing to the exigencies

of scientific abstraction, takes for consideration the isolated individual

and explicitly states that he is dealing with an abstract illustration (Denkschema),

Engels remarks, wittily but erroneously that the isolated man is nothing

but a new edition of the first Adam in the Garden of Eden. It is true that

in that criticism are contained many well-directed blows; and it might even

be called just, if it refers only to ethical conceptions in the sense of

assemblages of special rules and moral judgments, relative to definite social

situations, which assemblages and constructions cannot claim absolute truth

for all times, and all places, precisely because they are always made for

particular times and particular places. But apart from these special constructions,

analysis offers us the essential and ruling principles of morality, which

give opportunity for questions which may, truly, be differently answered,

but which most certainly are not taken into account by Marx and Engels. And,

in truth, even if some may be able to write on the theory of knowledge according

to Marx,(59*) to write on the principles of ethics according to Marx seems

to me a somewhat hopeless undertaking.






VI






CONCLUSION






The preceding remarks are partly attempts at interpretation, and partly

critical emendations of some of the concepts and opinions expressed by Marx

and in the Marxian literature. But how many other points deserve to undergo

revision ! Beginning with that concentration of private property in a few

hands, which threatens to become something like the discredited iron law

of wages, and ending with that strange statement in the history of philosophy

that the labour movement is the heir of German classical philosophy. And

attention could thus be given to another group of questions which we have

not discussed (ea. to the conception of future society) in regard to their

detailed elucidation and their practical and historical applications.(60*)

If that decomposition of Marxism, which some have predicted,(61*) meant a

careful critical revision, it would indeed be welcome.






To sum up, in the meantime, the chief results which are suggested in the

preceding remarks: they maintain.






1. In regard to economic science, the justification of Marxian economics,

understood not as general economic science, but as comparative sociological

economics, which is concerned with a problem of primary interest for historical

and social life.






2. In regard to the philosophy of history, the purification of historical

materialism from all traces of any a priori standpoint (whether inherited

from Hegelianism or an infection from ordinary evolutionism) and the understanding

of the theory as a simple, albeit a fruitful, canon of historical interpretation.






3. In regard to practical matters, the impossibility of inferring the

Marxian social programme (or, indeed any other social programme) from the

propositions of pure science, since the appraisement of social programmes

must be a matter of empirical observations and practical convictions; in

which connection the Marxian programme cannot but appear one of the noblest

and boldest and also one of those which obtain most support from the objective

conditions of existing society.






4. In regard to ethics, the abandonment of the legend of the intrinsic

immorality or of the intrinsic anti-ethical character of Marxism.






I will add a remark on the second point. Many will think that if historical

materialism is reduced to the limits within which we have confined it, it

will not only no longer be a legitimate and real scientific theory (which

we are indeed prepared to grant) but will actually lose all importance whatever,

and against this second conclusion we once more, as we have done already

on another occasion, make vigorous protest. Undoubtedly the horror expressed

by some for pure science and for abstractions is inane, since these intellectual

methods are indispensable for the very knowledge of concrete reality; but

no less inane is the complete and exclusive worship of abstract propositions,

of definitions, of theorems, of corollaries: almost as if these constituted

a sort of aristocracy of human thought. Well! the economic purists (not to

draw examples from other fields, though numbers could be found in pure mathematics)

prove to us, in fact, that the discovery of scientific theorems, strictly,

unimpeachably scientific,is frequently neither an over-important nor over-difficult

matter. To be convinced thereof we need only remark how many eponimi of new

theorems issue from every corner of the German or English schools. And concrete

reality, i.e. the very world in which we live and move, and which it concerns

us somewhat to know, slips out, unseizable, from the broad-meshed net of

abstractions and hypotheses. Marx, as a sociologist, has in truth not given

us carefully worked out definitions of social phenomena, such as may be found

in the books of so many contemporary sociologists, of the Germans Simmel

and Stammler, or of the Frenchman Durckheim; but he teaches us, although

it is with statements approximate in content and paradoxical in form, to

penetrate to what society is in its actual truth. Nay, from this point of

view, I am surprised that no one has thought of calling him 'the most notable

successor of the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli'; a Machiavelli of the labour

movement.






And I will also add a remark on the third point if the social programme

of Marxism cannot be wholly included in Marxian science, or in any other

science, no more can the daily practice of socialist politics be, in its

turn, wholly included in the general principles of the programme, which programme,

if we analyse it, determines (1) an ultimate end, (the technical organisation

of society); (2) an impulse, based on history, towards this end, found in

the objective tendencies of modern society (the necessity for the abolition

of capitalism and for a communistic organization, as the one possible form

of progress); (3) a method (to accelerate the final phases of the bourgeoisie,

and to educate politically the class destined to succeed them). Marx, owing

to his political insight, has for many years in a striking manner, joined

with, and guided by his advice and his work, the international socialist

movement; but he could not give precepts and dogmas for every contingency

and complication that history might produce. Now the continuation of Marx's

political work is much more difficult than the continuation of his scientific

work. And, if, in continuing the latter, the so-called Marxians have sometimes

fallen into a scientific dogmatism little to be admired, some recent occurrences

remind us of the danger, that the continuation of the former may also degenerate

into a dogmatism with the worst effects, i.e. a political dogmatism. This

gives food for thought to all the more cautious Marxians, amongst whom are

Kautsky and Bernstein in Germany, and Sorel in France; Labriola's new book,

too, contains serious warnings on the matter.






November, 1897.






NOTES:






1. 'An immense monograph' (of economics understood) it is called by Professor

Antonio Labriola, the most notable of the Italian Marxians, in his recent

book (Discorrcodo di filosophia e socialismo, Rome, Loescher, 1898). But

in an earlier work (In Memoria del 'Manifesto dei Comunisti', 2nd ed. Rome,

1895, p. 36) he defined it as 'a philosophy of history '.






2. I leave out those who regard the law of labour-value as the general

law of value. The refutation is obvious. How could it ever be 'general' when

it leaves out of account a whole category of economic goods, that is the

goods which cannot be increased by labour?






3. WERNER SOMBART: Zur Kritik des oekonomischer Systems von Karl Marx

(in the Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung and Statistik, Vol. vii, 1894, pp.

555-594). I have not by me the criticism (from the Hedonistic point of view)

of this article by Sombart -- on the third volume of Das Kapital -- made

last year by BOHM BAWERK in the Miscellany in honour of Knies.






4. Loc. cit., p. 571, at seq.






5. In the Neue Zeit xiv. vol. I, pp. 4-11, 37-44, I quote from the Italian

translation: Dal terzo volume del 'Capitale,' preface and notes by F. Engels,

Rome 1896, p. 39.






6. Sur la théorie Marxiste de la valeur (in the Journal des Economistes,

number for March 1897, pp. 122-31, see p. 228).






7. Discorrendo di sorialismo e di filosophia, p. 21.






8. It must be carefully noticed that what I call a concrete fact may still

not be a fact which is empirically real, but a fact made by us hypothetically

and entirely imaginary, or a fact partially empirical, i.e. existing partially

in empirical reality. We shall see later on that Marx's typical premise belongs

properly to this second class.






9. I accept the term employed by Labriola so much the more readily since

it is the same as that used by me a year ago. See Essay on Loria (Materialismio

Storico, pp. 48-50).






10. In making an hypothesis of this nature, Marx distinguished clearly

that, in such a case, 'labour-time would serve a down purpose: on the one

hand as standard of value, on the other as a standard of the individual share

reckoned to each producer in the common labour' (andrerseits dient die Arbeitzeit

zugleich als Mass des individuellen Antheils des Producenten an der Gemeinarbeit,

und daher auch an dem individuell verzehbaren Theil des Gemein products):

See Das Kapital I, p. 45.






11. This is a different thing from the workmen or operatives in our capitalist

society, who form a class, i.e. a portion of economic society and not economic

society in general and in the abstract, producing goods which can be increased

by labour.






12. It may be doubted whether this general application of labour-value

to every working economic society was included in the ideas of Marx and Engels,

when the numerous passages are recalled in which one or other has declared

many times that in the future communistic society the criterion of value

will disappear and production will be based on social utility, of Engels

as early as in the Umrisse 1844, (Italian translation in Critica sociale

a. v. 1895) Marx, Misère de la philosophie, 2nd ed. Paris, Giard et

Brière. 1896, p. 83; Engels Antidühring, p. 335. But this must

be understood in the sense that, not being a hypothetical communistic society

based on exchange, the function of value (in exchange) would lose, according

to them, its practical importance; but not in the other sense that in the

opinion of the communistic society the value of goods would no longer equal

the labour which they cost to society. Because even in such a system of economic

organization, value-labour would be the economic law which entirely governed

the valuation of individual commodities, produced by labour. There would

be that clearness of valuation which Marx describes in his Robinsonia, cf:

Das Kapital, p. 43.






13. Dal terzo volume del 'Capitale,' pp. 42-55.






14. Hence also Marx in §4 of Chap. I.: Der Fetischcharakter der Waare

and sein Geheimniss (I. pp. 37-50) gave a brief outline of the other economic

systems of medieval society, and of the domestic system: 'Aller Mysticismus

der Waarenwelt, all der Zauber und Spuk, welcher Arbeitsprodukte auf grundlage

der Waarenproduktion umnebelt, verschwindet daher sofort, sobal wir zu anderen

Producktions formen fliichten (p. 42). The relation between value and labour

appears more clearly in the less complex economic systems, because less opposed

and obscured by other facts.






15. Das Kapital, Book III., sec. III., Chaps. XIII, XIV, XV, Gesetz des

tendentiellen Falk der Profitrate (vol. iii., Part I, pp. 191-249).






16. The task of Marx's followers ought to be to free his thought from

the literary form which he adopts, to study again the questions which he

propounds, and to work them out with new and more accurate statements, and

with fresh historical illustrations. In this alone can scientific progress

consist. The expositions made hitherto of Marx's system, are merely materials;

and some (like Aveling's) consist entirely in a series of little summaries,

which follow the original chapter by chapter and prove even more obscure.

For the law of the fall in the rate of profits, see below, chap. V.






17. 'To follow out completely this criticism of bourgeois economics a

knowledge of the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution

is not alone adequate. We ought similarly to study at least in their essential

features and taken as terms of comparison, the other forms which have preceded

it in time, or exist alongside of it in less developed countries. Such an

investigation and comparison has hitherto been briefly expounded only by

Marx; and we owe almost entirely to his researches what we know about pre-bourgeois

theoretical economics.' (ENGELS, Antidühring, p. 154). This was written

by Engels twenty years ago; and since then the literature of economic history

has grown remarkably, but historical research has been seldom accompanied

by theoretical research.






18. 'Political economy is essentially an historical science.' (ENGELS,

l.c., p. 150).






19. What is strange is that ENGELS (in the passage quoted in the penultimate

note) says himself most truly that Marx has written theoretical economics,

nevertheless in the sentence quoted in the last note (which appears in the

same book and on the same page) he states definitely that economics in the

Marxian sense is nothing but an historical science.






20. Antidühring, pp. 150, 155.






21. Das Kapital, I, p. 67.






22. F. A. LANGE, Die Arbeiterfrage, 5th ed., Winterthur, 1894, (the author's

last revision was in 1874) see p. 332; of p. 248 and on p. 124, the quotation

from Gossen's book, then very little known.






23. ADOLF WAGNER, Grundlegung den politischen oekonomie, 3rd Ed., Leipzig,

1892, vol. I, pt. I; Bk. I, ch. i. Die Wirthschaftliche Natur des Menschen,

pp. 70-137.






24. I may be allowed to remark that in similar discussions, economists

usually make the serious mistake of making the concept economic coincide

with the concept egoistic. But the economic is an independent sphere of human

activity, in addition to all the others, such as the spheres of ethics, aesthetics,

logic, etc. The moral goods and the satisfaction of the higher moral needs

of man, just because they are goods, and needs, are taken into account in

economics, but still only as goods and needs, not as moral or immoral, egoistic

or altruistic. In like manner, a manifestation (by words or by any other

means of expression) is taken into account in aesthetics; but only as a manifestation

not as true, false, moral, immoral, useful, harmful, etc. Economists are

still impressed by the fact that Adam Smith wrote one book of theory and

of ethics, and another of economic theory; which may interpret to mean that

one dealt with a theory of altruistic facts and the other with one of egoistic

facts. But if this had been so, Adam Smith would have discussed, in both

of his chief works, facts of an ethical character, estimable or reprehensible;

and would not have been an economist at all; a ridiculous conclusion which

is a reductio ad absurdum of the identification of economic action with egoism.






25. Discorrendo di socialismo e di filesophia, 1. vi.






26. It is strange how among the students of pure economics also this need

for a different treatment makes itself felt, leading them to contradictory

statements and to insuperable perplexities. PANTALEONI, Principi di economia

pura, Florence, Barbera, 1889, p. 3, Ch. iii § 3 (pp. 299-302), contradicts

Bohm-Bawerk, inquiring whence the borrower of capital at interest is able

to find the wherewithal to pay the interest. PARETO, Introd. critica agli

Estratti del Capitale del Marx, Ital. trans. Palermo, Sandron, 1894, p. xxx,

n.: 'The phenomena of surplus value contradicts Marx's theory which determines

values solely by labour. But, on the other hand, there is an expropriation

of the kind which Marx condemns. It is not at all proved that this expropriation

helps to secure the hedonistic maximum. But it is a difficult problem how

to avoid this expropriation.' A learned and accurate Italian work which attempts

to reconcile the opinions of the hedonistic school with those of the followers

of Ricardo and Marx, is the memorandum of Prof. G. RICCA SALERMO, La theoria

del valore nella storia delle dottrine e dei fatti economici, Rome 1894.

(extr. from the Memorie dei Lincei, s. v. vol. I., pt. i.)






27. See above, chap. 1.






28. The over-abused Dühring was not mistaken when he remarked that

in Marx's works expressions occur frequently 'which appear to be universal

without being actually so' (Allgemein aussehen ohne es zu sein). Kritische

Gerchichte der Nationalökonomie and des Socialismus, Berlin, 1871, p.

527.






29. GENTILE, Una critica del materialismo storico in the Studi storici

of Crivellucci, vol. VI, 1897, pp. 379-423, throws doubt on the interpretation

offered by me of the opinions of Marx and Engels, and on the method of interpretation

itself. I gladly acknowledge that in my two earlier essays I do not clearly

point out where precisely the textual interpretation ends and the really

theoretical part begins; which theoretical exposition, only by conjecture

and in the manner described above, can be said to agree with the inmost thoughts

of Marx and Engels. In his recent book, La filosofia di Marx, Pisa, Spoerri,

1899 (in which the essay referred to is reprinted), Gentile remarks (p. 104),

that, although it is a very convenient practice, and in some cases legitimate

and necessary 'to interpret doctrines, by calling a part of their statement

worthless or accidental in form and external and weak, and a part the real

substance and essential and vital, it is yet necessary to justify it in some

way.' He means certainly, 'justify it as historical interpretation,' since

its justification as correction of theory cannot be doubtful. It seems to

me that even historically the interpretation can be justified without difficulty

when it is remembered that Marx did not insist, (as Gentile himself says)

on his metaphysical notions; and did certainly insist on his historical opinions

and on the political policy which he defended. Marx's personality as a sociological

observer and the teacher of a social movement, certainly outweighs Marx as

a metaphysician which he was almost solely as a young man. That it is worth

the trouble to study Marx from all sides is not denied, and Gentile has now

admirably expounded and criticised his youthful metaphysical ideas.






30. I confess that I have never been able to understand -- however much

I have considered the matter -- the meaning of this passage (which ought

however to be very evident, since it is quoted so often without any comment),

in the preface to the second edition of Das Kapital: 'Meine dialektische

Methode ist der Grundlage nach von der Hegel'schen nicht nur verschieden,

sondern ihr direktes Gegentheil. Fur Hegel is der Denkprocess, den er sogar

unter dem Namen Idee in ein selbständiger subjeckt verwandelt, der Demjurg

des Wirklichen, das nur seine aüstere Erscheinung bildet. Bei mir ist

umgekehrt das Ideelle nichts Andres als das im Menschenkopf umgesetzte und

ubersetzte Materielle.' (Das Kapital I, p. xvii.) Now it seems to me that

the Ideelle of the last phrase has no relation to the Denkproress and to

the Hegelian Idea of the preceding phrase, cf. above pp. 17. Some have thought

that by the objections there stated, I intended to deny Marx's Hegelian inspiration.

It is well to repeat that I merely deny the logical relation affirmed between

the two philosophical theories. To deny Marx's Hegelian inspiration would

be to contradict the evidence.






31. Answers to several of the questions suggested above are now supplied

in the book already referred to, by GENTILE: La Filosofia di Marx.






32. Antidühring, pt. I. ch. xiii., especially pp. 138-145, which

passage is translated into Italian in the appendix to the book by Labriola

referred to above: Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosophia, cf. Das Kapital,

I . p. xvii, 'Gelingt dies und spiegelt sick nun das Leben des stoffs ideell

wieder, so mag es aussehen, als habe man es mit einer Konstruction a priori

zu thun.'






33. LANGE, indeed, in reference to Marx's Das Kapital, remarked that the

Hegelian dialectic, 'the development by antithesis and synthesis, might almost

be called an anthropological discovery. Only in history, as in the life of

the individual, development by antithesis certainly does not accomplish itself

so easily and radically, nor with so much precision and symmetry as in speculative

thought.' ('Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 248-9.)






34. With regard to the abstract classes of Marxian economics and the real

or historical classes, see some remarks by SOREL in the article referred

to in the Journal des Economistes, p. 229.






35. G. GENTILE, o.c. in Studi storici, p. 421. cf 400-401.






36. Labriola has indeed an exaggerated dislike for what he calls the scholastic:

but even this exaggeration will not appear wholly unsuitable as a reaction

against the method of study which usually prevails among the mere men of

letters, the niggardly scholars, the empty talkers and jugglers with abstract

thought, and all those who lose their sense of close connection between science

and life.






37. Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosophia, 1. ix.






38. In torno alla storia della cultura (Kulturgeschichtein Atti dell Accad.

Pant.; vol. xxv. 1895, p. 8.)






39. 'If by Christianity is meant merely the sum of the beliefs and expectations

concerning human destiny, these beliefs' -- writes Labriola -- 'vary as much,

in truth, as in the difference, to mention only one instance, between the

free will of the Catholics after the Council of Trent, and the absolute determination

of Calvin!' (L.c. ix.)






40. Without referring to the somewhat unmethodical work of Westermarck,

History of Haman Marriage, see especially Ernst Grosse's book, Die Formen

der Familie and die Formen des Wirthschaft, Freiburg in B., 1896.






41. This connection is shortly but carefully dealt with by INGRAM, History

of Political Economy, Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1888, p. 62.






42. See, amongst many passages, MARX, Misère de la philosophie,

p. 167, at see. ENGELS, Antidühring, p. 1, et set.






43. On the hedonistic maxima, cf. Bertolini-Pantaleoni, Cenni sul concetto

di massimi edonistici individuali e collectivi (in Giorn, degli Econ., s

II vol. iv) and Coletti, in the same Giornale, vol. v.






44. In regard to this metaphysical use of the word science; there even

exists in Italy a Rivilta di Bolivia scientifica! And the metaphor may pass

here also.






45. Cours d'économie politique, Lausanne, 1896-7.






46. Cf. also his criticism of Marx already referred to. p. xviii.






47. Sauf l'Angleterre, où règne le libre échange

principalement parcequ'il est favourable aux interets de certains entrepreneurs,

le reste des pays civilises verse de plus en plus dans le protectionnisme

(§ 964).






48. See the Giornale degli econonlisti, excellent in all its critical

sections: and especially Pareto's chronirles therein.






49. It may be remarked that in the difficulty of distinguishing the purely

scientific from the practical lies the chief cause of the dangers and poverty

of the social and political sciences. And we may even smile at those scientists

or their ingenious admirers, who claim to accomplish the salvation of the

social and political sciences, by applying to them the methods, as they say,

of the natural sciences. (An Italian astronomer, ingenuous as clever, has

suggested the formation of sociological observatories which, in a few years

would make sociology something like astronomy!) Alas! the matter is not so

simple; all sociologists intend indeed to apply exact methods; but how can

this application succeed when one advances per ignes or over ground which

moves; d'una e d'altra parts sì come l'onda chefagge e s'appressa?

(From both sides like the wave which ebbs and flows.)






50. See the preface of the German translation of Misère de la philosophie,

2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1892, and now also in French in the reprint of the original

text of the same work (Paris, Giard et Brière, 1896.)






51. The word communism is also more appropriate, since there are so many

socialisms (democratic state, catholic, etc.). On the relation between the

materialistic theory of history and socialism, see GENTILE, op. cit., passim.






52. Pantagruel, III, 39-43






53. The absurdity of this interpretation will come out clearly if it is

merely remembered that there are many cases in which the capitalist manufacturer

pays for the labour of his workman, a price higher than what he then realists

on the market: cases, it is true, where the capitalist is proceeding towards

ruin and bankruptcy; but which he cannot, on this account, always avoid.

'Marx part des recherches faites par cette école Anglaise, dont it

avail fait une etude approfondie; et il veut expliquer le profit sans admettre

aucon brigandage.' (SOREL, art. cit., p. 227.)






54. See in Antidühring, p. 303, the historical justification of class

divisions.






55. From among the many passages which support this interpretation, cf;

Antidühring, pp. 152-3, 206 and especially pp. 61-2, and the preface

to the German translation of Misère de la Philosophie, 2nd ed. Stuttgart,

1892 pp. IX-X, cf. also Labriola, o.c. Lett. VIII.






56. See LABRIOLA, o.c. l. cit., the remarks on the difficulty with which

the theory of historical materialism meets owing to mental dispositions,

and amongst those who wish to moralist socialism.






One instance, in some respects analogous to this which arises from the

discussions on Marx's ethics, is the traditional criticism of Machiavelli's

ethics: which was refuted by De Sanctis (in the remarkable chapter devoted

to Machiavelli, in his Storia Della letteratura), but which continually recurs

and is inserted even in Professor Villari's book, who finds this defect in

Machiavelli: that he did not consider the moral question.






I have always asked myself for what reason, by what obligation, by what

agreement, Machiavelli was bound to discuss all kinds of questions, even

those for which he had neither preparation nor sympathy. Can it be said,

by way of example, to some one who is researching in chemistry: -- Your weak

and erroneous spot is that you have not gone back from your detailed investigations

to the general metaphysical enquiries into the principles of reality? Machiavelli

starts from the establishment of a fact: the condition of war in which society

found itself; and gives rules suited to this state of affairs. Why should

he, who was not cut out for a moral philosopher, discuss the ethics of war?

He goes straight to practical conclusions. Men are wicked he says and to

the wicked it is needful to behave wickedly. You will deceive him who would

certainly deceive you. You will do violence to him who would do violence

to you. These maxims are neither moral nor immoral, neither beneficial nor

harmful; they become one of the two according to the subjective aims and

the objective effects of the action, i.e. according to the intentions and

the results. What is evident is that a morality which desired to introduce

into war the maxims of peace would be a morality for lambs fit for the slaughter,

not for men who wish to repel injustice and to maintain their rights. 'And

if men were all good, this precept would not be good, etc., etc.' says Machiavelli

himself. (Principe, ch. XVIII). Villari is also troubled by the old formula

concerning the 'end which justifies the means' and the 'moral end' and the

'immoral means'. It is however sufficient to consider that the means, just

because they are means, cannot be divided into moral and immoral, but merely

into suitable and unsuitable. Immoral means, unless as an expression in current

speech, is a contradiction in terms. The qualification moral or immoral can

only belong to the end. And, in the examples usually given, an analysis made

with a little accuracy shows at once, that it is never a question of immoral

means but of immoral ends. The height of the confusion is reached by those

who introduce into the question the absurd distinction of private and public

morality.






I may be pardoned the digression; but, as I said, questions which are

really analogous reappear now in connection with the ethical maxims of Marxism.






57. And it would be to the point to draw a comparison between the peasants'

rebellions, with which modern Italy has supplied us with another example

in recent years, and the political struggles of the German workmen, or the

economic struggles of the Trade Unions in England.






58. See in particular P. I. ch. ix., Moral sand Recht, Ewige Wahrheiten.






59. See, in particular, MARX'S ideas: Ueber Feuerbach, in 1845, in the

appendix to Engels' book, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen

deutschen Philosophie, 2nd ed. Stuttgart, 1895, pp. 59-62; and cf. ANDLER

in Revue de metaphysique, 1897, LABRIOLA, o.c. passim and GENTILE, l.c.,

p. 319. From this point of view (i.e. limiting the statement to the theory

of knowledge) we might speak like Labriola of historical materialism as a

philosophy of practice, i.e. as a particular way of conceiving and solving,

or rather of overcoming, the problem of thought and of existence. The philosophy

of practice has now been designedly studied by Gentile in the volume referred

to.






60. Some interpretations would be merely verbal explanations. To some

it will appear a very hard statement that socialism aims at abolishing the

State. Yet it suffices to consider that the State, among socialists, is synonymous

with difference of classes and the existence of governing classes, to understand

that as in such a case we can speak of the origin of the State, so we can

speak of its end; which does not mean the end of organised society (cf. Antidühring,,

p. 302). The conception of the way in which capitalist society will come

to an end demands no little critical working out; on this point the thought

of Marx and Engels is not without obscurities and inconsistencies (cf. Antidühring,

pp. 287 et seq. and p. 297).






61. See CH. ANDLER, Les origines du socialisms d'état en Allemagne,

Paris, Alcan, 1897. Andler promises a book, and is now giving a course of

lectures on the decomposition of Marxism.








CHAPTER IV: RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MARXIAN THEORY OF VALUE AND

CONTROVERSIES CONCERNING THEM






I






I have always discussed frankly the views expressed in the writings of

my eminent friend Professor Antonio Labriola. I am therefore glad that he

has taken the same liberty with me, and has subjected to a vigorous criticism

(in the French edition of his book on Socialismo e la filosofia),(1*) my

interpretation of the Marxian theory of value.(2*) Labriola has been impelled

to this also from a wish to prevent my opinions from appearing, 'to the reader's

eyes,' as a supplement, approved by him, of his own personal ones. And though

I do not think that 'to the reader's eyes (I will however add intelligent

readers), this would be possible, since, I have always carefully indicated

the points, and they are neither few nor unimportant, where we disagree:

yet being convinced that clearness is never superfluous, I welcome his intention

to make it still plainer that I am not he, and that he thinks with his mind

whilst I think with mine.






Labriola rejects entirely the method adopted by me, which he describes

variously as scholastic, metaphysical, metaphorical, abstract, formal logic.

When I take pains to point out the differences between homo oeconomicus and

man, moral or immoral, between personal interest and egoism,(3*) he shrugs

his shoulders, he does not refuse a certain indulgence to this traditional

scholasticism, and compares me to the man in the street who speaks of the

rising or setting of the sun, or of shining light and warm heat. When I firmly

maintain the theoretical necessity for a general economics in addition to

the heterogeneous considerations of sociological economics, he taxes me with

creating, in addition to all the visible and tangible animals, an animal

as such. And he charges me, moreover, with wishing to attack history, comparative

philology and physiology in order to substitute for all these the plain Logic

of Port Royal, so that instead of studying examples of epigenesis which have

actually occurred, such as the transitions from invertebrates to vertebrates,from

primitive communism to private property in land, from Differentiated roots

to the systematic differentiation of nouns and verbs in the Ariosemitic group,

it might suffice to register these facts in concepts passing from the more

general to the more particular, in the series A a1 a2 a3 etc.






But I hardly know how to defend myself seriously from such accusations,

because it obliges me to repeat what is too obvious, i.e., that to make concepts

does not mean to create entities; that to employ metaphors (and language

is all metaphor), does not mean to believe mythology; that to construct experiences

in thought, and scientific abstractions, does not mean to substitute either

one or the other for concrete reality; that to make use, when needful, of

formal logic, does not mean to ignore fact,growth, history. When Marx expounds

historical facts I know no way of approaching him except that of historical

criticism, and when he defines concepts and formulates laws, I can only proceed

to recognise the content of his concepts, and to test the correctness of

his inferences and deductions. Thus I have followed this second method in

studying his theory of value. If Labriola knows another and better one, let

him state it. But what could this other one possibly be? Real logic? In that

case let us boldly re-establish Hegel, it will be the lesser evil, at least

we shall understand one another. Or a still worse alternative, what monstrous

empirical-dialectic or evolutionist method may it be, which confuses together

and abuses two distinct procedures, and lends itself so readily to the lovers

of prophecy? Or is it merely a question of new phraseology by which we shall

go on humbly working, more or less well, with the old methods, whilst detesting

the old words? Or again, is this dislike for formal logic nothing but a convenient

pretext for dispensing with any vindication of the concepts which are employed?






Marx has stated his concept of value; has expounded a process of transformation

of value into price; has reconstructed the nature of profit as surplus value.

For me the whole problem of Marxian criticism is confined within these limits:

-- Is Marx's conception substantially erroneous (entirely, owing to false

premises, and partially, owing to false deductions)? or, is Marx's conception

substantially correct, but has it been subsumed under a category to which

it does not belong, and has search been made in it for what it cannot supply,

whilst what it actually offers has been ignored? Having come to this second

conclusion I have asked myself: Under what conditions and assumptions is

Marx's theory thinkable? And this question I have tried to answer in my essay.






What Marx wished to do, or mistakenly thought himself to be doing is,

I think, of interest to criticism up to a certain point; although the history

of science shows that thinkers have not always had the clearest and plainest

knowledge of the whole of their thought; and that it is one thing to discover

a truth, and another to define and classify the discovery when made. It may

be allowed that he who confuses ideological with historical research thus

best reproduces Marx's spirit; but in this case the work will be an artistic

recasting or a psychological reproduction, not a criticism; and will gather

up with the sound also the unsound portion of Marx's thought.






To go into details. Labriola tries to prove the emptiness or vagueness

of some of my definitions and the falsity of some of my reasoning. 1 having

asserted that capitalist economics is a special case of general economics,

Labriola remarks, 'en passant,' that it is nevertheless the only case which

has given rise to a theory and to divisions of schools; and I acknowledge

that I do not understand the point of this remark, although it is said to

be made 'en passant.' Both Marx and Engels lamented that the ancient and

medieval economic systems had not been studied in the same way as the modern.

Thus there are conceivable at least three economic theories, ancient, medieval

and modern, and is it not lawful to construct a general economics; i.e. to

study in isolation that common element which causes these three groups of

facts to be all three denoted by a common name? Labriola then asks what this

general and extra-historical economics can consist of, and whether it can

never be of service to the conjectural psychology of primitive man: he jests

after the manner of Engels, who in truth has sometimes Joked too much during

a discussion on serious matters. Is it incredible that I too should jest?

But I do not think there is occasion to do so! He wonders at my insatiability,

because having accepted the hedonistic theories, I wish to accept Marx's

theories too: as though my entire proof was not intended to make it plain

that the antithesis between these theories exists only in imagination; and

that Marx's theory is not an economic system entirely opposed to other systems

('quelque chose de tout-à-fait opposé' are Labriola's own words),

but a special and partial inquiry; and as though by hedonism I meant all

the personal convictions, philosophical, historical and political, of those

who follow, or say that they follow, its guidance, and not indeed only what

follows legitimately from its axiom. When I call the explanation of the nature

of profits, offered by the hedonistic school, an economic explanation, he

inquires sarcastically: 'Could it possibly be non-economic?' But my statement

contains no pleonasm: the adjective economic is added to mark off the hedonistic

explanation from that of Marx, which, to my thinking, is not purely economic,

but historical and comparative, or sociological, if it is preferred. He wonders

that I speak of a working society, and asks: 'As opposed to what?' 'Perhaps

to the saints in paradise?' But I have pointed out the opposition between

a hypothetical working society,i.e. such that all its goods are produced

by labour,and a society, economic certainly, but not exclusively working,

because it enjoys goods given by nature, as well as the products of labour.

The saints in paradise form another irrelevant jest.






I called Marx's concept of surplus-value a concept of difference; and

Labriola reproaches me for not being able 'to say exactly what I understand

by these words.' And yet I am not in the habit of speaking or writing when

I do not exactly know what I want to say; and here I believe that I have

clearly expressed a thought which I had exceedingly clearly in my mind. Let

us take two types of society: type A consisting of 100 persons, who, with

capital held in common and equal labour, produce goods which are divided

in equal proportions; type B consisting of 100 persons, 50 of whom own the

land and the means of production, i.e. are capitalists, and 50 are shut out

from this ownership, i.e. are proletarians and workmen; in the distribution,

the former receive, in proportion to the capital which they employ, a share

in the products of the labour of the latter. It is evident that in type A

there is no place for surplus value. But neither in type B are you justified

in giving the name surplus-value to that portion of the products which is

swallowed up by the capitalists, except when you are comparing type B with

type A, and are considering the former as a contrast to the latter. If type

B is considered by itself, which is precisely what the pure economists do

and ought to do, the product which the 50 capitalists appropriate, i.e. their

profits, is a result of mutual agreement, arising out of different comparative

degrees of utility. Turn in every direction and in pure economics you will

find nothing more. The expropriatory character of profit can be asserted

only when to the second society, we apply, almost like a chemical reagent,

the standard, which, on the other hand, is characteristic of a type of society

founded on human equality, a type 'which has attained the solidity of a popular

conviction' (Marx). Profit 'is surplus-labour not paid for,' says Marx, and

it may be so; but not paid for in reference to what? In existing society

it is certainly paid for, by the price which it actually secures. It is a

question then, of determining in what society it would have that price which

in existing society is denied it. And then, indeed, it is a question of comparison.






The following of Labriola's assertions is not original, but is nevertheless

quite gratuitous: 'Pure economics is so little extra-historical, that it

has borrowed the data from real history, of which it makes two absolute postulates:

the freedom of labour and the freedom of competition, pushed to their extreme

by hypothesis.' If I open Pantaleoni's well-known treatise, I read in the

very first paragraph of the Teoria del valore, Ferrara's fundamental theory

that: 'value is above all a phenomenon of the economics of the individual

or isolated person.' So little do the legal conditions of society enter into

the necessary postulates of pure economics.






After which, Labriola ought not to be horrified if I have written: 'that

Marx has taken his celebrated equivalence(4*) "between value and labour

from outside the field of pure economics. He will ask me: from whence then

has he taken it? And I reply: from a special and definite type of society,

in which the legal organisation and the pre-supposed conditions of fact make

value correspond to the quantity of labour.






Labriola does not consider justified the comparison which I have drawn,

(metaphor for metaphor), between the commodities which in Marxian economics

are presented as the crystallisations of labour and the goods which in pure

economics might well be called quantities of possible satisfactions for crystallised

wants. 'Hitherto -- he exclaims -- only sorcerers have been able to believe,

or to cause it to be believed, that by desires alone a part of ourselves

might be glutinised into any goods whatsoever.' But what does glutinise mean?

To obtain the commodity a costs us x labour of a given kind this is Marx's

congealed labour. Pure economics, using a more general formula, states that

it costs us that body of wants which we must leave unsatisfied: this is the

form of congealment which pure economics might supply. There is no question,

in the one case, of an objective reality, as Labriola seems to think, or

in the other of an imagined sorcery; but in both cases it is a matter of

the literary use of imaginative expressions to denote mental attitudes and

elaborations. In this connection Labriola, as if to limit their range, says

that Marx, as an author, belonged to the seventeenth century. May I be allowed,

as a humble student of literature, and the author of several investigations

into the character and origin of seventeenth century style,(5*) to protest.

Seventeenth century style consists in ingenuity, i.e. in putting cold intellectuality

into an aesthetic form; hence the forced comparison, the lengthy metaphor,

the play on words and the equivocations. But Marx, on the contrary, misuses

poetic expressions, which give the content of his thought with unrestrained

vigour. We find in him just the opposite of seventeenth century style: not

a lack of connection between the form and the thought, but such a violent

embrace of the former by the latter that the unlucky form sometimes runs

the risk of being left suffocated.(6*)






The reader will be tired of these replies to a negative criticism; but

negative criticism is nevertheless all that Labriola offers us. What is his

interpretation of Marx's thought? Or which does he accept, out of those offered?

Here Labriola is silent. It is true that on another occasion I believed that

I discerned in his statement that 'labour-value is the typical premiss in

Marx, without which all the rest would be unthinkable,' an agreement with

my thesis. But I see now that I must have been deceived, and that the words

must have another meaning; which, however, warned by the unlucky attempt

already made, I shall not attempt further to specify. In the meantime Sombart

has built castles in the air; Sorel has made hasty or premature elaborations;

the present writer has not understood (see p. 224). Are we then faced by

a mystery? Our friend, Labriola, relates (p. 50) a story of Hegel who is

said to have declared that one only of his pupils had understood him. (The

anecdote, I may add, is recounted by Heinrich Heine in a much wittier manner).(7*)

Is the same thing to be repeated with regard to Marx's theory of value?






In truth, though without wishing to deny the difficulty of Marx's thought

and of the form in which he expresses it, I think that the mystery may be

at length cleared up. And I say this, not only on account of my inward conviction

of the truth of my own interpretation, but also on account of the agreement

in which I find myself with several critics, who, almost at the same moment,

and by independent methods, have arrived at results nearly similar to my

own.






'Or, se im mostra la mia carte il vero,


 Non e lontano a discoprirsi it porto....'(8*)






A similar tendency shows itself in what has been written on the subject

by Sombart, in 1894, by Engels in 1895, by myself in 1896, by Sorel in 1897,

by myself more at length in 1897, and again by Sorel in June of last year

(1898).(9*) Certainly truth and falsehood cannot be decided by external signs,

the intellect being the only judge of them, and a judge who allows scope

for infinite appeals. But nevertheless it is natural that under the circumstances

pointed out above, a feeling of hope and confidence must arise that the discussion

is about to be closed, that the problem is at length ripe for solution.






II






I think it opportune, however, to return to those elaborations of Sorel,

which Labriola summarily judges with such severity, in order to make some

remarks about them, not in refutation but in support, and to explain a certain

point where there may seem to be disagreement between us, which perhaps has

no reason to exist.






But here I may be allowed to make a remark. Labriola is also waging war

with Sorel: his book Discorrendo, etc., arising out of a series of friendly

letters to Sorel, which I undertook to edit in Italy is published in French

with an appendix directed against me, and a preface directed against Sorel

The ground of the quarrel is especially in connection with the so-called

crisis in Marxism.






Now if the crisis in Marxism be understood as the assertion of the need

for a revision and correction of the scientific ideas, of the historical

beliefs, of the material of observed facts, which are current in Marxian

literature, well and good: in such a crisis I too believe. If it means also

a change in the programmes and practical methods, I neither agree nor disagree,

having never concerned myself with the subject in dispute. If the danger

is really existent the apprehension of which seems to obsess and disturb

Labriola, that a crisis in Marxism of whatever kind; or the commencement

of it, may be neutralised by those to whose interest it is to lead astray

and scatter the labour movement, then provideant consules. But whether there

be crisis or no crisis, whether purely scientific or also practical, whether

apprehensions are well-founded or imagined and exaggerated, all these things

have no connection with the questions raised by me, which relate to the erroneousness

of this or that theoretical or historical statement of Marxism, and the way

in which this or that must be understood in order to be regarded as true.

This is my standpoint and on this ground alone I admit discussion. I may

be mistaken, but this must be proved to me. But if, on the contrary, the

only answer vouchsafed to me is that the crisis in Marxism results from the

international reaction, of which ingenious critics are taking advantage,

I shall be left it is true, somewhat bewildered; but I shall not on this

account be convinced that the theory of value is true, in the burlesque sense,

for example, in which it is expounded by Stern in his well-known propagandist

booklet.






Sorel at first supposes,(10*) wittily enough, that Marx had built up different

economic spheres, the first of which (that of labour-value) is the simplest;

the second, including the phenomenon of an average rate of profit, and the

creation of cost of production, is more complex, and the third, in which

is observed the effect of rent of land, is still more complex. In passing

from the simple to the more complex sphere, we should find again the laws

of the preceding one, modified by the new data introduced, which would have

given rise to new phenomena.






In his second article he abandons this interpretation, being convinced

that Marx's ideal construction does not aim at supplying a complete explanation

of the phenomena of economics by means of the increasing complexity of his

combinations. And, in my opinion, he did well to abandon it; not only for

the excellent reason stated by him, that Marx's inquiry does not include

an entire system of economics, but also because the process suggested by

him does not explain why Marx, in analysing the economic phenomena of the

second or third sphere, ever used concepts whose place was only in the first

one. It does not explain what I have called the elliptical comparison, and

herein lies the difficulty of Marx's work, or rather of the literary statement

of his thought. If the correspondence between labour and value is only realized

in the simplified society of the first sphere, why insist on translating

the phenomena of the second into terms of the first? Why give the name transformation

of surplus value to what makes its appearance as the natural economic result

of capital which must have (from its very nature as capital) a profit? Does

Marx offer an explanation connecting ground and consequence, or does he not

rather draw a parallel between two different phenomena, by which the diversities

illuminating the origins of society are set in relief?






But Sorel now advances to precisely this conclusion, borrowing a happy

phrase from his first article: that Marx's work is not intended to explain

by means of laws analogous to physical laws, but only to throw partial and

indirect light on economic reality.






The method which Marx employs in his inquiry, says Sorel, is a metaphysical

instrument; he makes a metaphysics of economics. This expression may be satisfactory

or not, according to the different meanings given to the word metaphysics;

but the idea is accurate end true. Marx builds an ideal construction which

helps him to explain the conditions of labour in capitalist society.






What are the limits of Marx's ideal construction, and in what do his hypotheses

consist? I have said that the concept of labour-value is true for an ideal

society, whose only goods consist in the products of labour, and in which

there are no class distinctions. Sorel does not think it necessary to eliminate

as I have done, the divisions of classes. But, since he writes: 'Marx, like

Ricardo, conceived a mechanical society, perfectly automatic, in which competition

is always at its maximum efficiency, and exchanges are effected by means

of universal information; and he supposed that the various sociological conditions

are measurable in intensity, and that the numbers resulting can be connected

by mathematical formula; hence in such a society, utility, demand, and commerce

in commodities arc results of the divisions of classes; value will not in

consequence be a function of this condition, although it is truly a function

of the conditions of production; utility, demand, can only appear in the

forms of the function, in the parameters referring to the social divisions.'

Since he, I repeat, does not in his hypothesis, make labour-value dependent

on the division of classes, it seems to me that this is practically to leave

out the fact of the division. And it is perhaps clearer to omit it explicitly.






We should have then: (1) a working economic society without differences

of classes, law of labour-value; (2) Social divisions of classes, origin

of profit, which, but only in comparison with the preceding, type and in

so far as the concepts of the former are carried over into the latter, may

be defined as surplus-value; (3) Technical distinction between the different

industries requiring different combinations of capital (different proportions

of fixed and floating capital). Origin of the average rate of profits, which

In relation to the preceding type, may be regarded as a change in, and equalisation

of, surplus-values; (4) Appropriation of the land by part of a social class.

Pure rent; (5) Qualitative differences in land. Differential rent. Which

rents, pure and differential, present themselves, but only in comparison

with the preceding types, as cut off from the amounts of surplus-value and

of profits. Sorel agrees with me that the concept of labour-value, obtained

in the manner described, is not only not a law in the same sense as a physical

law, but is also not a law in the ethical sense, i.e. one that could be understood

as a rule of what ought to exist. It is a law, he says, in an entirely Marxian

sense. This I too tried to express when I wrote in my essay: 'It is a law

in Marx's conception, but not in economic reality. It is clear that we may

conceive the divergencies in relation to a standard as the rebellion of reality

in opposition to that standard, to which we have given the dignity of law.'






It seems to me that the jurist Professor Stammler in his book Wirthschaft

and Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung,(11*) has also

made the mistake of interpreting Marx's concept as an ideal law. He is absolutely

correct when, in rejecting Kautsky's comparison between the concept of labour-value

and the law of gravity -- which takes effect fully on a vacuum -- whilst

the resistance made by air leads to special results, he maintains that this

has nothing analogous to a physical law. For him, on the other hand, Marx's

law is justified (at least formally) as an attempt at investigation into

what in the judgment of economists, granted the capitalist organisation of

society, may be objectively accurate. Subjective judgments may differ, but

that does not affect what ought to be an objective criterion, to divide the

true from the false. But can an objective criterion ever be found within

the sphere of economics? Anyone who has rightly understood the principle

of hedonistic economics must answer no. And if Stammler brings forward such

an idea, it is because in his work he expressly intends to deny the originality

of economic material and the independence of economics as a science.(12*)






Sorel believes that Marx's method has rendered all the assistance of which

it is capable, and cannot aid the study, which it is needful to make, of

modern economic conditions. If I am not mistaken he means that the hopes

of the Marxians in regard to the fruitfulness of Marx's method are futile,

and that the pages which he has written in the history of economics are practically

all that can be produced by it. A good part of the third volume, in which

Marx shows himself a simple classical economist, and the miserable and scanty

output of Marxian economic writings subsequent to Marx, would suggest that

Stammler's opinion is justified by the facts.






But, whilst Sorel's book seems to me welcome in the endeavour to understand

and define the score of Marx's economic inquiries, I cannot form the same

judgment of another attempt made to reform the basis of Marx's system by

rejecting his method, and a part of his results. I refer to a recent book

by Dr Antonio Graziadei,(13*) which has been much discussed during these

last months. Graziadei's object is to examine profits independently of the

theory of value: a course already indicated by Professor Loria, and the fallacy

of which ought to be clearly evident at a glance, without its being necessary

to wait for proof from the results of the attempt. A system of economics

from which value is omitted, is like logic without the concept, ethics without

duty, aesthetics without expression. It is economics... cut off from its

proper sphere. But let us see for a moment how Graziadei manages the working

out of his idea.






In the first place he tries to prove that in Marx's own work the theory

of profits is in itself independent of that of value. Profits he says, consist

in surplus-value, i.e. in the difference between total labour and necessary

labour. Hence it can be made to originate in surplus-value without starting

from the form value itself. But he himself destroys the argument when further

on (p. 10) he objects that if labour is not productive labour it does not

give rise to profits. Precisely for that reason we answer in order to be

in a position to speak of labour which is productive, Marx must start from

value, and precisely for that reason, in Marx's thought, the theory of profits

and the theory of value are inseparably connected.






As to the construction, on his own account, of a theory of profits which

is independent of that of value, Graziadei accomplishes this in a very curious

way: viz. by carefully avoiding the words value and labour, and by speaking

instead only of product. Profits, according to him, do not arise out of surplus-labour

or surplus-value, but out of surplus-product; hence we can, and ought, in

theory, to start from the concept of product and not concern ourselves with

value, which is a superficial growth of the final stage of the market.






Surplus product! But surplus-product, in so far as it is an economic surplus-product,

is value. Certainly, the capitalist who pays wages in kind, and in getting

back again the goods advanced by him, also appropriates the other part of

the product (surplus-product), can, instead of taking this to market, consume

it himself directly (as in Graziadei's hypothesis). But this does not alter

the matter at all, because the fact that the product is not taken to market

does not mean that it has no value in exchange: since it is true that the

capitalist has obtained it by means of an exchange between himself and the

labourer; which means that he has always assessed its value in some manner.






And here we are again at the theory of value. from which we have vainly

attempted to escape, Moreover, since Graziadei is essentially concerned with

the economics of labour, here we are again at Marx's exact concept of labour

value. Tamen usque recumt!(14*)






Graziadei's book includes also some corrections of Marx's special theories

on profits and wages. But I may be allowed to remark that the corrections

to be called such ought to refer to the governing principles. New facts do

not weaken a theory firmly established on fundamentals; and it is natural

that, with a change in the actual conditions, a new casuistry will arise

which Marx could not discuss. Whatever forecasts he may have made in his

long career as author and politician, which the event has proved fallacious

-- I do not believe he ever pretended:






'Sguaiato Giosue..


 Fermare it sole.'(15*)






April, 1899.






NOTES:






1. Socialisms et philosophie by ANTONIO LABRIOLA. Paris, Giard et Briere,

1899, see pp. 207-224. Postscript to the French edition.






2. See chap. III.






3. Like an impenitent sinner I shall come back to this distinction, which

is essential for the solid foundation of the principles of economics, and

the evil effects of whose neglect are apparent in the discourses of economists.






4. I write equivalance because Marx writes thus, and because for the present

question this other is quite irrelevant: viz. whether the relation of value

can be expressed in the mathematical form of a relation of equivalence. But,

for my part, and I follow the hedonists in this; I deny entirely that the

relation of value is a relation of equivalence. The proof of this has already

been supplied by others, and there is no occasion to repeat it.






5. See CROCE Giambattista Basile e il' Cunto de li Cunti,' Naples, 1891;

Ricerche ispano-italiane, series I, last paragraph, (Atti dell'Acc. Pontan;

vol. xxviii, 1898); Ipredicatori italiani delseietnto e il gusto spagnaolo,

Naples, Pierro, 1899; I trattatisti italiani Gel 'conerttismo' e Baltasar

Grarian (Atti dell'Acc. Pontan; vol. XXIX. 1899).






6. LABRIOLA -- who reproduces Marx's style very well here and there in

his own -- writes in his essay on 'Das Kommanistische Manifest,' 2nd Ed.,

p. 79. 'The Manifesto... does not shed tears over nothing. The tears of things

have already risen on their feet of themselves, like a spontaneously vengeful

force.' The tears which rise on their feet may make the hair rise on the

head of a man of moderate taste; but the expression, although violently imaginative,

is not in seventeenth century style.






7. 'Als Hegel auf dem Todbette lag, sagte er: -- Nur einer hat much verstanden!

Aber gleich darauf fugte er verdriesslich hinzu. Und der hat mich auch nichtverstanden!'

(Heine. Zar Geschichte der Religion and Philosophie in Deutschland. Bk. III).






8. 'Now, if my map shows me true, we are not far from the sight of our

haven....' (Ariosto, Orlando Furioso.)






9. SOMBART, in the Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgelung and Statism, vol. VII.,

1894, pp. 555-594; ENGELS in Neue Zeit xiv., vol. i., 4-11, 37-44; CROCE,

Le teorie storiche del prof Loria; SOREL in the Journal des economistes,

no. for May 15th, 1897; CROCE, Per la interpretazione e la critica di alcuni

concerti del marxism, see in this volume chap. III; SOREL, Nuovi contributi

alla Doria marxistica del valore, in the Giornale degli economisti, June

1898.






10. In the article referred to, in the Journal des Economistes.






11. See pp. 266-8, 658-9.






12. See chap. II.






13. La prodozione capitalistica, Turin, Bocca, 1899.






14. Graziadei will allow me to point out to him that it is not the first

time that he has made discoveries that turn out to be equivocal. Some years

ago when carrying on a controversy, in the review Critica sociale, on the

theory of the origin of profits in Marx's system, Graziadei (vol. IV., n.

22, With Nov. 1894, p. 348) wrote: 'We can very readily imagine a society,

in which profits exist, not indeed with surplus-labour, but with no labour.

If, in fact, for all the labour now accomplished by man was substituted the

work of machines, these latter, with a relatively small quantity of commodities

would produce an enormously greater quantity. Now, given a capitalist organization

of society, this technical phenomenon would afford a basis for a social phenomenon,

viz.: that the ruling class being able to enjoy by itself alone the difference

between the product and the consumption of the machine, would see at their

disposal an excess of products over the consumption of the laborers, i.e.,

a surplus-product, much larger than when the feeble muscular force of man

still co-operated in production.' But here Graziadei neglects to explain

how labourers could ever exist, and profits of labour, in a hypothetical

society, based on non-labour, and in which all the laborer actually done

by man would be done by machines. What would the labourers be doing there?

The work of Sisyphus or the Danaides? In his hypothesis the proletariat would

either be maintained by the charity of the ruling class, or would end by

rapidly disappearing, destroyed by starvation. For if he supposed that the

machines would produce automatically a superfluity of goods for the whole

of that society, then he was simply constructing by hypothesis a land of

Cocaigne.






15. 'As follower of Joshua.... to stop the sun.'








CHAPTER V. A CRITICISM OF THE MARXIAN LAW OF THE FALL IN THE RATE OF PROFITS






This law is set forth in the third section of the third book (posthumous)

of Das Kapital. A few criticisms have been made of it, which vary from that

of Sombart, who says that it is developed in the most striking manner (in

glänzendster Weise), to that of Loria, who defines it as 'a metaphysical

pistol shot (sic) from beyond the Rhine,' and thinks that he refutes it by

an objection which is in fact quite inappropriate. Others have thought the

law certainly true, but that it explained only partially the fact of the

decline in the rate of profits and required to be combined with other laws

already known to classical economics. But most of those who have studied

Marx's economic theories have not examined it at all; his opponents (like

Bohm Bawerk) reject it by implication, when they reject Marx's fundamental

principles; the Marxians welcome it, German fashion, humbly and submissively,

without discussion, with that lack of freedom and intellectual originality

which Is noticeable in all their writings.






The examination of it attempted here, rests on the same basis as Marx's

theories, i.e. it is made from the standpoint of those who accept the essentials

of these theories, and hence the premise of labour-value, the distinction

between fixed and floating capital, the view of profits as arising from surplus-value,

and of the average rate of profits as arising from the equalization, Owing

to competition, of the various rates of surplus-value. It is true that I

accept all these things in a certain sense, which is not the sense of the

ordinary Marxian, inasmuch as they are not looked upon as laws actually working

in the economic world, but as the results of comparative investigations into

different possible forms of economic society. But such a reservation, which

relates to a question discussed by me at length elsewhere,(1*) has practically

no effect on the present study, whose results would be almost the same, even

if these theories of Marx were interpreted in the sense which I consider

erroneous. The object here is no longer to determine and define accurately

Marx's fundamental concepts, but to see whether, from these concepts, even

when interpreted in the current manner, it is ever possible in any way to

deduce the law of the fall in the rate of profits. This task I think impossible.






The law was derived by Marx from the study of the effects of technical

improvement. Marx states that technical improvement increases the amount

and changes the form of the total capital, increasing the proportion of fixed

as compared with floating capital, so that by this means the rate of profit

is decreased; the latter arises, as is well-known, alit of the surplus-value,

the product of the floating capital divided by the total capital. He illustrates

the matter thus. Some technical improvement occurs; new machines are made,

which formerly did not exist. The capital employed in production has been

hitherto, we will suppose, a total of 1,000, divided into 500 fixed and 500

floating, and employing 100 labourers: the surplus-value = 500, i.e. the

rate of it is 100 per cent; and hence the rate of profit is 500/1000 = 50

per cent. In consequence of the technical improvement, and of the construction

of new machines, the too labourers who are maintained by the variable capital

of 500, continue still to be employed in production; but, in order that this

may be possible, it is necessary to use a larger fixed capital, which we

may suppose 200 larger than before. Hence, as the result of the technical

improvement, there will now be a total capital of 1,200, i.e. 700 fixed and

500 floating; and the rate of surplus-value remaining unchanged at 100 per

cent, the rate of profit will be 500/1200 = about 41 per cent, i.e. will

have decreased from 50 per cent to 41 per cent. Hence the necessary decline

in the rate of profit on the hypothesis of technical improvement. But this

hypothesis is an actual everyday fact in modern capitalist society. Hence,

the actual decline of the average rate of profits in modern capitalist society.

But this law is more or less counteracted by other facts, which act in a

contrary sense more or less transitorily. Thus the fall is only a tendency.






In order that our study may be clear, it is above all necessary to distinguish

the two groups of facts, or the two stages in the same capitalist society

which Marx confused and embraced in a single somewhat obscure view.






The first stage is marked by the fact, pure and simple, of a technical

improvement. Now technical improvement, among its logical, or what is the

same thing, its necessary effects, in no way includes that of an increase

in the amount of total capital employed, nor that of leaving the quantity

of total capital unchanged. It has rather exactly the opposite as its necessary

and immediate effect: i.e. that of limiting the capital employed. It is unnecessary

to warn the reader that we are here treating of economic science and that

increase and decrease refer always to economic values. In its simplest form,

supposing the quantity of objects produced to be constant (200 shoes are

required, and there is no reason to increase the production), technical progress

will consist, purely and simply, in a saving of social expense: the same

production at less expense. And since all cost, in Marx's hypothesis resolves

itself into social labour, there will be the same production with less social

labour. If it were not so, it would not be worth while to introduce this

technical innovation; there would be, economically, no improvement but either

the status quo ante or a regression. We must not take into account the other

effects which would arise to increase production, greater consumption, increase

of population, etc: additional and extraneous facts which are not considered

here, since we are concerned with the single fact of technical improvement,

all other conditions remaining unchanged. And, in such a case, we cannot

represent technical improvement with the increasing series of total capital

which Marx employs, viz. 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, etc., but with this decreasing

one, 150, 140, 130, 120, 110, etc. And to keep to the illustration used above,

if we suppose that the given technical improvement has caused a decrease

of 1/10 in the total social labour required, we shall have in place of the

original capital of 1,000 a capital of 900, no longer made up of 500 fixed

and 500 floating, but of 450 fixed and 450 floating. The decrease must affect

proportionally every part of the capital since all of it is, in the final

analysis, a product of labour. Of the 100 original labourers, 1/10, i.e.

10 of them will remain unemployed: a fraction of the original capital will

remain unemployed; the quantity (or utility) of the goods produced will remain

the same.(2*)






When the description of the facts is thus corrected, there is no doubt

that the smaller total capital employed, supposing on the one hand, the rate

of surplus-value to remain unchanged, and, on the other, lo of the original

labourers to be working no longer, would absorb an amount of surplus-value

of 450. But the rate of profit would not on this account be changed; or rather,

just for this reason the rate of profit could not be altered and would be

expressed by 450/900 (as at first 500/1000), i.e. it would be as at first,

50 per cent.






This simplest case does not then give us Marx's law, but this other law;

'Technical improvement, supposing all the other conditions remain unchanged,

causes a decrease in the amount (not the rate) of surplus-value and of profits.'

this law assumes that the 1/10 of the labourers left unemployed become entirely

superfluous. These ten labourers are henceforth to be a dead weight supported

by the charity of others, or to die of starvation, or to emigrate to a new

world. Let them be left to their fate. Social production will remain at its

former level, thanks to the technical improvement, but accomplished without

their help. This is the hypothesis, but given this hypothesis, of what importance

is the law? To see this clearly it will suffice to push the hypothesis yet

further, as we are entitled to do, and suppose that the technical improvements

continuing, the employment gradually becomes superfluous, not only of 1/10,

but of 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 of the labourers, i.e. that the employment of labourers

tends to become = 0. In this case capitalist society as such would come entirely

to an end, since the utility of labour, on which it is based, would come

to an end. Where there is nothing the King loses his rights; and where labour

has no utility the capitalist loses his. The ex-capitalists would have no

more workmen to impoverish, but would be changed into the owners of automatic

fountains of wealth; like those fortunate mortals in the fable enriched by

charmed knives, by wonderful lamps, by gardens producing with instantaneous

and spontaneous energy all God's gifts. In other words the law here resolves

itself into a truism.






But Marx did not think of this truism. He wished to determine exactly

the organic law of the variations in the rate of profits. In fact as is seen

in the illustration given he does not at all suppose that the energy of labour

may become superfluous; but rather that the labourers will find fresh employment

with an increase in the original fixed capital. Given technical improvement

and production also will be increased; this is the second stage which he

considers. The 100 labourers are still all working, the fixed capital with

which they work must be increased from 500 to 700, and the total has hence

become 1200. The law which he deduces, of the fall in the rate of profits

(in the illustration, from 50 per cent to 41 per cent) is not a truism; on

the contrary it presents itself with all the importance and originality of

a scientific discovery. All depends on seeing whether in the scientific discovery

we have indeed the truth.






The crux of Marx's proof lies in the statement; that the labourers who

would have had to remain unemployed, find on the contrary employment, but

with a capital increased by so much (= 200) over the original. Is this statement

correct? On what does Marx base it?






To this fundamental proposition my criticism refers, itself equally fundamental.

If it is admitted it amounts to a most complete denial of the truth of the

Marxian law. Nevertheless I state my idea in the form of a criticism and

doubtfully, because, in dealing with a thinker of Mark's rank, it is necessary

to proceed cautiously, and to remember (which I do not forget) that several

times errors ascribed to him have been explained as mistakes of his opponents.






For what reason, I ask myself, do the ten unoccupied labourers, in order

to be employed afresh, require a constant capital larger than the original?






The technical improvement has not diminished the natural utility of the

production (also in our hypothesis it has not increased it either, but has

left it unchanged); but it has only diminished its value. There will be then,

with the improved technical organization, raw materials, tools, clothing,

foodstuffs, etc., of the same total natural utility as at first. The economic

value of all these products is diminished, because in them (to employ the

metaphor chosen by Marx), is congealed a smaller quantity of labour, i.e.

less by the work of ten labourers. But from the point of view of power to

satisfy wants, the raw materials, the tools, the clothing, the means of sustenance,

etc., remain, in virtue of the technical improvement, of the same rank as

at first. If then capitalists and workpeople have remained as temperate as

before, and their standard of life has not risen (and this is in the hypothesis),

the production will offer as at first means of employment and means of sustenance

for the ten labourers left unoccupied. By re-employing them, etc., maintaining

them with the original means of subsistence, and setting them to work on

the original raw materials or their new products, the capitalists will increase

their production, or -- what is the same thing -- will improve its quality.

But since we know that, economically, the value of that capital has diminished,

it will come about that a capital economically smaller will absorb the same

energy of labour as formerly, i.e. the same amount of profits; and an equal

amount of profits with a smaller total capital means an increased rate of

profits. Exactly the opposite to what Marx thought it possible to prove.






Turning to our illustration, the ten labourers will find employment with

a capital which, like the utility, has remained the same, but economically

has decreased to 900. This means that the rate of profits has increased from

500/1000 to 500/900, i.e. from 50 per cent to about 55 per cent. As to the

rate of surplus-value, since the entire value of the total capital is reduced,

it must no longer be calculated, as before the technical improvement, as

500/500, nor as in the first stage we considered (in which the technical

improvement had made a portion of the labour entirely superfluous) as 450/450,

but as 500/450, i.e. it will no longer be 100 per cent, but will have risen

to about 111 per cent.






To this criticism of mine I have found no answer, either explicit or implicit,

in Marx's work. Only in one passage, where he speaks of the counteracting

causes, and in particular of surplus population (Chap. XIV, § iv.),

he hints at the case where labour power may be re-employed with a minimum

capital. It may be said that here Marx passed close to the difficulty, without

striking upon it, i.e. without becoming aware of its importance. And, if

he had struck on it, I doubt whether he would have overcome it and passed

on; I think rather that his theory would have gone to pieces.






I foresee that it may be said: you have assumed that, owing to the technical

improvement, not only would a number of labourers remain unemployed, but

also a fraction of the original total capital, i.e. of means of production

and means of subsistence; and when the labourers are re-employed, it is true

that during the new cycle of production, other fractions of unoccupied capital

will not unite with the original fractions, but precisely for this reason

the quantity ot production which will result will be increased, and in the

next cycle of production a still greater fraction of unoccupied capital will

add itself, unless the ten labourers do not continue to be reemployed, in

which case the un-occupied fraction will be smaller, but the increase will

become constant. Now all these means of production and of sustenance will

not be consumed (or will be partially consumed and partially saved), by the

capitalist class, and hence there will be an increasing accumulation. The

quantities of goods saved, owing to the impulsion of economic interest will

not remain un-used in warehouses or strong boxes, but will be thrown on the

market as capital seeking employment. This will increase the rate of wages,

and hence will have a depressing effect on the rate of profits. Very good,

but in such a case we are outside the Marxian law. The factor here considered,

is no longer technical improvement taken by itself, but saving, which may

be, as stated, encouraged by technical progress, but cannot be inferred from

it. For it is true that, if we suppose the case of extravagant capitalists,

saving, in spite of technical improvement will not take place. And as technical

improvement encourages saving, so the latter, in its turn, by increasing

wages, encourages the increase of population, and hence the reduction of

wages, and once again a rise in the rate of profits. But, when saving and

the increase of population come upon the scene we are already within the

sphere of the law of demand and supply, i.e. of ordinary, accredited economics,

which Marx despised as vulgar, and out of dislike of which he devised his

law of the fall in the rate of profits yielded by the above combination of

capital owing to the effect of technical improvement. I, indeed, believe

that only the ordinary law of demand and supply can explain the variations

in the rate of profit: but to return to it is not indeed to defend Marx's

thesis, but rather to ratify its condemnation.






However it is regarded, this thesis seems to me indefensible; and even

more indefensible if, leaving aside for a moment logical trains of reasoning

and arithmetical calculations, we look at it with the clear intuition of

common sense. See hereto follow the strict hypothesis set forth by Marx on

one side a capitalist class, and on the other a proletarian class. What effect

does technical improvement have? It increases the wealth in the hands of

the capitalist class. Is it not intuitively evident that, as a result of

technical improvement, the capitalists can, by anticipating commodities whose

value is continually decreasing, obtain the same services which they obtained

at first from the proletariat? And that hence the relation between value

of services and value of capital will change in favour of the former, i.e.

that the rate of profits will increase? When commodities (capital) are anticipated,

which formerly were reproduced by five hours of labour and now are reproduced

by four, the workman will continue to work ten hours. Formerly with five

there were ten; now with four there is similarly ten. The sponge costs less,

but the quantity of water with which it is saturated is the same. How could

Marx suppose that after technical improvement, the expenses of the capitalists

would always increase, so that proportionally profits would be in a state

of perpetual decline, and would end by making, in face of the total costs,

a most wretched figure?






Marx's mistake has been that he has inadvertently attributed a greater

value to the fixed capital, which after the technical improvement is worked

by the same labourers as before. Certainly anyone who looks at a society

in two successive stages of technical development, will find in the second

stage a greater number of machines and of tools of every kind. This is a

question of statistics, not of economics. Capital (and Marx appears to have

neglected this point for the moment) is not estimated by its physical extension,

but by its economic value. And economically that capital (supposing all the

other conditions remain constant) must be worth less; otherwise no technical

improvement would have taken place.






An external circumstance which might serve to explain Marx's error is

the fact that the third book of Das Kapital is a posthumous work, some parts

of which are hardly sketched out, and amongst these that of the law of the

rate of profits, which, moreover, does not relate to the establishment of

principles, but, being a consequence and an application of these, was perhaps

not worked out to the same extent as the fundamental or central part of the

theory.(3*) It it probable that the author, if he could have gone over his

rough draft again, would have materially modified it or entirely discarded

it. But perhaps some internal reason could also be found for this strange

mistake, in that Marx always misused the comparative method without disclosing

any distinct knowledge of his procedure. And it might be that, as already

in his earlier investigations, he perpetually transferred labour-value from

a hypothetical society to the actual capitalist society, so in this new problem

he has been led to estimate the worth of the technical capital in a more

advanced society at the rate of value of that in a less advanced society.

In this impossible attempt his method has here broken in his hands.






As we have disputed the actual basis of the Marxian law, it seems indeed

superfluous to follow out its further developments, which are advanced in

a form worked out with but little care. It is enough to remark that in these

developments, as in general, throughout Das Kapital, there is a continuous

medley of theoretical deductions and historical descriptions, of logical

and of material connections. The defect, however, becomes in this instance

an advantage, because many of the observations made by Marx, understood as

historical descriptions of what usually happens in modern society, will be

found to be true and can be saved from the shipwreck, as regards the theory

of the law, with which by chance they are feebly connected. And it would

even be possible to make such an investigation in respect to that very portion

which we have disputed, i.e. to enquire what facts, actually observed by

him, could have impelled Marx to construct his law, i.e. to give of these

facts an explanation which is theoretically unjustifiable.






Marx attributed the greatest importance to the discovery of the law of

the fall in the rate of prof is. Herein day for him 'the mystery over which

all economists from Adam Smith onwards have toiled'; and in the different

attempts to solve the problem he saw the explanation of the divergence between

the various schools of economists. Ricardo's bewilderment in face of the

phenomenon of the progressive decrease in the rate of profits seemed to him

fresh evidence of the earnestness of mind of that writer, who discerned the

vital importance of the problem for capitalist society. That the solution

had not been found before his, Marx's, time, appeared to him easily explicable,

when it was remembered that until then political economy had sought gropingly

for the distinction between fixed and floating capital without succeeding

in formulating it, and had not been able to explain surplus-value in distinction

from profits, nor profit itself in its purity, independently of the separate

fractions of it in competition amongst themselves; and that, in the end,

it had been unable to analyse completely the difference in the organic composition

of capital, and much less, the formation of the general rate of profits.






His explanation being now rejected, a double problem presents itself.

The first question relates to fact. It is needful to ask: does the fact spoken

of actually exist, and how does it exist? Has a gradual decline in the rate

of profits been ascertained? And in which countries, and in what circumstances?

The second question relates to the cause: since, whilst we have seen that

there could only be one economic reason for the phenomenon, (the law of demand

and supply), there may be several historical causes, and these may vary in

different cases. The decline in the rate of profits may happen owing to a

nominal increase in wages due to an increase in the rent of land, or it may

happen owing to a real increase in wages due to stronger organisation among

the workpeople, or it may happen owing to an increase, also real, in wages

resulting from saving and from growing accumulations, which increase the

capital in search of employment. This investigation must be made without

prejudices, whether optimistic or pessimistic, apologetic or controversial;

and economists have sinned but too often in all these ways. The listeners

have seized upon the result of limited and qualified investigations, now

in order to sing a hymn to the spontaneous force of progress, which will

gradually cause the disappearance of capitalists or reduce interest to 2

per cent; now in order to terrify their audience by a spectacle no less fantastic,

of landed proprietors as the sole owners of all the goods of society!(4*)






May 1899.






NOTES:






1. See chaps. III and IV.






2. We here suppose a series of productive periods already rapidly passed

through, which may suffice to replace the whole of the total capital by the

new technical processes. It is evident however, that as fixed capital is

replaced in successive portions, in a first stage, goods are used as capital,

whose cost of reproduction no longer corresponds to their original cost of

production, A, whose actual social value no longer corresponds to the original

one. But to consider the separate stages would here cause a useless complication.






3. The explanation of the way in which the average rate of profit arises

belongs to the fundamental part of the third book of Das Kapital, and Marx

must have thought it out together with the fundamental chapters in the first

book.






4. This is the case contemplated by Ricardo in the celebrated § 44

of chapter vi, On Profits: Marx appears to attach little importance to this

case, having complete faith in the continued technical progress of agriculture,

not to speak of other counteracting causes. It is necessary to add that Marx

in conformity with his law, maintains that the rent of land also has a tendency

to fall, although it may increase its total amount, or its proportion in

reference to industrial profits: see vol. iii, 223-4.








CHAPTER VI. ON THE ECONOMIC PRINCIPLE






TWO LETTERS TO PROFESSOR V. PARETO






I






Esteemed Friend,






On reading the little paper, which you were courteous enough to send me,

on how to state the problem of pure economics,(1*) I at once felt a desire

to discuss the subject with you. Other occupations have obliged me to defer

the satisfaction of this wish until now; and this has been fortunate. The

extracts from your hew and still unpublished treatise on pure economics,

which came out in the March number of this Review,(2*) have obliged me to

abandon in part the scheme of thought which I had in mind; for I saw from

them that you had modified some of those points in your thesis, which seemed

to me most open to dispute.






I have on several occasions heard something like a feeling of distaste

expressed for the endless discussions about value and the economic principle

which absorb the energies of economic science. It is said that if this splitting

of hairs over the scholastic accuracy of its principle were abandoned, the

science might throw light on historical and practical questions which concern

the welfare of human society. Apparently you have not allowed yourself to

be alarmed by the threatened distaste of readers; nor indeed am I. Can we

silence the doubts which disturb us? Could we have assurance whilst silencing

these doubts that we were not endangering just those practical issues which

the majority have at heart? Issues which we ourselves have at heart since

we are certainly not able, like the monks of old, to free ourselves from

interest in the affairs of the age. May not science be, as Leibniz said,

quo magis speculative, magis practica? We must then go our way, and endeavour

to satisfy our doubts, with all the caution and self-criticism of which we

are capable; since they cannot be suppressed. On the other hand we should

endeavour also not to offer our solutions to the public except when our knowledge,

-- wide if it may be so (yet necessarily imperfect) -- of the literature

on the subject, gives us some confidence that we are not repeating things

already stated. Unless indeed, other considerations make us think it opportune

to repeat and to impress things which have been stated, but without sufficient

emphasis.






The new school of economic thought, of which you are such a worthy representative,

has a merit of no small significance. It has reacted against the anti-scientific

tendencies of the historical and empirical schools, and has restored the

concept of a science of pure economics. This means indeed nothing more than

a science which is science; the word pure, unless tautologous, is an explanation

added for those who are ignorant or unmindful of what a science is. Economics

is neither history nor discussion of practical issues: it is a science possessing

its own principle, which is indeed called the economic principle.






But, as I had occasion to remark at another time,(3*) I do not consider

that this principle whose fundamental character is asserted, has hitherto

been grasped in its individuality, nor conveniently defined in relation to

other groups of facts, that is to the principles of other sciences. Of those

conceptions of it which seem to me erroneous, the chief ones can he reduced

to four which I will call the mechanical, the hedonistic, the technological

and the egoistic.






You have now rejected the first two, because you think that mechanical

and hedonistic considerations belong to metaphysics and psychology. But I

acknowledge that I am dissatisfied with your method of arriving at this praiseworthy

rejection.






You no longer say, indeed, as in your previous essay: 'L'economie pure

ntest pas seulement semblable a la mechanique: c'est, a proprement parlor,

un genre de mechanique.' But you still say that 'Pure economics employs the

same methods as rational mechanics, and has many points of contact with this

science.' although you do not pause over the mechanical considerations, it

is not from a clear conviction that a datum in economics, as such, is quite

different from a datum in mechanics; but merely because it seems to you convenient

to omit such considerations, of which you do not deny, but rather admit,

the possibility.






Now I on the contrary, say decisively that the data of economics is not

that of mechanics, or that there is no transition from the mechanical aspect

of a fact to the economic aspect; and that the very possibility of the mechanical

point of view is excluded, not as a thing which may or may not be abstracted

from, but as a contradiction in terms, which it is needful to shun.






Do you wish for the simplest and clearest proof of the non-mechanical

nature of the economic principle? Note, then, that in the data of economics

a quality appears which is on the contrary repugnant to that of mechanics.

To an economic fact words can be applied which express approval or disapproval.

Man behaves economically well or ill, with gain or loss, suitably or unsuitably:

he behaves, in short, economically or uneconomically. A fact in economics

is, therefore, capable of appraisement (positive or negative); whilst a fact

in mechanics is a mere fact, to which praise or blame can only be attached

metaphorically.






It seems to me that on this point we ought easily to be agreed. To ascertain

it, it is sufficient to appeal to internal observation. This shows us the

fundamental distinction between the mechanical and the teleological, between

mere fact and value. If I am not mistaken, you assign to metaphysics the

problem of reducing the teleological to the mechanical, value to mere fact.

But observe that metaphysics cannot get rid of the distinction; and will

only labour, with greater or less good luck, at its old business of reconciling

opposites, or of deriving two contraries from one unity.






I foresee what may be advanced against this assertion of the non-mechanical

nature of the economic principle. It may be said: What is not mechanical,

is not measurable; and economic values, on the contrary, are measured. Although

hitherto the unit of measurement has not been found, it is yet a fact that

we distinguish very readily larger and smaller,greater and least values and

construct scales of values. This suffices to establish the measurability

and hence the essentially mechanical nature of economic value. Look at the

economic man, who has before him a series of possible actions a, b, c, d,

e, f,...; which have for him a decreasing value, indicated by the numbers

10, 9, 8, 7, 6... just because he measures value, he decides on the action

a = 10, and not on c = 8 or f = 6.






And there is no fault in the deduction granted the existence of the scale

of values, which we have just illustrated by an example. Granted the existence:

but, supposing this to be an illusion of ours? If the man in the example,

instead of being the homo oeconomicus were the homo utopicus or heterocosmicus,

not to be found even in imaginative constructions?






This is precisely my opinion. The supposed scale of values is an absurdity.

When the homo oeconomicus in the given example, selects a, all the other

actions (b, c, d, e, f,...) are not for him values smaller than a; they are

merely non-a; they are what he rejects; they are non-values.






If then the homo oeconomicus could not have a, he would be acting under

different conditions: under conditions without a. Change the conditions and

the economic action -- as is well known -- changes also. And let us suppose

that the conditions are such that, for the individual acting, b represents

the action selected by him; and c, d, e, f,... those which he omits to do,

and which are all non-b, i.e. have no value.






If the conditions change again and it is supposed that the individual

decides on c, and then on d, and then on e, and so on. These different economic

actions, each arising under particular conditions, are incommensurable amongst

themselves. They are different; but each is perfectly adapted to the given

conditions, and can only be judged in reference to these conditions.






But then what are these numbers, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6...? They are symbols,

symbols of what? What is the reality beneath the numerical symbol? The reality

is the alteration in the actual conditions; and these numbers show a succession

of changes: neither more nor less than is indicated by the alphabetic series,

for which they are substituted.






The absurdity involved in the notion of greater or smaller values is,

in short, the assumption that an individual may be at the same moment under

different conditions. The homo oeconomicus is not at the same moment in a,

b, c, d, e, f... but when he is in b, he is no longer in a; when he is in

c he is no longer in b. He has before him only one action, approved by him;

this action rules out all the others which are infinite, and which for him

are only actions not preferred (non-values).






Certainly physical objects form part of the data of economics; and these,

just because they are physical, are measurable. But economics does not consider

physical things and objects, but actions. The physical object is merely the

brute matter of an economic act: in measuring it we remain in the physical

world, we do not pass over to that of economics, or else, when measured,

the economic fact has become volatile. You say that 'political economy only

concerns itself with choices, which fall on things that are variable in quantity

and capable of measurement'; but pardon me, dear friend, you would be much

perplexed if you had to justify this wholly arbitrary limitation; and if

you had to show that the attribute measurabilility influences in any way

the attribute of belonging to economics.






I think that I have explained, shortly, but adequately for a wise man

like yourself, the reasons why the mechanical conception of the economic

principle is untenable. If calculations and measurements come into problems

that are called economic they do so just in so far as these are not problems

in pure economics.






This non-mechanical datum, which is an economic datum, you call choice.

And this is all right But to choose means to choose consciously. A choice

made unconsciously, is either not a choice or not unconscious. You speak

of the unconscious actions of man; but these cannot be the actions of the

man in so far as he is man but movements of man in so far as he is also animal.

They are instinctive movements; and instinct is not choice except metaphorically.

Hence the examples you bring forward of dogs, of cats, of sparrows, of rats,

and of asses from Buridano, are not facts of choice; and hence are not economic

facts. You consider animal economics as an unfruitful science, which exhausts

itself in descriptions. Look more closely and you will see that this science

does not exist. An economics of the animals, understood in the sense of the

naturalists, has not been written, not because it is not worth while, but

because it is impossible to write it. Whence could it be obtained unless

from books such as the Roman de Renart and the Animali parlanti?






This analysis ought to lead us to conceive of an economic datum as an

act of man; i.e. as a fact of human activity.






And from this recognition is inferred in its turn the true criticism of

the hedonistic conception of the economic principle. You say that 'the equations

of pure economics express merely the fact of a choice, and can be drawn up

independently of the ideas of pleasure and pain,' but you admit at the same

time that the fact of the choice 'can be expressed equally well as a fact

of pleasure.'






It is true that every case of economic choice is at the same time, a case

of feeling: of agreeable feeling if the economic choice is rightly made,

of disagreeable feeling, if it is ill made. Man's activity develops itself

in the human mind, not under a pneumatic bell, and an activity which develops

rightly, brings as its reflex, a feeling of pleasure, that which develops

badly, one of displeasure. What is economically useful, is, at the same time

pleasurable.






But this judgment cannot be converted. The pleasurable is not always economically

useful. The mistake in the hedonist theory consists in making this conversion.

Pleasure may appear unaccompanied by man's activity, or may be accompanied

by a human activity which is not economic. Herein lies the fundamental distinction

between pleasure and choice. A choice, is in the concrete, inseparable from

the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; but this feeling is separable from

choice, and may in fact exist independently of it.






If psychology be understood (as it is usually understood) as the science

of psychical mechanism, economics is not a psychological science; this Herr

van Ehrenfels fails to grasp. I do not know whether you have read the two

volumes hitherto published on the System des Werttheorie.(4*) After devoting

some hundred pages to psychological disquisitions -- which I do not mean

to discuss here -- he wishes, finally, to prove that his definitions of value

remain sound, from whatever theory of psychology you start. He does this

as he asserts (§ 87), not because he is doubtful of himself, but to

safeguard his economic conclusions, which are so important for the practical

problems of life, from unjustified attacks based on the standpoints of schools

of psychology other than his own, the method of the barrister, who composes

an apparent conclusion, and makes several demands that are connected therewith

subordinately. It is true that there is no need for economists to spend their

time on details of theoretical psychology; so true that Professor Ehrenfels

might spare us his: but is it not true that economics remains the same whatever

psychological theory is accepted. The unity of science means that a modification

at one point is never without some reaction on the others; and the reaction

is greatest when it is a question of the way of conceiving two facts, distinct

but inseparable, like the economic and the psychical fact.






An economic datum is not then a hedonistic datum, nor, in general, a mechanical

datum. But as the fact of man's activity, it still remains to determine whether

it is a fact of knowledge or of will: whether it is theoretical or practical.






You, who conceive it as choice, can have no doubt that it is a fact of

practical activity, i.e. of will. This is also my own conclusion. To choose

something can only mean to will it.






But you somewhat obscure the conclusion now indicated when you speak of

logical and illogical actions, and place actions properly economic amongst

the former. Logical and illogical bring us back to theoretical activity.

A logical or illogical action is a common way of speaking; but it is not

a way of speaking exactly or accurately. The logical work of thought is quite

distinct from the action of the will. To reason is not to will.






Nor is to will to reason; but the will presupposes thought and hence logic.

He who does not think, cannot even will. I mean by willing, what is known

to us by the evidence of our consciousness; not Schopenhauer's metaphysical

will.






In knowledge, in so far as it is a necessary presupposition of economic

action, is found, if not a justification, an explanation of your phrases

about logical and illogical actions. Economic actions are always (we say

so, at any rate) logical actions, i.e. preceded by logical acts. But it is

necessary to distinguish carefully the two stages: the phenomenon and its

presupposition, since from lack of distinction between the two stages has

arisen the erroneous conception of the economic principle as a technological

fact. I have criticised at length in other essays this confusion between

technical and economic, and I may be allowed to refer both to what I have

written in my review of Stammler's book Wirthschaft and Recht, and to the

more exact analyses in my recent memorandum on the Estetica. Stammler maintains

precisely that the economic principle can be nothing but a technical concept.

I would advise anyone who wishes to see at a glance, the difference between

the technical and the economic to consider carefully in what a technical

error and in what an economic error respectively consist. A technical error

is ignorance of the laws of the material on which we wish to work: for instance

the belief that it is possible to put very heavy beams of iron on a delicate

wall, without the latter falling into ruins. An economic error is the not

aiming directly at one's own object; to wish this and that, i.e. not really

to wish either this or that. A technical error is an error of knowledge:

an economic error is an error of will. He who makes a technical mistake will

be called, if the mistake is a stupid one, an ignoramus; he who makes an

economic mistake, is a man who does not know how to behave in life: a weak

and inconclusive person. And, as is well known and proverbial, people can

be learned without being men (practical or complete).






Thus an economic fact is a fact of practical activity. Have we attained

our object in this definition? Not yet. The definition is still incomplete

and to complete it we must not only cross another expanse of sea, but avoid

another rock: viz. that of the conception of economic data as egoistic data.






This error arises as follows: if an economic fact is a practical activity,

it is still necessary to say how this activity is distinguished from moral

activity. But moral activity is defined as altruistic; then, it is inferred,

economic data will be egoistic. Into this mistake has fallen, amongst others,

our able Professor Pantaleoni, in his Principe d'economia pura, and in other

writings.






The egoistic is not something merely different from a moral fact; it is

the antithesis of it; it is the immoral. In this way, by making the economic

principle equivalent to an egoistic fact, instead of distinguishing economics

from morality, we should be subordinating the former to the latter, or rather

should deny it any right to exist, recognising it as something merely negative,

as a deviation from moral activity.






A datum in economics is quite different. It does not form an antithesis

to a moral datum; but is in the peaceable relation of condition to conditioned.

It is the general condition which makes the rise of ethical activity possible.

In the concrete, every action (volition) of man is either moral or immoral,

since no actions are morally indifferent. But both the moral and the immoral

are economic actions; which means that the economic action, taken by itself,

is neither moral nor immoral. Strength of character, for example, is needed

both by the honest man and by the cheat.






It seems to me that you approach gropingly to this conception of the economic

principle, as relating to practical actions, which taken in the abstract,

are neither moral nor immoral; when at one point in your last essay, you

exclude from economic consideration choices, which have an altruistic motive;

and further on, exclude also those which are immoral. Now, since choices

are necessarily either altruistic or egoistic, either moral or immoral, you

have no way of escaping from the difficulty except the one which 1 suggest;

to regard economics as concerned with practical activity in so far as it

is (abstractly) emptied of all content, moral or immoral.






I might enlarge further on this distinction and show how it has an analogy

in the sphere of theoretical activity, where the relation of economics to

ethics is repeated in the relation of aesthetics to logic. And I might point

out the reason why scientific and aesthetic productions cannot be subjects

of economic science, i.e. are not economic products. The reason given, in

this connection, by Professor Ehrenfels, is, to say the least of it, curious:

he remarks that: 'the relations of value upon which the data of logic and

aesthetics rest, are so simple that they do not demand a special economic

theory.' It should not be difficult to see that logical and aesthetic values

are theoretical and not practical values, whereas economic value is a practical

value, and that it is impossible to unite an economics of the theoretical

as such. When, some years ago, the lamented Mazzola sent me the introduction

in which he had discussed Economics and Art, I had occasion to write to him

and afterwards to say to him by word of mouth, that much more fundamental

relations might be discovered between the two groups of phenomena; and he

urged me to expound my observations and inquiries. This I have done in the

essay on Estetica, referred to above. I am sorry to be obliged to refer so

many times in writing to you and to the public. But here the need for brevity

and clearness constrains me.






This, then, is a rapid statement of how I arrive at the definition of

the data of economics, which I should like to see at the beginning of every

economic treatise. The data of economics are the practical activities of

men in so far as they are considered as such, independent of any moral or

immoral determination.






Granted this definition, and it will be seen also that the concept of

utility, or of value or of ofelimity, is nothing but the economic action

itself, in so far as it is rightly managed, i.e. in so far as it is really

economic. In the same way as the true is thinking activity itself, and the

good is moral activity itself.






And to speak of things (physical objects) as having or not having value,

will appear simply a metaphorical usage to express those causes which we

think efficacious to produce the effects which we desire, and which are therefore

our ends. A is worth b, the value of a is b, does not mean (the economists

of the new school knew it well) a = b nor even as is said a > b; but that

a has value for us, and b has not. And value -- as you know -- exists only

at the moment of exchange, i.e. of choice.






To connect with these general propositions the different problems which

are said to belong to economic science, is the task of the writer of a special

treatise on economics. It is your task, esteemed friend, if after having

studied these general propositions, they seem to you acceptable. To me it

seems that they alone are able to safeguard the independence of economics,

not only as distinct from History and Practice but as distinct from Mechanics,

Psychology, Theory of Knowledge, and Ethics.






Naples, 15th May 1900.(5*)






II






Esteemed Friend,






Our disagreement concerning the nature of economic data has two chief

sources: disagreement on a question of method and disagreement on a question

of postulates. I acknowledge that one object of my first letter was to obtain

from you such explanations as might set clearly in relief our disagreement

on the two points indicated. -- To reduce controversies to their simplest

terms, to expose ultimate oppositions, is, you will agree, an approach to

truth. I will explain briefly the two points at issue. In regard to that

of method, although I agree with you in upholding the claims of a procedure

that is logical, abstract and scientific, as compared with one that is historical

(or synthetic, as you say), I cannot in addition allow that the former procedure

involves something of the nature of an arbitrary choice, or that it can be

worked out equally well in either of two ways. You talk of cutting away a

slice from a concrete phenomenon, and examining this by itself; but I inquire

how you manage to cut away that slice? for it is no question here of a piece

of bread or of cheese into which we can actually put the knife, but of a

series of representations which we have in our consciousness, and into which

we can insert nothing except the light of our mental analysis. In order to

cut off your slice you would thus have to carry out a logical analysis; i.e.

to do at the outset what you propose to do subsequently. Your cutting off

of the slice is indeed an answer to the problem of the quid in which an economic

fact consists. You assume the existence of a test to distinguish what you

take for the subject of your exposition from what you leave aside. But the

test or guiding concept must be supplied by the very nature of the theory,

and must be in conformity with it.






Would it for instance be in conformity with the nature of the thing, to

cut away, as you wish to do, only that group of economic facts which relates

to objects capable of measurement? What intrinsic connection is there between

this merely accidental attribute, measurability, of the objects which enter

into an economic action, and the economic action itself? Does measurability

lead to a modification in the economic fact by changing its nature, i.e.

by gong rise to another fact? If so, you must prove it. I, for my part, cannot

see that an economic action changes its nature whether it relates to a sack

of potatoes, or consists in an exchange of protestations of affection!






In your reply you refer to the need of avoiding waste of time over matters

that are too simple, for which 'it is not worth while to set in motion the

great machine of mathematical reasoning.' But this need relates to the pedagogy

of the professional chair or of the book, not to the science in itself, which

alone we are now discussing. It is quite evident that anybody who speaks

or writes lays more stress on those portions which he thinks harder for his

hearers and readers to grasp, or more useful to be told. But he who thinks,

i.e. speaks with himself, pays attention to all portions without preferences

and without omissions. We are now concerned with thought, that is with the

growth of science; not with the manner of communicating it. And in thought,

we cannot admit arbitrary judgments.






Nor need we be turned aside by an analogy with the classes of facts, made

by zoology and other natural sciences. The classifications of zoology and

botany are not scientific operations, but merely views in perspective; and,

considered in relation to really scientific knowledge, they are arbitrary.

He who investigates the nature of economic data, does not, however, aim at

putting together, in perspective and roughly, groups of economic cases, as

the zoologist or the botanist do, mutilating and manipulating the inexhaustible,

infinite varieties of living creatures.






Upon the confusion between a science and the exposition of a science is

based also the belief that we can follow different paths in order to arrive

at a demonstration of the same truth. Unless in your case, since you are

a mathematician, it arose from a false analogy with calculation. Now, calculation

is not a science, because it does not give us the reasons of things; and

hence mathematical logic is logic in a manner of speaking, a variety of formal

logic, and has nothing to do with scientific or inventive logic.






When we pass to the question of the postulates, you will certainly be

surprised if I tell you that the disagreement between us consists in your

wish to introduce a metaphysical postulate into economic science; whereas

1 wish here to rule out every metaphysical postulate and to confine myself

entirely to the analysis of the given facts. The accusation of being metaphysical

will seem to you the last that could ever be brought against you. Your implied

metaphysical postulate is, however, this; that the facts of man's activity

are of the same nature as physical facts; that in the one case as in the

other we can only observe regularity and deduce consequences therefrom, without

ever penetrating into the inner nature of the facts; that these facts are

all alike phenomena (meaning that they would presuppose a noumena, which

evades us, and of which they are manifestations). Hence whereas I have called

my essay ' On the economic principle,' yours is entitled 'On the economic

phenomenon.'






How could you defend this postulate of yours except by a metaphysical

monism; for example that of Spencer? But, whilst Spencer was anti-metaphysical

and positivist in words, I claim the necessity of being so in deeds; and

hence I cannot accept either his metaphysics or his monism, and I hold to

experience. This testifies to me the fundamental distinction between external

and internal, between physical and mental, between mechanics and teleology,

between passivity and activity, and secondary distinctions involved in this

fundamental one. What metaphysics unites philosophy distinguishes (and joins

together); the abstract contemplation of unity is the death of philosophy.

Let us confine ourselves to the distinction between physical and mental.

Whilst the external facts of nature, admitted by empirical physical science,

are always phenomena, since their source is by definition outside themselves,

the internal facts or activities of man, cannot be called phenomena, since

they are their own source.






By this appeal to experience and by this rejection of all metaphysical

intrusion, I place myself in a position to meet the objection which you bring

forward to my conception of economic data. You think that the ambiguity of

the term value comes from this, that it denotes a very complex fact, a collection

of facts included under a single word. For me, on the contrary, the difficulty

in it arises from its denoting a very simple fact, a summum genus, i.e. the

fact of the very activity of man. Activity is value. For us nothing is valuable

except what is an effort of imagination, of thought, of will, of our activity

in any of its forms. As Kant said that there was nothing in the universe

that could be called good except the good will; so, if we generalise, it

may be said that there is nothing in the universe that is valuable, except

the value of human activity. Of value as of activity you cannot demand a

so-called genetic definition. The simple and the original is genetically

indefinable. Value is observed immediately in ourselves, in our consciousness.(6*)






This observation shows us also that the summum genus 'value,' or 'mental

activity' gives place to irreducible forms, which are in the first instance

those of theoretical activity and practical activity, of theoretical values

and practical values. But what does practical mean? -- you now ask me. I

believe that I have already answered by explaining that the theoretical is

everything which is a work of contemplation, and the practical everything

that is the work of will. Is will an obscure term? We may rather call the

terms light, warmth and so on, obscure; not that of will. What will is, I

know well. I find myself face to face with it throughout my life as a man.

Even in writing this letter, today, in a room in an inn and in shaking off

the laziness of country life, I have willed; and if I have delayed the answer

for two months, it is because I have been so feeble as not to know how to

will.






You see from this that the question raised by me, whether by choice you

meant conscious or unconscious choice, is not a careless question. It is

equivalent to this other one; whether the economic fact is or is not a fact

of will. 'This does not alter the fact of the choice,' you say. But indeed

it does alter it! If we speak of conscious choice, we have before us a mental

fact, if of unconscious choice, a natural fact; and the laws of the former

are not those of the latter. I welcome your discovery that economic fact

is the fact of choice; but I am forced to mean by choice, voluntary choice.

Otherwise we should end by talking not only of the choices of a man who is

asleep (when he moves from side to side) but of those of animals, and why

not? of plants and why not again? at minerals; passing rapidly along the

steep slope down which my friend Professor C. Trivero has slipped in his

recently published Teoria dei lisogni, for which may he be forgiven!(7*)






When I defined economic data as 'the practical activities of man, in so

far as they are considered as such, independently of any moral or immoral

determination,' I did not make an arbitrary judgment, which might authorise

others to do likewise, in a science which does not tolerate arbitrary judgments;

but I merely distinguished further within the species practical activity,

two sub.species or grades: pure practical activity, (economic), and moral

practical activity, (ethical); will that is merely economic, and moral will.

There is ambiguity in your reproach that when I speak of approval or disapproval

as aroused by economic activity, I am considering the matter from a synthetic

instead of an analytic point of view, and that approval or disapproval are

extraneous factors. I did not however speak (and I believed that I had explained

myself clearly), of moral, intellectual or esthetic approval or disapproval.

No, I said, and I repeat, that a judgment of approval or reprobation was

necessarily bound up with economic activity: but a merely ECONOMIC judgment

of approval or reprobation. 'By saying that Rhenish wine is useful to me,

has a value for me, is ofelimo to me, I mean only to say that I like it;

and I do not see how this simplest of relations can be well or ill-managed.

You will forgive me if in this sentence of yours I have italicised the words

by saying. Here is the point. Certainly the mere saying does not give rise

to an internal judgment of economic approval or disapproval. It will give

rise to a grammatical or linguistic, i.e. aesthetic, approval or disapproval,

according to whether the saying is clear or confused, well or ill expressed.

But it is no question of saying: it is a question of doing, i.e. of the action

willed carried out by the movement that is willed, of a choice of movement.

And do you think that the acquisition and consumption of a bottle of Rhenish

wine involves no judgment of approval or disapproval? If I am very rich,

if my aim in life is to obtain momentary sensual pleasures, and I know that

Rhenish wine will secure me one of them, I buy and drink Rhenish wine and

approve my act. I am satisfied with myself. But if I do not wish to indulge

in gluttony, and if my money is all devoted to other purposes, for which

1 wish as preferable, and if, in spite of this, yielding to the temptation

of the moment, I buy and drink Rhenish wine, I have put myself into contradiction

with myself, and the sensual pleasure will be followed by a judgment of disapproval,

by a legitimate and fitting ECONOMIC REMORSE.






To prove to you how, in all this, I omit every moral consideration, I

will give you another example: that of a knave who thinks it ofelimo to himself

to murder a man in order to rob him of a sum of money. At the moment of assassination,

and although remaining a knave at heart, he yields to an emotion of fear

or to a pathological feeling of compassion, and does not kill the man. Note

carefully the terms of the hypothesis. The knave will call himself an ass

and an imbecile, and will feel remorse for his contradictory and inconclusive

conduct; but not indeed a moral remorse (of that he is, by hypothesis, incapable),

but, precisely, a remorse that is merely economic.






It seems to me that there is another confusion, easy to dispel, in your

counter criticism to my criticism of the scale of values (economic) you say

that 'there is no need for one person to find himself at the same moment

under different conditions; it is enough that he can picture to himself these

different conditions.' Can you in truth picture yourself being at the same

moment under different conditions? Fancy has its laws; and does not allow

the imagination of what is unimaginable. You can easily say that you picture

it to yourself: words are docile; but, to picture it in reality, is, pardon

me, another matter altogether. You will not succeed in it any more than I.

Ask me to imagine a lion with the head of a donkey, and I will comply at

once; but ask me to imagine a lion standing at the same moment in two different

places, and I cannot succeed. I will picture to myself, if you like, two

similar lions, two exactly alike, but not the same in two different positions.

Fancy reconstructs reality, but possible reality, not the impossible or what

is contradictory. Thus my demonstration of the absurdity of the scale of

values applies both to actual and to possible reality. Nay, in discussing

science in the abstract it was framed precisely on the mere consideration

of the possible.






I do not know whether I have answered all your objections, but I have

endeavoured to answer all those which seem to me fundamental. A dispute,

in which questions of method and of principle are at stake need not be carried

on pedantically into minute details; we must depend to some extent on the

assistance of the readers, who, putting themselves mentally in the position

of the two disputants, work out for themselves the final application. I wish

merely to add that it is my strongest conviction that the reaction against

metaphysics (a farsighted reaction in that it has freed scientific procedure

from admixture with the arbitrary judgments of feeling and belief) has been

pushed forward by many so far as to destroy science itself. The mathematicians

who have a quick feeling for scientific procedure, have done much for economic

science by reviving in it the dignity of abstract analysis, darkened and

overwhelmed by the mass of anecdotes of the historical school. But, as it

happens, they have also introduced into it the prejudice of their profession,

and, being themselves students of the general conditions of the physical

world, the particular prejudice that mathematics can take up in relation

to economics which is the science of man, of a form of the conscious activity

of man the same attitude which it rightly takes up in relation to the empirical

natural sciences.






From what I have now stated you will easily discover exactly how far we

are in agreement in the establishment of the principles of Economies and

how far we disagree. If my new observations should assist in further reducing

the extent of the disagreement, I shall indeed be glad.






Perugia, 20th October, 1900.(8*)






NOTES:






1. Comment se pose le problème de l'economie pure. Paper read in

December 1898 to the Societé Stella.






2. Giornale degli economisti, March 1900, pp. 216-235.






3. Rivista di sociolgia, III. no. vi., pp. 746 8, see Materialismio Storico,

pp. 193-208.






4. DR CHRISTIAN V. EHRENFELS (Professor at Prague University): System

der Werttheorie, vol. I, Allgemeine Werttheorie, Psychologie des Begehrens,

Leipzig, Reisland, 1897; vol. II. Grundzüge einer Ethik, the same, 1898.






5. PARETO answered this letter in the same journal, Giornale degli economisti.

August. 1900, pp. 110-162.






6. I have before me Professor A. GRAZIADEI'S article Intorno alla teoria

edonistica del valore. (In Riforma Sociale, September 15th, 1900); in which

A. fails to see how the purist theory of value dovetails in with the doctrines

of Psychophysics and Psychology. I can well believe it! Psychophysics and

Psychologist are natural sciences and cannot throw light on economic fact

which is mental and of value. I may be allowed to point out, that, even three

years ago, I gave a warning against the confusion of economics with psychology.

(See in this volume pp. 72-75 ) He who appeals to psychology (naturalistic)

in order to understand economic fact, will always meet with the delusion,

opportunely shown up by Graziadei. I have stated the reasons owing to which

economics cannot dwell where the psychologists and hedonists say; now Graziedei

has questioned the doorkeepers (Fechner, Wundt, etc.), and has learnt that

it does not dwell there. Well and good!






7. CAMILLO TRIVERO, La teoria dei bisogni, Turin, Bocca, 1900, pp. 198.

Trivero means by need 'the condition of a being, either conscious or unconscious

(man, animal, plant, thing), in which it cannot remain': so that it can be

said 'that all needs are ultimately condensed into the supreme need or end

of being or becoming.' Need for him is hence actual reality itself. But since,

on the other hand, he declares that he does not wish to solve nor even to

consider the philosophical problem, it is hard to understand what a theory

of needs (i.e. of reality) can be, and for what reason he goes back to such

generalities.






It is true that Trivero believes that, by going back to the general concept

of need, he can establish the parent theory on which rest the particular

doctrines of needs; and amongst them economics, which concerns itself with

economic needs. If there are species he says we ought to determine of what

genus they are species. But he will allow me to remark that the genus to

look for is, as logic teaches, the proximal genus. To jump to such a great

distance as to reality or to fact, would only lead to the noble discovery:

that economic needs are part of reality, are a group of facts.






And what he does is to mace an equally valuable discovery: that the true

theory of history is the theory of needs, which, granted his definition of

needs, is as much as to say that history is history of reality and the theory

of it is the theory.






I have then no objection to make to the meaning which Trivero wishes to

give to the word need; but I must assert that, having given it this meaning,

he has not afterwards constructed the theory of anything, nor thrown light

on any special group of facts.






For real economic theory his book is quite useless. Economists do not

recognise the needs of things and plants and animals, but only human needs,

or those of man in so far as he is homo oeconomicus and hence a conscious

being. I too believe that it is right to work out philosophically the principle

of economics; but in order to do this, Trivero should have studied economic

science. He declares that 'he does not want to hold fast to anyone's petticoats.'

This statement is superfluous if it means that each individual ought to base

his own scientific convictions on reason and not on authority. It is dangerous

if it signifies, on the contrary, an intention to spare himself the trouble

of studying other people's books, and of reconstructing everything from the

beginning by his own personal efforts and by the aid of general culture alone.

The result obtained being far from satisfactory should deter the author (who

will not grumble at my plain speaking), from returning to this unfruitful

method in the future.






8. PARETO answers this second letter in the Giornale degli economisti,

February, 1901, pp. 131-138.