Fredrick Engels Socialism:Utopian and Scientific 1892English Edition Introduction [History (the role of Religion)in the English middle-class]

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages,the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element.It had conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization,but this position,also,had become too narrow for its expansive power.The development of the middle-class,the bourgeoisie ,became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system;the feudal system,therefore,had to fall.

But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church.It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe,in spite of all internal wars,into one grand political system,opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries.It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model,and,lastly,it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord,holding,as it did,fully 1/3rd of the soil of the Catholic world.Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail,this,its sacred central organization,had to be destroyed.

Moreover,parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great revival of science;astronomy,mechanics,physics,anatomy,physiology were again cultivated.And the bourgeoisie,for the development of its industrial production,required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature.Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church,had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith,and for that reason had been no science at all.Science rebelled against the Church;the bourgeoisie could not do without science,and,therefore,had to join in the rebellion.

The above,though touching but two of the points where the rising middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion,will be sufficient to show,first,that the class most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie;and second,that every struggle against feudalism,at that time,had to take on a religious disguise,had to be directed against the Church in the first instance.But if the universities and the traders of the cities started the cry,it was sure to find,and did find,a strong echo in the masses of the country people,the peasants,who everywhere had to struggle for their very existence with their feudal lords,spiritual and temporal.

The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great,decisive battles.

The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.

The war cry raised against the Church,by Luther,was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature;first,that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523),then the great Peasants'War,1525.Both were defeated,chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested,the burghers of the towns ?an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter.From that moment,the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power,and ended by blotting out Germany,for 200years,from the politically active nations of Europe.The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed,a religion adapted to absolute monarchy.No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.

But where Luther failed,Calvin won the day.Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time.His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness,but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him.It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth,but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers;and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution,when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones,when India and America were opened to the world,and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith ?the value of gold and silver ?began to totter and to break down.Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized,could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs,bishops,and lords?While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes,Calvinism founded a republic in Holland,and active republican parties in England,and,above all,Scotland.

In Calvinism,the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.This upheaval took place in England.The middle-class of the towns brought it on,and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out.Curiously enough,in all the three great bourgeois risings,the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting;and the peasantry is just the class that,the victory once gained,is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory.A hundred years after Cromwell,the yeomanry of england had almost disappeared.Anyhow,had it not been for that yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns,the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end,and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold.In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time,the revolution had to be carried considerably further ?exactly as in 1793in France and 1848in Germany.This seems,in fact,to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.

Well,upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily followed the inevitable reaction which,in its turn,went beyond the point where it might have maintained itself.After a series of oscillations,the new centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point.

The grand period of English history,known to respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion",and the struggles succeeding it,were brought to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians "the Glorious Revolution".

The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class and the ex-feudal landowners.The latter,though called,as now,the aristocracy,had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe in France became at a much later period:"The first bourgeois of the kingdom".

Fortunately for England,the old feudal barons had killed one another during the War of the Roses.Their successors,though mostly scions of the old families,had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new body,with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal.They fully understood the value of money,and at once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them with sheep.Henry VIII,while squandering the Church lands,created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale;the innumerable confiscation of estates,regranted to absolute or relative upstarts,and continued during the whole of the 17th century,had the same result.Consequently,ever since Henry VII,the English "aristocracy",far from counteracting the development of industrial production,had,on the contrary,sought to indirectly profit thereby;and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing,from economical or political reasons,to cooperate with the leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie.The compromise of 1689was,therefore,easily accomplished.The political spoils of "pelf and place"were left to the great landowning families,provided the economic interests of the financial,manufacturing,and commercial middle-class were sufficiently attended to.And these economic interests were at that time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation.There might be squabbles about matters of detail,but,on the whole,the aristocratic oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.

From that time,the bourgeoisie was a humble,but still a recognized,component of the ruling classes of England.With the rest of them,it had a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the nation.The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,or,as it was until lately called,of "natural superior"to his clerks,his work-people,his domestic servants.His interest was to get as much and as good work out of them as he could;for this end,they had to be trained to proper submission.He was himself religious;his religion had supplied the standard under which he had fought the king and the lords;he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors,and making them submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over them.In short,the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower orders",the great producing mass of the nation,and one of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.

There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the religious leanings of the bourgeoisie.That was the rise of materialism in England.

This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the middle-class;it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated men of the world,in contrast to religion,which was good enough for the uneducated masses,including the bourgeoisie.With Hobbes,it stepped on the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence;it called upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus ["Robust but malicious boy"]?to wit,the people.Similarly,with the successors of Hobbes,with Bolingbroke,Shaftesbury,etc.,the new deistic form of materialism remained an aristocratic,esoteric doctrine,and,therefore,hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois political connections.Accordingly,in opposition to the materialism and deism of the aristocracy,those Protestant sects which had furnished the flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to furnish the main strength of the progressive middle-class,and form even today the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".

In the meantime,materialism passed from England to France,where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers,a branch of Cartesianism.In France,too,it remained at first an exclusively aristocratic doctrine.But,soon,its revolutionary character asserted itself.The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters of religious belief;they extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political institution they met with;and to prove the claim of their doctrine to universal application,they took the shortest cut,and boldly applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they were named ?the Encyclopaedia.Thus,in one or the other of its two forms ?avowed materialism or deism ?it became the creed of the whole cultures youth of France;so much so that,when the Great Revolution broke out,the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and Terrorists,and furnished the text for the Declaration of the Rights of Man.The Great French Revolution was the third uprising of the bourgeoisie,but the first that had entirely cast off the religious cloak,and was fought out on undisguised political lines;it was the first,too,that was really fought out up to the destruction of one of the combatants,the aristocracy,and the complete triumph of the other,the bourgeoisie.

In England,the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary institutions,and the compromise between landlords and capitalists,found its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious preservation of the feudal forms of the law.In France,the Revolution constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past;it cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism,and created in the Code Civil a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law ?that almost perfect expression of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by Marx the production of commodities ?to modern capitalist conditions;so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms of the law of property in all other countries,not excepting England.

Let us,however,not forget that if English law continues to express the economic relations of capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the thing expressed,just as English spelling corresponds to English pronunciation?vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople ,said a Frenchman ?that same English law is the only one which has preserved through ages,nd transmitted to America and the Colonies,the best part of that old Germanic personal freedom,local self-government,and independence from all interference (but that of the law courts),which on the Continent has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy,and has nowhere been as yet fully recovered.

To return to our British bourgeois.The French Revolution gave him a splendid opportunity,with the help of the Continental monarchies,to destroy French maritime commerce,to annex French colonies,nd to crush the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry.That was one reason why he fought it.Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his grain.Not only its "execrable"terrorism,but the very attempt to carry bourgeois rule to extremes.What should the British bourgeois do without his aristocracy,that taught him manners,such as they were,and invented fashions for him ?that furnished officers for the army,which kept order at home,and the navy,which conquered colonial possessions and new markets aboard?There was,indeed,a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie,that minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the compromise;this section,composed chiefly of the less wealthy middle-class,did sympathize with the Revolution,but it was powerless in Parliament.

This,if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution,the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot,if the religious instincts of the masses were lost?The more materialism spread from France to neighboring countries,and was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents,notably by German philosophy,the more,in fact,materialism and free thought generally became,on the Continent,the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man,the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds.These creeds might differ from one another,but they were,all of them,distinctly religious,Christian creeds.

While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie in France,in England Watt,Arkwright,Cartwright,and others,initiated an industrial revolution,which completely shifted the centre of gravity of economic power.The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably faster than that of the landed aristocracy.Within the bourgeoisie itself,the financial aristocracy,the bankers,etc.,were more and more pushed into the background by the manufacturers.The compromise of 1689,even after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie,no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it.The character of these parties,too,had changed;the bourgeoisie of 1830was very different from that of the preceding century.The political power still left to the aristocracy,and used by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie,became incompatible with the new economic interests.A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary;it could end only in a victory of the new economic power.First,the Reform Act was pushed through,in spite of all resistance,under the impulse of the French Revolution of 1830.It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and powerful place in Parliament.Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move toward free-trade],which settled,once and for all,the supremacy of the bourgeoisie,and especially of its most active portion,the manufacturers,over the landed aristocracy.This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;it was,however,also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.

Whatever triumphs it obtained alter on,it had to share with a new social power ?first its ally,but soon its rival.

The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing capitalists,but also a class ?and a far more numerous one ?of manufacturing work-people.This class gradually increased in numbers,in proportion as the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another,and in the same proportion it increased its power.This power it proved as early as 1824,by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts forbidding combinations of workmen.During the Reform agitation,the workingmen constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party;the Act of 1832having excluded them from the suffrage,the formulated their demands in the People's Charter,and constituted themselves,in opposition to the great bourgeois Anti-Corn Law party,into an independent party,the Chartists,the first working-men's party of modern times.

Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March 1848,in which the working people played such a prominent part,and,at least in Paris,put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the point of view of capitalist society.And then came the general reaction.First,the defeat of the Chartists on April 10,1848;then the crushing of the Paris workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year;then the disasters of 1849in Italy,Hungary,South Germany,and at last the victory of Louis Bonaparte over Paris,December 2,1851.For a time,at least,the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down,but at what cost!If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious mood,how much more must he feel that necessity after all these experiences?Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers,he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands,year after year,upon the evangelization of the lower orders;not content with his own native religious machinery,he appealed to Brother Jonathan 1),the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade,and imported from America revivalism ,Moody and Sankey,and the like;and,finally,he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army,which revives the propaganda of early Christianity,appeals to the poor as the elect,fights capitalism in a religious way,and thus fosters an element of early Christian class antagonism,which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.

It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can in no European country get hold of political power ?at least for any length of time ?in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages.Even in France,where feudalism was completely extinguished,the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession of the Government for very short periods only.During Louis Philippe's reign,1830-48,a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom;by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification.

Under the Second Republic,1848-51,the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for three years only;their incapacity brought on the Second Empire.It is only now,in the Third Republic,that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept possession of the helm for more than 20years;and they are already showing lively signs of decadence.A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries like America,where feudalism was unknown,and society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis.And even in France and America,the successors of the bourgeoisie,the working people,are already knocking at the door.

In England,the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway.Even the victory of 1832left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the leading Government offices.The meekness with which the middle-class submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal manufacturer,Mr.W.A.Forster,in a public speech,implored the young men of Bradford to learn French,as a means to get on in the world,and quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when,as a Cabinet Minister,he had to move in society where French was,at least,as necessary as English!The fact was,the English middle-class of that time were,as a rule,quite uneducated upstarts,and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit,seasoned by business sharpness.2)Even now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show that the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough for the best education,and looks to something more modest.Thus,even after the repeal of the Corn Laws,it appeared a matter of course that the men who had carried the day?the Cobdens,Brights,Forsters,etc.

should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the country,until 20years afterwards a new Reform Act opened to them the door of the Cabinet.The English bourgeoisie are,up to the present day,so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep up,at their own expense and that of the nation,an ornamental caste of drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions;and they consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found worthy of admission into this select and privileged body,manufactured,after all,by themselves.

The industrial and commercial middle-class had,therefore,not yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political power when another competitor,the working-class,appeared on the stage.The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions,as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66(ascribed vulgarly to Free Trade alone,but due far more to the colossal development of railways,ocean steamers,and means of intercourse generally),had again driven the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party,of which they formed,as in pre-Chartist times,the Radical wing.Their claims to the franchise,however,gradually became irresistible;while the Whig leaders of the Liberals "funked",Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the boroughs,along with a redistribution of seats.Then followed the ballot;then,in 1884,the extension of household suffrage to the counties and a fresh redistribution of seats,by which electoral districts were,to some extent,equalized.

All these measures considerably increased the electoral power of the working-class,so much so that in at least 150to 200constituencies that class now furnished the majority of the voters.But parliamentary government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition;if the middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully called "our old nobility",the mass of the working-people then looked up with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters",the middle-class.Indeed,the British workman,some 15years ago,was the model workman,whose respectful regard for the position of his master,and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself,consoled our German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.

But the English middle-class ?good men of business as they are ?saw farther than the German professors.They had shared their powers but reluctantly with the working-class.They had learnt,during the Chartist years,what that puer robustus sed malitiosus ,the people,is capable of.And since that time,they had been compelled to incorporate the better part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom.Now,if ever,the people must be kept in order by moral means,and the first and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and remains?

religion.Hence the parsons'majorities on the School Boards,hence the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts of revivalism,from ritualism to the Salvation Army.

And now came the triumph of British respectability over the free thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois.The workmen of France and Germany had become rebellious.They were thoroughly infected with Socialism,and,for very good reasons,were not at all particular as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy.The puer robustus ,here,turned from day-to-day more malitiosus.Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop their free thought,as a youngster,when sea-sickness creeps upon him,quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board;one-by-one,the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior,spoke with respect of the Church,its dogmas and rites,and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped.French bourgeois dined maigre on Fridays,and German ones say out long Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays.

They had come to grief with materialism."Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden"?religion must be kept alive for the people ?that was the only and the last means to save society from utter ruin.Unfortunately for themselves,they did not find this out until they had done their level best to break up religion for ever.And now it was the turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say:"Why,you fools,I could have told you that 200years ago!"However,I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British,nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will stem the rising Proletarian tide.Tradition is a great retarding force,is the vis inertiae of history,but,being merely passive,is sure to be broken down;and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist society.If our juridical,philosophical,and religious ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given society,such ideas cannot,in the long run,withstand the effects of a complete change in these relations.And,unless we believe in supernatural revelation,we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a tottering society.

In fact,in England too,the working-people have begun to move again.

They are,no doubt,shackled by traditions of various kinds.Bourgeois traditions,such as the widespread belief that there can be but two parties,Conservatives and Liberals,and that the working-class must work out its salvation by and through the great Liberal Party.Working-men's traditions,inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action,such as the exclusion,from ever so many old Trade Unions,of all applicants who have not gone through a regular apprenticeship;which means the breeding,by every such union,of its own blacklegs.But,for all that,the English working-class is moving,as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists.It moves,like all things in England,with a slow and measured step,with hesitation here,with more or less unfruitful,tentative attempts there;it moves now and then with an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism,while it gradually absorbs the substance;and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the workers after another.It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled laborers of the East End of London,and we all know what a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return.And if the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of some people,let them not forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English character,and that,if a step in advance is once gained in England,it is,as a rule,never lost afterwards.If the sons of the old Chartists,for reasons unexplained above,were not quite up to the mark,the grandsons bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.

But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend upon England alone.It can only be secured by the cooperation of,at least,England,France,and Germany.In both the latter countries,the working-class movement is well ahead of England.In Germany,it is even within measurable distance of success.The progress it has there made during the last 25years is unparalleled.It advances with ever-increasing velocity.If the German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political capacity,discipline,courage,energy,and perseverance,the German working-class have given ample proof of all these qualities.Four hundred years ago,Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class;as things are now,is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany will be the scene,too,of the first great victory of the European proletariat?

FREDERICK ENGELS

London April 20,1892

Notes2"Brother Jonathan"?A sort of Anglo-Christian "Uncle Sam".

[2]And even in business matters,the conceit of national Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser.Up to quite recently,the average English manufacturer considered it derogatory for an Englishman to speak any language but his own,and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact that "poor devils"of foreigners settled in England and took off his hands the trouble of disposing of his products abroad.He never noticed that these foreigners,mostly Germans,thus got command of a very large part of British foreign trade,imports and exports,and that the direct foreign trade of Englishmen became limited,almost entirely,to the colonies,China,the United States,and South America.Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other Germans abroad,who gradually organized a complete network of commercial colonies all over the world.But,when Germany,about 40years ago [c.1850],seriously began manufacturing for export,this network served her admirably in her transformation,in so short a time,from a corn-exporting into a first-rate manufacturing country.Then,about 10years ago,the British manufacturer got frightened,and asked his ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his customers together.The unanimous answer was:

(1)You don't learn customer's language but expect him to speak your own;(2)You don't even try to suit your customer's wants,habits,and tastes,but expect him to conform to your English ones.

Socialism:Utopian and Scientific (Introduction -Materialism)Fredrick Engels Socialism:Utopian and Scientific 1892English Edition Introduction [General Introduction and the History of Materialism]

The present little book is,originally,part of a larger whole.About 1875,Dr.E.Duhring,privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage]at Berlin University,suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism,and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory,but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society.As a matter of course,he fell foul of his predecessors;above all,he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the same time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany ?Eisenachers and Lasselleans ?had just effected their fusip;[at the Gotha Unification Congress],and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength,but,was what more,the faculty of employing the whole of this strength against the common enemy.The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power.But,to make it a power,the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled.And Dr.Duhring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect,the nucleus of a future separate party.It,thus,became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us,and to fight out the struggle,whether we liked it or not.

This,however,though it might not be an over-difficult,was evidently a long-winded business.As is well-known,we Germans are of a terribly ponderous Grundlichkeit,radical profundity or profound radicality,whatever you may like to call it.Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers a new doctrine,he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system.

He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered,crowning theory.And Dr.Duhring,in this respect,was quite up to the national mark.Nothing less than a complete "System of Philosophy",mental,moral,natural,and historical;a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism";and,finally,a "Critical History of Political Economy"?three big volumes in octavo,heavy extrinsically and intrinsically,three army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general,and against Marx in particular ?in fact,an attempt at a complete "revolution in science"?these were what I should have to tackle.I had to treat of all and every possible subject,from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism;from the eternity of matter and motion,to the perishable nature of moral ideas;from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society.Anyhow,the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing,in opposition to him,and in a more connected form than had previously been done,the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects.And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig Vorwarts,the chief organ of the Socialist party [1],and later on as a book:"Herr Eugen Duhrings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft"(Mr.E.Duhring's "Revolution in Science"),a second edition of which appeared in Zurich,1886.

At the request of my friend,Paul Lafargue,now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies,I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet,which he translated and published in 1880,under the title:

"Socialisme utopiqueet Socialisme scientifique".From this French text,a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared.In 1883,out German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language.Italian,Russian,Danish,Dutch,and Roumanian translations,based upon the German text,have since been published.Thus,the present English edition,this little book circulates in 10languages.I am not aware that any other Socialist work,not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848,or Marx's Capital ,has been so often translated.In Germany,it has had four editions of about 20,000copies in all.

The Appendix,"The Mark",was written with the intention of spreading among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history and development of landed property in Germany.This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people of the towns was in a fair way of completion,and when the agricultural laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand.This appendix has been included in the translation,as the original forms of tenure of land common to all Teutonic tribes,and the history of their decay,are even less known in England and in Germany.I have left the text as it stands in the original,without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky,according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account by a large patriarchal family community,embracing several generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga),and that the partition,later on,took place when the community had increased,so as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management.Kovalevsky is probably quite right,but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].

The economic terms used in this work,as afar as they are new,agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital.We call "production of commodities"that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers,but also for the purpose of exchange;that is,as commodities ,not as use values.This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time;it attains its full development under capitalist production only,that is,under conditions where the capitalist,the owner of the means of production,employs,for wages,laborers,people deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power,and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay.We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:

handicraft,small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices,where each laborer produces a complete article;manufacture,where greater numbers of workmen,grouped in one large establishment,produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor,each workman performing only one partial operation,so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all;modern industry,where the product is produced by machinery driven by power,and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting the performance of the mechanical agent.

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public.But,if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability",we should be even worse off than we are.This book defends what we call "historical materialism",and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers."Agnosticism"might be tolerated,but materialism is utterly inadmissible.

And,yet,the original home of all modern materialism,from the 17th century onwards,is England.

"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.

Already the British schoolman,Duns Scotus,asked,'whether it was impossible for the matter to think?'

"In order to effect this miracle,he took refuge in God's omnipotence ?i.e.,he made theology preach materialism.Moreover,he was a nominalist.Nominalism,the first form of materialism,is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.

"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon.

To him,natural philosophy is the only true philosophy,and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.

Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae,Democritus and his atoms,he often quotes as his authorities.According to him,the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge.All science is based on experience,and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation.Induction,analysis,comparison,observation,experiment,are the principal forms of such a rational method.Among the qualities inherent in matter,motion is the first and foremost,not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion,but chiefly in the form of an impulse,a vital spirit,a tension ?or a 'qual',to use a term of Jakob Bohme';[2]?of matter.

"In Bacon,its first creator,materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development.On the one hand,matter,surrounded by a sensuous,poetic glamor,seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles.On the other,the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.

"In its further evolution,materialism becomes one-sided.

Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism.Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom,it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician;geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.

Materialism takes to misanthropy.If it is to overcome its opponent,misanthropic,flashless spiritualism,and that on the latter's own ground,materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic.Thus,from a sensual,it passes into an intellectual,entity;but thus,too,it evolves all the consistency,regardless of consequences,characteristic of the intellect.

"Hobbes,as Bacon's continuator,argues thus:if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses,then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms,divested of their sensual forms,of the real world.Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms.One name may be applied to more than one of them.There may even be names of names.It would imply a contradiction if,on the one hand,we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation,and,on the other,that a word was more than a word;that,besides the beings known to us by our senses,beings which are one and all individuals,there existed also beings of a general,not individual,nature.An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body.

Body,being,substance,are but different terms for the same reality.It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks.This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world.The word infinite is meaningless,unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition.Only material things being perceptible to us,we cannot know anything about the existence of God.My own existence alone is certain.Every human passion is a mechanical movement,which has a beginning and an end.The objects of impulse are what we call good.Man is subject to the same laws as nature.Power and freedom are identical.

"Hobbes had systematized Bacon,without,however,furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle,the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation.It was Locke who,in his Essay on the Human Understanding ,supplied this proof.

"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism;Collins,Dodwell,Coward,Hartley,Priestley,similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism.

At all events,for practical materialists,Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion."Karl Marx The Holy Family p.201-204Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism.

If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment the paid their ancestors,more's the pity.It is none the less undeniable that Bacon,Hobbes,and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the 18th century,in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen,a pre-eminently French century,even before that crowning French Revolution,the results of which we outsides,in England as well as Germany,are still trying to acclimatize.

There is no denying it.About the middle of this century,what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England,was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class.We,at that time,were all materialists,or,at least,very advanced free-thinkers,and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles,and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book of Genesis;while,in order to find people who dared to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters,you had to go amongst the uneducated,the "great unwashed",as they were then called,the working people,especially the Owenite Socialists.

But England has been "civilized"since then.The exhibition of 1851sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness.England became gradually internationalized,in diet,in manners,in ideas;so much so that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here.Anyhow,the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851known only to the aristocracy)has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental scepticism in matters religious,and it has come to this,that agnosticism,though not yet considered "the thing"quite as much as the Church of England,is yet very nearly on a par,as far as respectability goes,with Baptism,and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army.And I cannot help believing that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled notions"are not of foreign origin,are not "made in Germany",like so many other articles of daily use,but are undoubtedly Old English,and that their British originators 200years ago went a good deal further than their descendants now dare to venture.

What,indeed,is agnosticism but,to use an expressive Lancashire term,"shamefaced"materialism?The agnostic's conception of Nature is materialistic throughout.The entire natural world is governed by law,and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without.But,he adds,we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe.Now,this might hold good at the time when Laplace,to Napoleon's question,why,in the great astronomer's Treatise on Celestial Mechanics ,the Creator was not even mentioned,proudly replied""I had no need of this hypothesis."But,nowadays,in our evolutionary conception of the universe,there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler;and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world,implies a contradiction in terms,and,as it seems to me,a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.

Again,our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses.But,he adds,how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them?And he proceeds to inform us that,whenever we speak of objects,or their qualities,of which he cannot know anything for certain,but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses.Now,this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation.But before there was argumentation,there was action.Im Anfang war die That.[from Goethe's Faust :"In the beginning was the deed."]And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it.The proof of the pudding is in the eating.From the moment we turn to our own use these objects,according to the qualities we perceive in them,we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception.If these perceptions have been wrong,then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong,and our attempt must fail.But,if we succeed in accomplishing our aim,if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it,and does answer the purpose we intended it for,then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities,so far ,agree with reality outside ourselves.And,whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure,then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail;we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial,or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them ?what we call defective reasoning.

So long as we take care to train our senses properly,and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used,so long as we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived.

Not in one single instance,so far,have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception,scientifically controlled,induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are,by their very nature,at variance with reality,or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say:We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing,but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself.This "thing-in-itself"is beyond our ken.To this Hegel,long since,has replied:If you know all the qualities of a thing,you know the thing itself;nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us;and,when your senses have taught you that fact,you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself,Kant's celebrated unknowable Ding an sich.To which it may be added that in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect,behind the little we knew about each of them,a mysterious "thing-in-itself".But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped,analyzed,and,what is more,reproduced by the giant progress of science;and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable.To the chemistry of the first half of this century,organic substances were such mysterious object;now we learn to build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes.Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of no-matter-what body is known,it can be built up from its elements.We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances,the albuminous bodies;but there is no reason why we should not,if only after centuries,arrive at the knowledge and,armed with it,produce artificial albumen.But,if we arrive at that,we shall at the same time have produced organic life,for life,from its lowest to its highest forms,is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies.

As soon,however,as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations,he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is.He may say that,as far as we know,matter and motion,or as it is now called,energy,can neither be created nor destroyed,but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other.But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case,he will quickly put you out of court.If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto ,he will have none of it in concreto.As far as we know and can know,he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe;as far as we are concerned,matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated;for us,mind is a mode of energy,a function of the brain;all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws,and so forth.

Thus,as far as he is a scientific man,as far as he knows anything,he is a materialist;outside his science,in spheres about which he knows nothing,he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.

At all events,one thing seems clear:even if I was an agnostic,it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched out in this little book as "historical agnosticism".Religious people would laugh at me,agnostics would indignantly ask,was I making fun of them?

And,thus,I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use,in English as well as in so many other languages,the term "historical materialism",to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society,in the changes in the modes of production and exchange,in the consequent division of society into distinct classes,and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

This indulgence will,perhaps,be accorded to me all the sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British respectability.

I have mentioned the fact that,about 40or 50years ago,any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class.

I am now going to prove that the respectable English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner.

Its religious leanings can be explained.

Notes 1Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78,after the Gotha Unification Congress.

[2]"Qual"is a philosophical play upon words.Qual literally means torture,a pain which drives to action of some kind;at the same time,the mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas ;his "qual"was the activating principle arising from,and promoting in its turn,the spontaneous development of the thing,relation,or person subject to it,in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without.[Note by Engels to the English Edition]

Socialism:Utopian and Scientific (Chpt.1)Fredrick Engels Socialism:Utopian and Scientific I[The Development of Utopian Socialism]

Modern Socialism is,in its essence,the direct product of the recognition,on the one hand,of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors,between capitalists and wage-workers;on the other hand,of the anarchy existing in production.But,in its theoretical form,modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century.Like every new theory,modern Socialism had,at first,to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand,however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.

The great men,who in France prepared men's minds for the coming revolution,were themselves extreme revolutionists.They recognized no external authority of any kind whatever.Religion,natural science,society,political institutions ?everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism:everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence.Reason became the sole measure of everything.It was the time when,as Hegel says,the world stood upon its hea ;[1];first in the sense that the human head,and the principles arrived at by its thought,claimed to be the basis of all human action and association;but by and by,also,in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had,in fact,to be turned upside down.Every form of society and government then existing,every old traditional notion,was flung into the lumber-room as irrational;the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices;everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt.Now,for the first time,appeared the light of day,the kingdom of reason;henceforth superstition,injustice,privilege,oppression,were to be superseded by eternal truth,eternal Right,equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie;that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice;that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law;that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man;and that the government of reason,the Contrat Social of Rousseau,came into being,and only could come into being,as a democratic bourgeois republic.The great thinkers of the 18th century could,no more than their predecessors,go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.

But,side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal nobility and the burghers,who claimed to represent all the rest of society,was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited,of rich idlers and poor workers.

It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing not one special class,but the whole of suffering humanity.Still further.From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis:capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers,and,in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois,the guild journeyman and the day-laborer,outside the guilds,developed into the proletarian.

And although,upon the whole,the bourgeoisie,in their struggle with the nobility,could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period,yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner,more or less developed,of the modern proletariat.For example,at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants'War,the Anabaptists and Thomas Munzer;in the great English Revolution,the Levellers;in the great French Revolution,Babeuf.

These were theoretical enunciations,corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed;in the 16th and 17th centuries,Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions 2);in the 18th century,actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably).The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights;it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals.It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished,but class distinctions themselves.A Communism,ascetic,denouncing all the pleasures of life,Spartan,was the first form of the new teaching.Then came the three great Utopians:Saint-Simon,to whom the middle-class movement,side by side with the proletarian,still had a certain significance;Fourier and Owen,who in the country where capitalist production was most developed,and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this,worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.

One thing is common to all three.Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had,in the meantime,produced.Like the French philosophers,they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with,but all humanity at once.

Like them,they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice,but this kingdom,as they see it,is as far as Heaven from Earth,from that of the French philosophers.

For,to our three social reformers,the bourgeois world,based upon the principles of these philosophers,is quite as irrational and unjust,and,therefore,finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society.If pure reason and justice have not,hitherto,ruled the world,this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them.What was wanted was the individual man of genius,who has now arisen and who understands the truth.That he has now arisen,that the truth has now been clearly understood,is not an inevitable event,following of necessity in the chains of historical development,but a mere happy accident.He might just as well have been born 500years earlier,and might then have spared humanity 500years of error,strife,and suffering.

We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century,the forerunners of the Revolution,appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is.

A rational government,rational society,were to be founded;everything that ran counter to eternal reasons was to be remorselessly done away with.

We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understand of the 18th century citizen,just then evolving into the bourgeois.

The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government.

But the new order of things,rational enough as compared with earlier conditions,turned out to be by no means absolutely rational.The state based upon reason completely collapsed.Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror,from which the bourgeoisie,who had lost confidence in their own political capacity,had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate,and,finally,under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism.The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest.The society based upon reason had fared no better.The antagonism between rich and poor,instead of dissolving into general prosperity,had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges,which had to some extent bridged it over,and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church.The "freedom of property"from feudal fetters,now veritably accomplished,turned out to be,for the small capitalists and small proprietors,the freedom to sell their small property,crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords,to these great lords,and thus,as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned,became "freedom from property".The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society.Cash payment became more and more,in Carlyle's phrase,the sole nexus between man and man.The number of crimes increased from year to year.Formerly,the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight;though not eradicated,they were now at any rate thrust into the background.In their stead,the bourgeois vices,hitherto practiced in secret,began to blossom all the more luxuriantly.Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating.The "fraternity"of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition.

Oppression by force was replaced by corruption;the sword,as the first social lever,by gold.The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers.Prostitution increased to an extent never head of.Marriage itself remained,as before,the legally recognized form,the official cloak of prostitution,and,moreover,was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.

In a word,compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers,the social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason"were bitterly disappointing caricatures.All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment,and they came with the turn of the century.

In 1802,Saint-Simon's Geneva letters appeared;in 1808appeared Fourier's first work,although the groundwork of his theory dated from 1799;on January 1,1800,Robert Owen undertook the direction of New Lanark.

At this time,however,the capitalist mode of production,and with it the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,was still very incompletely developed.Modern Industry,which had just arisen in England,was still unknown in France.But Modern Industry develops,on the one hand,the conflicts which make absolutely necessary a revolution in the mode of production,and the doing away with its capitalistic character ?conflicts not only between the classes begotten of it,but also between the very productive forces and the forms of exchange created by it.And,on the other hand,it develops,in these very gigantic productive forces,the means of ending these conflicts.If,therefore,about the year 1800,the conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning to take shape,this holds still more fully as to the means of ending them.

The "have-nothing"masses of Paris,during the Reign of Terror,were able for a moment to gain the mastery,and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie themselves.But,in doing so,they only proved how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining.The proletariat,which then for the first time evolved itself from these "have-nothing"masses as the nucleus of a new class,as yet quite incapable of independent political action,appeared as an oppressed,suffering order,to whom,in its incapacity to help itself,help could,at best,be brought in from without or down from above.

This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism.

To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.The solution of the social problems,which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions,the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain.Society presented nothing but wrongs;to remove these was the task of reason.It was necessary,then,to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda,and,wherever it was possible,by the example of model experiments.These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian;the more completely they were worked out in detail,the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

These facts once established,we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question,now wholly belonging to the past.We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies,which today only make us smile,and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning,as compared with such "insanity".For ourselves,we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering,and to which these Philistines are blind.

Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution,at the outbreak of which he was not yet 30.The Revolution was the victory of the 3rd estate ?i.e.,of the great masses of the nation,working in production and in trade,over the privileged idle classes,the nobles and the priests.But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a smaller part of this "estate",as the conquest of political power by the socially privileged section of it ?i.e.,the propertied bourgeoisie.

And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution,partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church,confiscated and afterwards put up for sale,and partly by frauds upon the nation by means of army contracts.It was the domination of these swindlers that,under the Directorate,brought France to the verge of ruin,and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his coup detat.

Hence,to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers"and "idlers".The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes,but also all who,without taking any part in production or distribution,lived on their incomes.And the workers were not only the wage-workers,but also the manufacturers,the merchants,the bankers.That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved,and was by the Revolution finally settled.That the non-possessing classes had not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror.Then,who was to lead and command?According to Saint-Simon,science and industry,both united by a new religious bond,destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation ?a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity".But science,that was the scholars;and industry,that was,in the first place,the working bourgeois,manufacturers,merchants,bankers.These bourgeois were,certainly,intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public officials,of social trustees;but they were still to hold,vis-a-vis of the workers,a commanding and economically privileged position.The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit.This conception was in exact keeping with a time in which Modern Industry in France and,with it,the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat was only just coming into existence.But what Saint-Simon especially lays stress upon is this:

what interests him first,and above all other things,is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and the most poor ("la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre").

Already in his Geneva letters,Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that "all men ought to work".In the same work he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses.

"See,"says he to them,"what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there;they brought about a famine."But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war,and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie,but between nobility,bourgeoisie,and the non-possessors,was,in the year 1802,a most pregnant discovery.

In 1816,he declares that politics is the science of production,and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics.The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo.Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production ?that is to say,the "abolition of the state",about which recently there has been so much noise.

Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries,when in 1814,immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris,and again in 1815,during the Hundred Days'War,he proclaims the alliance of France and England,and then of both of these countries,with Germany,as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe.To preach to the French in 1815an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight.

If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view,by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo,we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society,genuinely French and witty,but not upon that account any the less thorough.Fourier takes the bourgeoisie,their inspired prophets before the Revolution,and their interested eulogists after it,at their own word.He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world.He confronts it with the earlier philosophers'dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign,of a civilization in which happiness should be universal,of an illimitable human perfectibility,and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time.He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases,and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

Fourier is not only a critic,his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist,and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time.

He depicts,with equal power and charm,the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution,and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in,and characteristic of,French commerce at that time.

Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes,and the position of woman in bourgeois society.He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society.

He divides its whole course,thus far,into four stages of evolution?

savagery,barbarism,the patriarchate,civilization.This last is identical with the so-called civil,or bourgeois,society of today ?i.e.,with the social order that came in with the 16th century.He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence,complex,ambiguous,equivocal,hypocritical"?that civilization moves "in a vicious circle",in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them;hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain,or pretends to want to attain,so that,e.g.,"under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself".

Fourier,as we see,uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary,Hegel.Using these same dialectics,he argues against talk about illimitable human perfectibility,that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent,and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race.As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth,Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.

Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land,in England a quieter,but not on that account less tremendous,revolution was going on.Steam and the new tool-making machinery were transforming manufacture into modern industry,and thus revolutionizing the whole foundation of bourgeois society.The sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period changed into a veritable storm and stress period of production.

With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up into large capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on.Between these,instead of the former stable middle-class,an unstable mass of artisans and small shopkeepers,the most fluctuating portion of the population,now led a precarious existence.

The new mode of production was,as yet,only at the beginning of its period of ascent;as yet it was the normal,regular method of production ?the only one possible under existing conditions.Nevertheless,even then it was producing crying social abuses ?the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns;the loosening of all traditional moral bonds,of patriarchal subordination,of family relations;overwork,especially of women and children,to a frightful extent;complete demoralization of the working-class,suddenly flung into altogether new conditions,from the country into the town,from agriculture into modern industry,from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change from day to day.

At this juncture,there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29-years-old ?a man of almost sublime,childlike simplicity of character,and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men.Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers:that man's character is the product,on the one hand,of heredity;on the other,of the environment of the individual during his lifetime,and especially during his period of development.In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion,and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly.He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favorite theory,and so of bringing order out of chaos.

He had already tried it with success,as superintendent of more than 500men in a Manchester factory.From 1800to 1829,he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark,in Scotland,as managing partner,along the same lines,but with greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European reputation.A population,originally consisting of the most diverse and,for the most part,very demoralized elements,a population that gradually grew to 2,500,he turned into a model colony,in which drunkenness,police,magistrates,lawsuits,poor laws,charity,were unknown.And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings,and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation.He was the founder of infant schools,and introduced them first at New Lanark.At the age of two,the children came to school,where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarely be got home again.Whilst his competitors worked their people 13or 14hours a day,in New Lanark the working-day was only 10and a half hours.When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months,his workers received their full wages all the time.And with all this the business more than doubled in value,and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.

In spite of all this,Owen was not content.The existence which he secured for his workers was,in his eyes,still far from being worthy of human beings."The people were slaves at my mercy."The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions,much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.

"And yet,the working part of this population of 2,500persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as,less than half a century before,it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000to create.I asked myself,what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?"[3]

The answer was clear.It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5per cent on the capital they had laid out,in addition to over 300,000pounds clear profit.And that which held for New Lanark held to a still greater extent for all the factories in England.

"If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,imperfectly as it has been applied,the wars of Europe,in opposition to Napoleon,and to support the aristocratic principles of society,could not have been maintained.And yet this new power was the creation of the working-classes."Note,l.c.,p.22.

To them,therefore,the fruits of this new power belonged.The newly-created gigantic productive forces,hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses,offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society;they were destined,as the common property of all,to be worked for the common good of all.

Owen's communism was based upon this purely business foundation,the outcome,so to say,of commercial calculation.Throughout,it maintained this practical character.Thus,in 1823,Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies,and drew up complete estimates of costs of founding them,yearly expenditure,and probably revenue.And in his definite plan for the future,the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge ?ground plan,front and side and bird's-eye views all included ?that the Owen method of social reform once accepted,there is from the practical point of view little to be said against the actual arrangement of details.

His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen's life.As long as he was simply a philanthropist,he was rewarded with nothing but wealth,applause,honor,and glory.He was the most popular man in Europe.Not only men of his own class,but statesmen and prince listened to him approvingly.But when he came out with his Communist theories that was quite another thing.Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform:private property,religion,the present form of marriage.

He knew what confronted him if he attacked these?outlawry,excommunication from official society,the loss of his whole social position.But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences,and what he had foreseen happened.Banished from official society,with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press,ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America,in which he sacrificed all his fortune,he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for 30years.Every social movement,every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.He forced through in 1819,after five years'fighting,the first law limiting the hours of labor of women and children in factories.He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association.He introduced as transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society,on the one hand,cooperative societies for retail trade and production.These have since that time,at least,given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary.On the other hand,he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes,whose unit was a single hour of work;institutions necessarily doomed to failure,but completely anticipating Proudhon's bank of exchange of a much later period,and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills,but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.

The Utopians'mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the 19th century,and still governs some of them.Until very recently,all French and English Socialists did homage to it.The earlier German Communism,including that of Weitling,was of the same school.To all these,Socialism is the expression of absolute truth,reason and justice,and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power.And as an absolute truth is independent of time,space,and of the historical development of man,it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.With all this,absolute truth,reason,and justice are different with the founder of each different school.And as each one's special kind of absolute truth,reason,and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding,his conditions of existence,the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training,there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another.Hence,from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic,average Socialism,which,as a matter of fact,has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England.

Hence,a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion:a mish-mash of such critical statements,economic theories,pictures of future society by the founders of different sects,as excite a minimum of opposition;a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate,like rounded pebbles in a brook.

To make a science of Socialism,it had first to be placed upon a real basis.

Notes [1]This is the passage of the French Revolution:

"Thought,the concept of law,all at once made itself felt,and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand.

In this conception of law,therefore,a constitution has now been established,and henceforth everything must be cased upon this.Since the Sun had been in the firmament,and the planets circled around him,the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head ?i.e.,on the Idea ?and building reality after this image.Anaxagoras first said that the Nous,reason,rules the world;but now,for the first time,had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality.And this was a magnificent sunrise.All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day.A sublime emotion swayed men at that time,an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world,as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world."[Hegel:"The Philosophy of history",1840,p.535]

Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings,subversive and to the common danger,by the late Professor Hegel?

2Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists Thomas More (16th century)and Tommaso Campanella (17th century).

[3]From The Revolution in Mind and Practice ,p.21,a memorial addressed to all the "red Republicans,Communists and Socialists of Europe",and sent to the provisional government of France,1848,and also "to Queen Victoria and her responsible advisers."Socialism:Utopian and Scientific (Chpt.2)Fredrick Engels Socialism:Utopian and Scientific II[The Science of Dialectics]

In the meantime,along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century,had arisen the new German philosophy,culminating in Hegel.