Georgi Plekhanov 1907

Fundamental Problems of Marxism

Source: Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 3, Progress Publishers (Moscow, 1976), pp. 117-83;

Transcribed: for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

According to the Soviet editors: ‘This work was written in November and December 1907 for the collection of articles which was being prepared for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marx’s death. For a number of reasons this collection never came out, but the article was published in pamphlet form in 1908.’

Marxism is an integral world-outlook. Expressed in a nutshell, it is contemporary materialism, at present the highest stage in the development of that view upon the world whose foundations were laid down in ancient Greece by Democritus, [1] and in part by the Ionian thinkers who preceded that philosopher. What was known as hylozoism was nothing but a naive materialism. It is to Karl Marx and his friend Frederick Engels that the main credit for the development of present-day materialism must no doubt go. The historical and economic aspects of this world-outlook, that is, what is known as historical materialism and the closely related sum of views on the tasks, method and categories of political economy, and on the economic development of society, especially capitalist society, are in their fundamentals almost entirely the work of Marx and Engels. That which was introduced into these fields by their precursors should be regarded merely as the preparatory work of amassing material, often copious and valuable, but not as yet systematised or illuminated by a single fundamental idea, and therefore not appraised or utilised in its real significance. What Marx and Engels’ followers in Europe and America have done in these fields is merely a more or less successful elaboration of specific problems, sometimes, it is true, of the utmost importance. That is why the term ‘Marxism’ is often used to signify only these two aspects of the present-day materialist world-outlook not only among the ‘general public’, who have not yet achieved a deep understanding of philosophical theories, but even among people, both in Russia and the entire civilised world, who consider themselves faithful followers of Marx and Engels. In such cases these two aspects are looked upon as something independent of ‘philosophical materialism’, and at times as something almost opposed to it. [2] And since these two aspects cannot but hang in mid-air when they are torn out of the general context of cognate views constituting their theoretical foundation, those who perform that tearing-out operation naturally feel an urge to ‘substantiate Marxism’ anew by joining it – again quite arbitrarily and most frequently under the influence of philosophical moods prevalent at the time among ideologists of the bourgeoisie – with some philosopher or another: with Kant, Mach, Avenarius or Ostwald, and of late with Joseph Dietzgen. [3] True, the philosophical views of J Dietzgen have arisen quite independently of bourgeois influences and are in considerable measure related to the philosophical views of Marx and Engels. The latter views, however, possess an incomparably more consistent and rich content, and for that reason alone cannot be supplemented by Dietzgen’s teachings but can only be popularised by them. No attempts have yet been made to ‘supplement Marx’ with Thomas Aquinas. It is however quite feasible that, despite the Pope’s recent encyclical against the Modernists, the Catholic world will at some time produce from its midst a thinker capable of performing this feat in the sphere of theory. [4]

I

Attempts to show that Marxism must be ‘supplemented’ by one philosopher or another are usually backed up with reference to the fact that Marx and Engels did not anywhere set forth their philosophical views. This reasoning is hardly convincing, however, apart from the consideration that, even if these views were indeed not set forth anywhere, that could provide no logical reason to have them replaced by the views of any random thinker who, in the main, holds an entirely different point of view. It should be remembered that we have sufficient literary material at our disposal to form a correct idea of the philosophical views of Marx and Engels. [5]

In their final shape, these views were fairly fully set forth, although in a polemical form, in the first part of Engels’ book Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (of which there are several Russian translations). Then there is a splendid booklet by the same author, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (which I have translated into Russian and supplied with a preface and explanatory notes; it has been published by Mr Lvovich), in which the views constituting the philosophical foundation of Marxism are expounded in a positive form. [6] A brief but vivid account of the same views, related to agnosticism, was given by Engels in his preface to the English translation of the pamphlet The Development of Scientific Socialism (translated into German, and published under the title of Über den historischen Materialismus in Neue Zeit, nos 1 and 2, 1892-93). As for Marx, I will mention as important for an understanding of the philosophical aspect of his teachings, in the first place, the characterisation of materialist dialectic – as distinct from Hegel’s idealist dialectic – given in the afterword to the Second German edition of Volume 1 of Capital, and, secondly, the numerous remarks made en passant in the same volume. Also significant in certain respects are some of the pages in La Misère de la philosophie (which has been translated into Russian). Finally, the process of the development of Marx and Engels’ philosophical views is revealed with sufficient clarity in their early writings, republished by F Mehring under the title of Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, etc (Stuttgart, 1902).

In his dissertation Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie, as well as in several articles republished by Mehring in Volume 1 of the publication just mentioned, the young Marx appears before us as an idealist pur sang of the Hegelian school. However, in the articles which have now been included in the same volume and which first appeared in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, [7] Marx – like Engels, who also collaborated in the Jahrbücher – was a firm adherent of Feuerbachian ‘humanism’.[8] Die heilige Familie, order Kritik der kritischen Kritik, which appeared in 1845 and has been republished in Volume 2 of the Mehring publication, shows us our two authors, that is, both Marx and Engels, as having made several important steps in the further development of Feuerbach’s philosophy. The direction they gave to this elaboration can be seen from the eleven Theses on Feuerbach written by Marx in the spring of 1845, and published by Engels as an appendix to the aforementioned pamphlet Ludwig Feuerbach. In short, there is no lack of material here; the only thing needed is the ability to make use of it, that is, the need to have the proper training for its understanding. Present-day readers, however, do not have the training required for that understanding, and consequently do not know how to make use of it.

Why is that so? For a variety of reasons. One of the principal reasons is that nowadays there is, in the first place, little knowledge of Hegelian philosophy, without which it is difficult to learn Marx’s method, and, in the second place, little knowledge of the history of materialism, the absence of which does not permit present-day readers to form a clear idea of the doctrine of Feuerbach, who was Marx’s immediate precursor in the field of philosophy, and in considerable measure worked out the philosophical foundation of what can be called the world-outlook of Marx and Engels.

Nowadays Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ is usually described as something very vague and indefinite. FA Lange, who has done so much to spread, both among the ‘general public’ and in the learned world, an absolutely false view of the essence of materialism and of its history, refused to recognise Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ as a materialist teaching. FA Lange’s example is being followed, in this respect, by almost all who have written on Feuerbach in Russia and other countries. PA Berlin too seems to have been affected by this influence, since he depicts Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ as a kind of materialism that is not quite ‘pure’. [9] I must admit that I do not know for certain how this question is regarded by Franz Mehring, whose knowledge of philosophy is the best, and probably unique, among German Social-Democrats. But it is perfectly clear to me that it was the materialist that Marx and Engels saw in Feuerbach. True, Engels speaks of Feuerbach’s inconsistency, but that does not in the least prevent him from recognising the fundamental propositions of his philosophy as purely materialist. [10] But then these propositions cannot be viewed otherwise by anybody who has gone to the trouble of making a study of them.

II

I am well aware that in saying all this I risk surprising very many of my readers. I am not afraid to do so; the ancient thinker was right in saying that astonishment is the mother of philosophy. For the reader not to remain at the stage, so to say, of astonishment, I shall first of all recommend that he ask himself what Feuerbach meant when, while giving a terse but vivid outline of his philosophical curriculum vitae, he wrote: ‘God was my first thought, Reason the second, and Man the third and last thought.’ I contend that this question is conclusively answered in the following meaningful words of Feuerbach himself:

In the controversy between materialism and spiritualism... the human head is under discussion... once we have learnt what kind of matter the brain is made up of, we shall soon arrive at a clear view upon all other matter as well, matter in general. [11]

Elsewhere he says that his ‘anthropology’, that is, his ‘humanism’, merely means that man takes for God that which is his own essence, his own spirit. [12] He goes on to say that Descartes did not eschew this ‘anthropological’ point of view. [13] How is all this to be understood? It means that Feuerbach made ‘Man’ the point of departure of his philosophical reasoning only because it was from that point of departure that he hoped the sooner to achieve his aim – to bring forth a correct view upon matter in general and its relation to the ‘spirit’. Consequently what we have here is a methodological device, whose value was conditioned by circumstances of time and place, that is, by the thinking habits of the learned, or simply educated, Germans of the time, [14] and not by any specificity of world-outlook.[15]

The above quotation from Feuerbach regarding the ‘human head’ shows that when he wrote these words the problem of ‘the kind of matter the brain is made up of’ was solved by him in a ‘purely’ materialistic sense. This solution was also accepted by Marx and Engels. It provided the foundation of their own philosophy, as can be seen with the utmost clarity from Engels’ works, so often quoted here – Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring. That is why we must make a closer study of this solution; in doing so, we shall at the same time be studying the philosophical aspect of Marxism.

In an article entitled ‘Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie’, which came out in 1842 and, judging by the facts, had a strong influence on Marx, Feuerbach said that ‘the real relation of thinking to being is only as follows: being is the subject; thinking, the predicate. Thinking is conditioned by being, and not being by thinking. Being is conditioned by itself... has its foundation in itself.’ [16]

This view on the relation of being to thinking, which Marx and Engels made the foundation of the materialistic explanation of history, is a most important outcome of the criticism of Hegel’s idealism already completed in its main features by Feuerbach, a criticism whose conclusions can be set forth in a few words.

Feuerbach considered that Hegel’s philosophy had removed the contradiction between being and thinking, a contradiction that had expressed itself in particular relief in Kant. However, as Feuerbach thought, it removed that contradiction, while continuing to remain within the latter, that is, within one of its elements, namely, thinking. With Hegel, thinking is being: ‘Thinking is the subject; being, the predicate.’ [17] It follows that Hegel, and idealism in general, eliminated the contradiction only by removing one of its component elements, that is, being, matter, nature. However, removing one of the component elements in a contradiction does not at all mean doing away with that contradiction. ‘Hegel’s doctrine that reality is “postulated” by the Idea is merely a translation into rationalistic terms of the theological doctrine that Nature was created by God – and reality, matter, by an abstract, non-material being.’ [18] This does not apply only to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which the external world receives its laws from Reason instead of Reason receiving them from the external world, is closely akin to the theological concept that the world’s laws were dictated to it by divine Reason. [19] Idealism does not establish the unity of being and thinking, nor can it do so; it tears that unity asunder. Idealistic philosophy’s point of departure – the ‘I’ as the fundamental philosophical principle – is totally erroneous. It is not the ‘I’ that must be the starting-point of genuine philosophy, but the ‘I’ and the ‘you’. It is such a point of departure that makes it possible to arrive at a proper understanding of the relation between thinking and being, between the subject and the object. I am ‘I’ to myself, and at the same time I am ‘you’ to others. The ‘I’ is the subject, and at the same time the object. It must at the same time be noted that I am not the abstract being idealistic philosophy operates with. I am an actual being; my body belongs to my essence; moreover, my body, as a whole, is my I, my genuine essence. It is not an abstract being that thinks, but that actual being, that body. Thus, contrary to what the idealists assert, an actual and material being proves to be the subject, and thinking – the predicate. Herein lies the only possible solution of the contradiction between being and thinking, a contradiction that idealism sought so vainly to resolve. None of the elements in the contradiction is removed; both are preserved, revealing their real unity. ‘That which to me, or subjectively, is a purely spiritual, non-material and non-sensuous act is in itself an objective, material and sensuous act.’ [20]

Note that in saying this, Feuerbach stands close to Spinoza, whose philosophy he was already setting forth with great sympathy at the time his own breakaway from idealism was taking shape, that is, when he was writing his history of modern philosophy. [21] In 1843 he made the subtle observation, in his Grundsätze, that pantheism is a theological materialism, a negation of theology but as yet on a theological standpoint. This confusion of materialism and theology constituted Spinoza’s inconsistency, which, however, did not prevent him from providing a ‘correct – at least for his time – philosophical expression for the materialist trend of modern times’. That was why Feuerbach called Spinoza ‘the Moses of the modern free-thinkers and materialists’. [22] In 1847 Feuerbach asked: ‘What then, under careful examination, is that which Spinoza calls Substance, in terms of logics or metaphysics, and God in terms of theology?’ To this question he replied categorically: ‘Nothing else but Nature.’ He saw Spinozism’s main shortcoming in the fact that ‘in it the sensible, anti-theological essence of Nature assumes the aspect of an abstract, metaphysical being’. Spinoza eliminated the dualism of God and Nature, since he declared that the acts of Nature were those of God. However, it was just because he regarded the acts of Nature to be those of God, that the latter remained, with Spinoza, a being distinct from Nature, but forming its foundation. He regarded God as the subject and Nature as the predicate. A philosophy that has completely liberated itself from theological traditions must remove this important shortcoming in Spinoza’s philosophy, which in its essence is sound. ‘Away with this contradiction!’, Feuerbach exclaimed. ‘Not Deus sive Natura but aut Deus aut Natura is the watchword of Truth.’ [23]

Thus, Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ proved to be nothing else but Spinozism disencumbered of its theological pendant. And it was the standpoint of this kind of Spinozism, which Feuerbach had freed of its theological pendant, that Marx and Engels adopted when they broke with idealism.

However, disencumbering Spinozism of its theological appendage meant revealing its true and materialist content. Consequently, the Spinozism of Marx and Engels was indeed materialism brought up to date. [24]

Further. Thinking is not the cause of being, but its effect, or rather its property. Feuerbach says: Folge und Eigenschaft. I feel and think, not as a subject contraposed to an object, but as a subject-object, as an actual and material being. ‘For us the object is not merely the thing sensed, but also the basis, the indispensable condition of my sensation.’ The objective world is not only without me but also within me, inside my own skin. [25] Man is only a part of Nature, a part of being; there is therefore no room for any contradiction between his thinking and his being. Space and time do not exist only as forms of thinking. They are also forms of being, forms of my contemplation. They are such, solely because I myself am a creature that lives in time and space, and because I sense and feel as such a creature. In general, the laws of being are at the same time laws of thinking.

That is what Feuerbach said. [26] And the same thing, though in a different wording, was said by Engels in his polemic with Dühring. [27] This already shows what an important part of Feuerbach’s philosophy became an integral part of the philosophy of Marx and Engels.

If Marx began to elaborate his materialist explanation of history by criticising Hegel’s philosophy of law, he could do so only because Feuerbach had completed his criticism of Hegel’s speculative philosophy.

Even when criticising Feuerbach in his Theses, Marx often develops and augments the former’s ideas. Here is an instance from the sphere of ‘epistemology’. Before thinking of an object, man, according to Feuerbach, experiences its action on himself, contemplates and senses it.

It was this thought that Marx had in mind when he wrote:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. [28]

This shortcoming in materialism, Marx goes on to say, accounts for the circumstance that, in his Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach regards theoretical activity as the only genuine human activity. Expressed in other words, this means that, according to Feuerbach, our I cognises the object by coming under its action. [29] Marx, however, objects by saying: our I cognises the object, while at the same time acting upon that object. Marx’s thought is a perfectly correct one: as Faust already said, ‘Am Anfang war die Tat.’ It may of course be objected, in defence of Feuerbach, that, in the process of our acting upon objects, we cognise their properties only in the measure in which they, for their part, act upon us. In both cases sensation precedes thinking; in both cases we first sense their properties, and only then think of them. But that is something that Marx did not deny. For him the gist of the matter was not the indisputable fact that sensation precedes thinking, but the fact that man is induced to think chiefly by the sensations he experiences in the process of his acting upon the outer world. Since this action on the outer world is prescribed to man by the struggle for existence, the theory of knowledge is closely linked up by Marx with his materialist view of the history of human civilisation. It was not for nothing that the thinker who directed against Feuerbach the thesis we are here discussing wrote in Volume 1 of his Capital: ‘By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.’ [30] This proposition fully reveals its profound meaning only in the light of Marx’s theory of knowledge. We shall see how well this theory is confirmed by the history of cultural development and, incidentally, even by the science of language. It must, however, be admitted that Marx’s epistemology stems directly from that of Feuerbach, or, if you will, it is, properly speaking, the epistemology of Feuerbach, only rendered more profound by the masterly correction brought into it by Marx.

I shall add, in passing, that this masterly correction was prompted by the ‘spirit of the times’. The striving to examine the interaction between object and subject precisely from the point of view in which the subject appears in an active role, derived from the public mood of the period in which the world-outlook of Marx and Engels was taking shape. [31] The revolution of 1848 was in the offing...

III

The doctrine of the unity of subject and object, thinking and being, which was shared in equal measure by Feuerbach, and by Marx and Engels, was also held by the most outstanding materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Elsewhere [32] I have shown that La Mettrie and Diderot – each after his own fashion – arrived at a world-outlook that was a ‘brand of Spinozism’, that is, a Spinozism without the theological appendage that distorted its true content. It would also be easy to show that, inasmuch as we are speaking of the unity of subject and object, Hobbes too stood very close to Spinoza. That, however, would be taking us too far afield, and, besides, there is no immediate need to do that. Probably of greater interest to the reader is the fact that today any naturalist who has delved even a little into the problem of the relation of thinking to being arrives at that doctrine of their unity which we have met in Feuerbach.

When Huxley wrote the following words: ‘Surely no one who is cognisant of the facts of the case, nowadays, doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the physiology of the nervous system’, and went on to say that the operations of the mind ‘are functions of the brain’, [33] he was expressing just what Feuerbach had said, only with these words he connected concepts that were far less clear. It was precisely because the concepts connected with these words were far less clear than with Feuerbach that he attempted to link up the view just quoted with Hume’s philosophical scepticism. [34]

In just the same way, Haeckel’s [35] ‘monism’, which created such a stir, is nothing else but a purely materialist doctrine – in essence close to that of Feuerbach – of the unity of subject and object. Haeckel, however, is poorly versed in the history of materialism, which is why he considers it necessary to struggle against its ‘one-sidedness’; he should have gone to the trouble of making a study of its theory of knowledge in the form it took with Feuerbach and Marx, something that would have preserved him from the many lapses and one-sided assumptions that have made it easier for his opponents to wage a struggle against him on philosophical grounds.

A very close approach to the most modern materialism – that of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels – has been made by August Forel in various of his writings, for instance in the paper Gehirn und Seele, which he read to the Sixty-Sixth Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians held in Vienna (26 September 1894). [36] In places Forel not only expresses ideas resembling Feuerbach’s but – and this is amazing – marshals his arguments just as Feuerbach did his. According to Forel, each new day brings us convincing proofs that the psychology and the physiology of the brain are merely two ways of looking at ‘one and the same thing’. The reader will not have forgotten Feuerbach’s identical view, which I have quoted above and which pertains to the same problem. This view can be supplemented here with the following statement: ‘I am the psychological object to myself’, Feuerbach says, ‘but a physiological object to others.’ [37] In the final analysis, Forel’s main idea boils down to the proposition that consciousness is the ‘inner reflex of cerebral activity’. [38] This view is already materialist.

Objecting to the materialists, the idealists and Kantians of all kinds and varieties claim that what we apprehend is only the mental aspect of the phenomena that Forel and Feuerbach deal with. This objection was excellently formulated by Schelling, who said that ‘the Spirit will always be an island which one cannot reach from the sphere of matter, otherwise than by a leap’. Forel is well aware of this, but he provides convincing proof that science would be an impossibility if we made up our minds in earnest not to leave the bounds of that island. ‘Every man’, he says, ‘would have only the psychology of his own subjectivism (hätte nur die Psychologie seines Subjectivismus)... and would positively be obliged to doubt the existence of the external world and of other people.’ [39] Such doubt is absurd, however. [40]

Conclusions arrived at by analogy, natural-scientific induction, a comparison of the evidence provided by our five senses, prove to us the existence of the external world, of other people, and the psychology of the latter. Likewise they prove to us that comparative psychology, animal psychology and, finally, our own psychology would be incomprehensible and full of contradictions if we considered it apart from the activities of our brain; first and foremost, it would seem a contradiction of the law of the conservation of energy. [41]

Feuerbach not only reveals the contradictions that inevitably beset those who reject the materialist standpoint, but also shows how the idealists reach their ‘island’.

I am I to myself [he says], and you to another. But I am such an I only as a sensible [that is, material – GP] being. The abstract intellect isolates this being-for-oneself as Substance, the atom, ego, God; that is why, to it, the connection between being-for-oneself and being-for-another is arbitrary. That which I think of as extra-sensuous (ohne Sinnlichkeit), I think of as without and outside any connection. [42]

This most significant consideration is accompanied by an analysis of that process of abstraction which led to the appearance of Hegelian logic as an ontological doctrine. [43]

Had Feuerbach possessed the information provided by present-day ethnology, he would have been able to add that philosophical idealism descends, in the historical sense, from the animism of primitive peoples. This was already pointed out by Edward Tylor, [44] and certain historians of philosophy are beginning to take it, in part, into consideration, though for the time being more as a curiosity than a fact from the history of culture, and of tremendous theoretical and cognitive significance. [45]

These ideas and arguments of Feuerbach’s were not only well known to Marx and Engels and given careful thought by them, but indubitably and in considerable measure helped in the evolution of their world-outlook. If Engels later had the greatest contempt for post-Feuerbachian German philosophy, it was because that philosophy, in his opinion, merely resuscitated the old philosophical errors already revealed by Feuerbach. That, indeed, was the case. Not one of the latest critics of materialism has brought forward a single argument that was not refuted either by Feuerbach himself or, before him, by the French materialists, [46] but to the ‘critics of Marx’ – to E Bernstein, C Schmidt, B Croce and the like – ‘the pauper’s broth of eclecticism’ [47] of the most up-to-date German so-called philosophy seems a perfectly new dish; they have fed on it, and, seeing that Engels did not see fit to address himself to it, they imagined that he was ‘evading’ any analysis of an argumentation he had long ago considered and found absolutely worthless. That is an old story, but one that is always new. Rats will never stop thinking that the cat is far stronger than the lion.

In recognising the striking similarity – and, in part, also the identity – in the views of Feuerbach and A Forel, we shall, however, note that while the latter is far better informed in natural science, Feuerbach had the advantage of a thorough knowledge of philosophy. That is why Forel makes mistakes we do not find in Feuerbach. Forel calls his theory the psycho-physiological theory of identity. [48] To this no objection of any significance can be raised, because all terminology is conventional. However, since the theory of identity once formed the foundation of an absolutely definite idealist philosophy, Forel would have done well to have straightforwardly, boldly and simply declared his theory to be materialist. He seems to have preserved certain prejudices against materialism, and therefore chose another name. That is why I think it necessary to note that identity in the Forelian sense has nothing in common with identity in the idealist sense.

The ‘critics of Marx’ do not know even this. In his polemic with me, C Schmidt ascribed to the materialists precisely the idealist doctrine of identity. In actual fact, materialism recognises the unity of subject and object, not their identity. This was well shown by the selfsame Feuerbach.

According to Feuerbach, the unity of subject and object, of thinking and being, makes sense only when man is taken as the basis of that unity. This has a special kind of ‘humanist’ sound to it, and most students of Feuerbach have not found it necessary to give deeper thought to how man serves as the basis of the unity of the opposites just mentioned. In actual fact, this is how Feuerbach understood the matter: ‘It is only when thinking is not a subject for itself, but the predicate of a real [that is, material – GP] being that thought is not something separated from being.’ [49] The question now is: where, in which philosophical systems, is thinking a ‘subject for itself’, that is to say, something independent of the bodily existence of a thinking individual? The answer is clear: in systems that are idealist. The idealists first convert thinking into a self-contained essence, independent of man (‘the subject for itself’), and then assert that it is in that essence that the contradiction between being and thinking is resolved, for the very reason that separate and independent being is a property of that independent-of-matter essence. [50] Indeed, the contradiction is resolved in that essence. In that case, what is that essence? It is thinking, and this thinking exists – is – independently of anything else. Such a resolution of the contradiction is a purely formal one, which, as we have already pointed out, is achieved only by eliminating one of its elements, namely, being, as something independent of thinking. Being proves to be a simple property of thinking, so that when we say that a given object exists, we mean that it exists only in our thinking. That is how the matter was understood by Schelling, for example. To him, thinking was the absolute principle from which the real world, that is, Nature and the ‘finite’ spirit, followed of necessity. But how did it follow? What was meant by the existence of the real world? Nothing but existence in thinking. To Schelling, the Universe was merely the self-contemplation of the Absolute Spirit. We see the same thing in Hegel. Feuerbach, however, was not satisfied with such a purely formal resolving of the contradiction between thinking and being. He pointed out that there is no – there can be no – thinking independent of man, that is, of an actual and material creature. Thinking is activity of the brain. To quote Feuerbach: ‘But the brain is the organ of thinking only as long as it is connected with the human head and body.’ [51]

We now see in what sense Feuerbach considers man the basis of the unity of being and thinking. Man is that basis in the sense that he is nothing but a material being that possesses the ability to think. If he is such a being, then it is clear that none of the elements of the contradiction is eliminated – neither being nor thinking, ‘matter’ or ‘spirit’, subject or object. They are all combined in him as the subject-object. ‘I exist, and I think... only as a subject-object’, Feuerbach says.

To be does not mean to exist in thought. In this respect, Feuerbach’s philosophy is far clearer than that of J Dietzgen. As Feuerbach put it: ‘To prove that something exists means to prove that it is not something that exists only in thought.’ [52] This is perfectly true, but it means that the unity of thinking and being does not and cannot in any way mean their identity.

This is one of the most important features distinguishing materialism from idealism.

IV

When people say that, for a certain period, Marx and Engels were followers of Feuerbach, it is often inferred that, when that period ended, Marx and Engels’ world-outlook changed considerably, and became quite different from Feuerbach’s. That is how the matter is viewed by Karl Diehl, who finds that Feuerbach’s influence on Marx is usually highly exaggerated. [53] This is a gross mistake. When they ceased from being followers of Feuerbach, Marx and Engels did not at all cease from sharing a very considerable part of his philosophical views. The best proof of this is the Theses which Marx wrote in criticism of Feuerbach. The Theses in no way eliminate the fundamental propositions in Feuerbach’s philosophy, but only correct them, and – what is most important – call for an application more consistent (than Feuerbach’s) in explaining the reality that surrounds man, and in particular his own activity. It is not thinking that determines being, but being that determines thinking. That is the fundamental thought in all of Feuerbach’s philosophy. Marx and Engels made that thought the foundation of the materialist explanation of history. The materialism of Marx and Engels is a far more developed doctrine than Feuerbach’s. The materialist views of Marx and Engels, however, developed in the direction indicated by the inner logic of Feuerbach’s philosophy. That is why these views will not always be fully clear – especially in their philosophical aspect – to those who will not go to the trouble of finding out just which part of the Feuerbachian philosophy became incorporated in the world-outlook of the founders of scientific socialism. And if the reader meets anyone who is much taken up with the problem of finding ‘philosophical substantiation’ for historical materialism, he may well be sure that this wise mortal is very much deficient in the respect I have just mentioned.

But let us return to the subject. Already in his Third Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx tackled the most difficult of all the problems he was to resolve in the sphere of social man’s historical ‘practice’, with the aid of the correct concept of the unity of subject and object, which Feuerbach had developed. The Thesis reads: ‘The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men, and that the educator must himself be educated.’ [54] Once this problem is solved, the ‘secret’ of the materialist explanation of history has been uncovered. But Feuerbach was unable to solve it. In history, he – like the French eighteenth-century materialists he had so much in common with – remained an idealist. [55] Here Marx and Engels had to start from scratch, making use of the theoretical material that had been accumulated by social science, chiefly by the French historians of the Restoration period. But even here, Feuerbach’s philosophy provided them with some valuable pointers. ‘Art, religion, philosophy and science’, Feuerbach says, ‘are but the manifestation or revelation of genuine human essence.’ [56] Hence it follows that the ‘human essence’ contains the explanation of all ideologies, that is, that the development of the latter is conditioned by the development of the ‘human essence’. What is that essence? ‘Man’s essence’, Feuerbach replies, ‘is only in community, in Man’s unity with Man.’ [57] This is very vague, and here we see a border line that Feuerbach did not cross. [58] However, it is beyond that border line that the region of the materialist explanation of history, a region discovered by Marx and Engels, begins; that explanation indicates the causes which in the course of history determine the ‘community..., Man’s unity with Man’, that is, the mutual relations that men enter into. This border line not only separates Marx from Feuerbach, but testifies to his closeness to the latter.

The sixth Thesis on Feuerbach says that human essence is the ensemble of the social relations. This is far more definite than what Feuerbach himself said, and the close genetic link between Marx’s world-outlook and Feuerbach’s philosophy is here revealed with probably greater clarity than anywhere else.

When Marx wrote this Thesis he already knew, not only the direction in which the solution of the problem should be sought, but the solution itself. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law he showed that no mutual relations of people in society:

... neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term ‘civil society’; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. [59]

It now remained only to explain the origin and development of the economy to obtain a full solution of a problem that materialism had been unable to cope with for centuries on end. That explanation was provided by Marx and Engels.

It stands to reason that, when I speak of the full solution of that great problem, I am referring only to its general or algebraic solution, which materialism could not find in the course of centuries. It stands to reason that, when I speak of a full solution, I am referring, not to the arithmetic of social development, but to its algebra; not to the causes of individual phenomena, but to how the discovery of those causes should be approached. And that means that the materialist explanation of history was primarily of a methodological significance. Engels was fully aware of this when he wrote: ‘It is not the bare conclusions of which we are in such need, but rather study [das Studium]; the conclusions are nothing without the reasoning that has led up to them.’ [60] This, however, is sometimes not understood either by ‘critics’ of Marx, whom, as they say, may God forgive, or by some of his ‘followers’, which is much worse. Michelangelo once said of himself: ‘My knowledge will engender a multitude of ignoramuses.’ These words have regrettably proved prophetic. Today Marx’s knowledge is engendering ignoramuses. The fault lies, not with Marx, but with those who talk rubbish while invoking his name. For such rubbish to be avoided, an understanding of the methodological significance of historical materialism is necessary.

V

In general, one of the greatest services rendered to materialism by Marx and Engels lies in their elaboration of a correct method. Feuerbach, who concentrated his efforts on the struggle against the speculative element in Hegel’s philosophy, had little appreciation of its dialectical element, and made little use of it. ‘True dialectic’, he said, ‘is no more monologue by a solitary thinker with himself; it is a dialogue between the ego and the tu.’ [61] In the first place, however, Hegel’s dialectic did not signify a ‘monologue by a solitary thinker with himself’; and, secondly, Feuerbach’s remark gives a correct definition of the starting-point of philosophy, but not of its method. This gap was filled by Marx and Engels, who understood that it would be mistaken, in waging a struggle against Hegel’s speculative philosophy, to ignore his dialectic. Some critics have declared that, during the years immediately following his break with idealism, Marx was highly indifferent to dialectic too. Though this opinion may seem to have some semblance of plausibility, it is controverted by the aforementioned fact that, in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, Engels was already speaking of the method as the soul of the new system of views. [62]

In any case, the second part of La Misère de la philosophie leaves no room for doubt that, at the time of his polemic with Proudhon, Marx was very well aware of the significance of the dialectical method and knew how to make good use of it. Marx’s victory in this controversy was one by a man able to think dialectically, over one who had never been able to understand the nature of dialectic, but was trying to apply its method to an analysis of capitalist society. This same second part of La Misère de la philosophie shows that dialectic, which with Hegel was of a purely idealist nature and had remained so with Proudhon (so far as he had assimilated it), was placed on a materialist foundation by Marx. [63]

‘To Hegel [Marx wrote subsequently, describing his own materialist dialectic], the life-process of the human brain, that is, the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.’ [64]

This description implies full agreement with Feuerbach, firstly in the attitude towards Hegel’s ‘Idea’, and, secondly, in the relation of thinking to being. The Hegelian dialectic could be ‘turned right side up’ only by one who was convinced of the soundness of the basic principle of Feuerbach’s philosophy, viz, that it is not thinking that determines being, but being that determines thinking.

Many people confuse dialectic with the doctrine of development; dialectic is, in fact, such a doctrine. However, it differs substantially from the vulgar ‘theory of evolution’, which is completely based on the principle that neither Nature nor history proceeds in leaps and that all changes in the world take place by degrees. Hegel had already shown that, understood in such a way, the doctrine of development was untenable and ridiculous.

When people want to understand the rise or disappearance of anything [he says in Volume 1 of his Wissenschaft der Logik], they usually imagine that they achieve comprehension through the medium of a conception of the gradual character of that rise or disappearance. However, changes in being take place, not only by a transition of one quantity into another, but also by a transition of qualitative differences into quantitative, and, on the contrary, by a transition that interrupts gradualness, and substitutes one phenomenon for another. [65]

And every time gradualness is interrupted, a leap takes place. Hegel goes on to show by a number of examples how often leaps take place both in Nature and in history, and he exposes the ridiculous logical error underlying the vulgar ‘theory of evolution’.

Underlying the doctrine of gradualness [he remarks] is the conception that what is arising already exists in reality, and remains unobserved only because of its small dimensions. In like manner, people, when they speak of gradual disappearance, imagine that the non-existence of the phenomenon in question, or the phenomenon that is to take its place, is an accomplished fact, although it is as yet imperceptible... But this can only suppress any notion of arising and destruction... To explain appearance or disappearance by the gradualness of the change means reducing the whole matter to absurd tautology and to imagining in an already complete state [that is, as already arisen or already gone – GP] that which is in the course of appearing or disappearing. [66]

This dialectical view of Hegel’s as to the inevitability of leaps in the process of development was adopted in full by Marx and Engels. It was developed in detail by Engels in his polemic with Dühring, and here he ‘turned it right side up’, that is to say, on a materialist foundation.

Thus he indicated that the transition from one form of energy to another cannot take place otherwise than by means of a leap. [67] Thus he sought, in modern chemistry, a confirmation of the dialectical theorem of the transformation of quantity into quality. Generally speaking, he found that the rights of dialectical thinking are confirmed by the dialectical properties of being. Here, too, being conditions thinking.

Without undertaking a more detailed characterisation of materialist dialectic (its relation to what, by a parallel with elementary mathematics, may be called elementary logic – see my preface to my translation of Ludwig Feuerbach), I shall remind the reader that, during the last two decades, the theory that sees only gradual changes in the process of development has begun to lose ground even in biology, where it used to be recognised almost universally. In this respect, the work of Armand Gautier and that of Hugo de Vries seem to show promise of epoch-making importance. Suffice it to say that de Vries’ theory of mutations is a doctrine that the development of species takes place by leaps (see his two-volume Die Mutations-Theorie, Leipzig, 1901-03, his paper Die Mutationen and die Mutations-Perioden bei der Entstehung der Arten, Leipzig, 1901, and the lectures he delivered at the University of California, which appeared in the German translation under the title of Arten und Varietäten und ihre Entstehung durch die Mutation, Berlin, 1906).

In the opinion of this outstanding naturalist, the weak point in Darwin’s theory of the origin of species is that this origin can be explained by gradual changes. [68] Also of interest, and most apt, is de Vries’ remark that the dominance of the theory of gradual changes in the doctrine of the origin of species has had an unfavourable influence on the experimental study of relevant problems. [69]

I may add that, in present-day natural science and especially among the neo-Lamarckians, there has been a fairly rapid spread of the theory of the so-called animism of matter, that is, that matter in general, and especially any organised matter, possesses a certain degree of sensibility. This theory, which many regard as being diametrically opposed to materialism (see, for instance, Der heutige Stand der Darwinschen Fragen, by RH Francé, Leipzig, 1907), is in fact, when properly understood, only a translation, into the language of present-day natural science, of Feuerbach’s materialist doctrine of the unity of being and thinking, of object and subject. [70] It may be confidently stated that Marx and Engels, who had assimilated this doctrine, would have been keenly interested in this trend in natural science, true, far too little elaborated as yet.

Herzen was right in saying that Hegel’s philosophy, which many considered conservative in the main, was a genuine algebra of revolution. [71] With Hegel, however, this algebra remained wholly unapplied to the burning problems of practical life. Of necessity, the speculative element brought a spirit of conservatism into the philosophy of this great absolute idealist. It is quite different with Marx’s materialist philosophy, in which revolutionary ‘algebra’ manifests itself with all the irresistible force of its dialectical method.

In its mystified form [Marx says] dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. [72]

If we regard materialist dialectic from the viewpoint of the history of Russian literature, we may say that this dialectic was the first to supply a method necessary and competent to solve the problem of the rationality of all that exists, a problem that so greatly troubled our brilliant thinker Belinsky. [73] It was only Marx’s dialectical method, as applied to the study of Russian life, that has shown us how much reality and how much semblance of reality there was in it.

VI

When we set out to explain history from the materialist standpoint, our first difficulty is, as we have seen, the question of the actual causes of the development of social relations. We already know that the ‘anatomy of civil society’ is determined by its economy. But what is the latter itself determined by?

Marx’s answer is as follows:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure... [74]

Marx’s reply thus reduces the whole question of the development of the economy to that of the causes determining the development of the productive forces at the disposal of society. In this, its final form, it is solved first and foremost by the reference to the nature of the geographic environment.

In his philosophy of history Hegel already speaks of the important role of ‘the geographic foundation of world history’. But since, in his view, the Idea is the ultimate cause of all development, and since it was only en passant and in instances of secondary importance, against his will as it were, that he had recourse to a materialist explanation of phenomena, the thoroughly sound view he expressed regarding the historic significance of geographic environment could not lead him to all the fruitful conclusions that follow therefrom. It was only by the materialist Marx that these conclusions were drawn in their fullness. [75]

The properties of the geographic environment determine the character both of the natural products that serve to satisfy man’s wants, and of those objects he himself produces with the same purpose. Where there were no metals, aboriginal tribes could not, unaided, emerge from what we call the Stone Age. In exactly the same way, for primitive fishers and hunters to go over to cattle-breeding and agriculture, the appropriate conditions of geographic environment were needed, that is, in this instance, suitable fauna and flora. Lewis Henry Morgan has shown that the absence, in the New World, of animals capable of being domesticated, and the specific differences between the flora of the two hemispheres, brought about the considerable difference in the course of their inhabitants’ social development. [76] Of the redskins of North America Waitz says: ‘... they have no domesticated animals. This is highly important, for in this circumstance lies the principal reason that forced them to remain at a low stage of development.’ [77] Schweinfurth reports that in Africa, when a given locality is overpopulated, part of the inhabitants emigrate and thereupon change their mode of life in accordance with the new geographic environment: ‘Tribes hitherto agricultural become hunters, while tribes that have lived from their flocks will turn to agriculture.’ [78] He also points out that the inhabitants of an area rich in iron, which seems to occupy a considerable part of Central Africa, ‘naturally began to smelt iron’. [79]

Nor is that all. Already at the lower stages of development, tribes enter into mutual intercourse and exchange some of their products. This expands the boundaries of the geographic environment, influencing the development of the productive forces of each of these tribes and accelerating the course of that development. It is clear, however, that the greater or lesser ease with which such intercourse arises and is maintained also depends on the properties of the geographic environment. Hegel said that seas and rivers bring men closer together, whereas mountains keep them apart. Incidentally, seas bring men closer together when the development of the productive forces has reached a relatively high level; at lower levels, as Ratzel rightly points out, the sea is a great hindrance to intercourse between the tribes it separates. [80] However that may be, it is certain that the more varied the properties of the geographic environment, the more they favour the development of the productive forces. Marx writes:

It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means and modes of labour. [81]

Using almost the same terms as Marx, Ratzel says: ‘The main thing is not that there is the greatest ease in procuring food, but that certain inclinations, habits and finally wants are aroused in man.’ [82]

Thus, the properties of the geographical environment determine the development of the productive forces, which, in its turn, determines the development of the economic relations, and therefore of all other social relations. Marx explains this in the following words:

These social relations into which the producers enter with one another, the conditions under which they exchange their activities and participate in the whole act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the invention of a new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal organisation of the army necessarily changed; the relationships within which individuals can constitute an army and act as an army were transformed and the relations of different armies to one another also changed. [83]

To make this explanation still more graphic, I shall cite an instance. The Masai of East Africa give their captives no quarter, the reason being, as Ratzel points out, that this pastoral people have no technical possibility of making use of slave labour. But the neighbouring Wakamba, who are agriculturists, are able to make use of that labour, and therefore spare their captives’ lives and turn them into slaves. The appearance of slavery therefore presupposes the achievement of a definite degree in the development of the social forces, a degree that permits the exploitation of slave labour. [84] But slavery is a production relation whose appearance indicates the beginning of a division into classes in a society which has hitherto known no other divisions but those of sex and age. When slavery reaches full development, it puts its stamp on the entire economy of society, and, through the economy, on all other social relations, in the first place of the political structure. However much the states of antiquity differed in political structure, their chief distinctive feature was that every one of them was a political organisation expressing and protecting the interests of freemen alone.

We now know that the development of the productive forces, which in the final analysis determines the development of all social relations, is determined by the properties of the geographic environment. But as soon as they have arisen, the social relations themselves exercise a marked influence on the development of the productive forces. Thus that which is initially an effect becomes in its turn a cause; between the development of the productive forces and the social structure there arises an interaction which assumes the most varied forms in various epochs.

It should also be remembered that while the internal relations existing in a given society are determined by a given state of the productive forces, it is on the latter that, in the final analysis, that society’s external relations depend. To every stage in the development of the productive forces there corresponds a definite character of armaments, the art of war, and, finally, of international law, or, to be more precise, of inter-social, that is, inter alia, of inter-tribal law. Hunting tribes cannot form large political organisations precisely because the low level of their productive forces compels them to scatter in small social groups, in search of means of subsistence. But the more these social groups are scattered, the more inevitable it is that even such disputes that, in a civilised society, could easily be settled in a magistrate’s court, are settled by means of more or less sanguinary combats. Eyre says that when several Australian tribes join forces for certain purposes in a particular place such contacts are never lengthy; even before a shortage of food or the need to hunt game has obliged the Australians to part company, hostile clashes flare up among them, which very soon lead, as is well known, to pitched battles. [85]

It is obvious that such clashes may arise from a wide variety of causes. It is, however, noteworthy that most travellers ascribe them to economic causes. When Stanley asked several natives of Equatorial Africa how their wars against neighbouring tribes arose, the answer was: ‘Some of our young men go into the woods to hunt game and they are surprised by our neighbours; then we go to them, and they come to fight us until one party is tired, or one is beaten.’ [86] In much the same way Burton says: ‘All African wars... are for one of two objects, cattle-lifting or kidnapping.’ [87]

Ratzel considers it probable that in New Zealand wars among the natives were frequently caused simply by the desire to enjoy human flesh. [88] The natives’ inclination towards cannibalism is itself to be explained by the paucity of the New Zealand fauna.

All know to what great extent the outcome of a war depends on the weapons used by each of the belligerents. But those weapons are determined by the state of their productive forces, by their economy, and by their social relations, which have arisen on the basis of that economy. [89] To say that certain peoples or tribes have been subjugated by other peoples does not yet mean explaining why the social consequences of that subjugation have been exactly what they are, and no other. The social consequences of the Roman conquest of Gaul were not at all the same as those of the conquest of that country by the Germans. The social consequences of the Norman conquest of England were very different from those that resulted from the Mongol conquest of Russia. In all these cases, the difference depended ultimately on the difference between the economic structure of the subjugated society on the one hand, and that of the conquering society on the other. The more the productive forces of a given tribe or people are developed, the greater are at least its opportunities to arm itself better to carry on the struggle for existence.

There may, however, be many noteworthy exceptions to this general rule. At lower levels of the development of the productive forces, the difference in the weapons of tribes that are at very different stages of economic development – for instance, nomadic shepherds and settled agriculturists – cannot be so great as it subsequently becomes. Besides, an advance in economic development, which exerts a considerable influence on the character of a given people, sometimes reduces its warlikeness to such a degree that it proves incapable of resisting an enemy economically more backward but more accustomed to warfare. That is why peaceable tribes of agriculturists are not infrequently conquered by warrior peoples. Ratzel remarks that the most solid state organisations are formed by ‘semi-civilised peoples’ as a result of the unifying – by means of conquest – of both elements, the agricultural and the pastoral. [90] However correct this remark may be on the whole, it should, however, be remembered that even in such cases (China is a good example) economically backward conquerors gradually find themselves completely subjected to the influence of a conquered but economically more advanced people.

The geographic environment exerts a considerable influence, not only on primitive tribes, but also on so-called civilised peoples. As Marx wrote:

It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive part in the history of industry. Examples are the irrigation works in Egypt, Lombardy, Holland, or in India and Persia where irrigation by means of artificial canals, not only supplies the soil with the water indispensable to it, but also carries down to it, in the shape of sediment from the hills, mineral fertilisers. The secret of the flourishing state of industry in Spain and Sicily under the dominion of the Arabs lay in their irrigation works. [91]

The doctrine of the influence of the geographic environment on mankind’s historical development has often been reduced to a recognition of the direct influence of ‘climate’ on social man: it has been supposed that under the influence of ‘climate’ one ‘race’ becomes freedom-loving, another becomes inclined to submit patiently to the rule of a more or less despotic monarch, and yet another race becomes superstitious and therefore dependent upon a clergy, etc. This view already predominated, for instance, with Buckle. [92] According to Marx, the geographic environment affects man through the medium of relations of production, which arise in a given area on the basis of definite productive forces, whose primary condition of development lies in the properties of that environment. Modern ethnology is more and more going over to this point of view, and consequently attributes ever less importance to ‘race’ in the history of civilisation. ‘Race has nothing to do with cultural achievement’, says Ratzel. [93]

But as soon as a certain ‘cultural’ level has been reached, it indubitably influences the bodily and mental qualities of the ‘race’. [94]

The influence of geographic environment on social man is a variable magnitude. Conditioned by the properties of that environment, the development of the productive forces increases man’s power over Nature, and thereby places him in a new relation towards the geographic environment that surrounds him; thus, the English of today react to that environment in a manner which is not quite the same as that in which the tribes that inhabited England in Julius Caesar’s day reacted to it. This finally removes the objection that the character of the inhabitants of a given area can be substantially modified, although the geographic characteristics of that area remain unchanged.

VIII

The legal and political relations [95] engendered by a given economic structure exert a decisive influence on social man’s entire mentality. ‘Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence’, says Marx, ‘rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life.’ [96] Being determines thinking. It may be said that each new step made by science in explaining the process of historical development is a fresh argument in favour of this fundamental thesis of contemporary materialism.

Already in 1877, Ludwig Noiré wrote: ‘It was joint activity directed towards the achievement of a common aim, it was the primordial labour of our ancestors, that produced language and the reasoning.’ [97] Developing this notable thought, L Noiré pointed out that language originally indicated the things of the objective world, not as possessing a certain form, but as having received that form (nicht als ‘Gestalten’, sondern als ‘gestaltete’); not as active and exerting a definite action but as passive and subjected to that action.[98] He went on to explain this with the sound remark that ‘all things enter man’s field of vision, that is, become things to him, solely in the measure in which they are subjected to his action, and it is in conformity with this that they get their designations, that is, names.’ [99] In short, it is human activity that, in Noiré’s opinion, gives meaning to the initial roots of language. [100] It is noteworthy that Noiré found the first embryo of his theory in Feuerbach’s idea that man’s essence lies in the community, in man’s unity with man. He apparently knew nothing of Marx, for otherwise he would have seen that his view on the role of activity in the formation of language was closer to Marx, who, in his epistemology, laid stress on human activity, unlike Feuerbach, who spoke mostly of ‘contemplation’.

In this connection, it is hardly necessary to remind the reader, with reference to Noiré’s theory, that the nature of man’s activities in the process of production is determined by the state of the productive forces. That is obvious. It will be more useful to note that the decisive influence of being upon thinking is seen with particular clarity in primitive tribes, whose social and intellectual life is incomparably simpler than that of civilised peoples. Karl von den Steinen writes of the natives of Central Brazil that we shall understand them only when we consider them as the outcome (Erzeugnis) of their life as hunters. ‘Animals have been the chief source of their experience’, he goes on to say, ‘and it is mainly with the aid of that experience that they have interpreted Nature and formed their world-outlook.’ [101] The condition of their life as hunters have determined not only the world-outlook of these tribes but also their moral concepts, their sentiments, and even, the writer goes on to say, their aesthetic tastes. We see exactly the same thing in pastoral tribes. Among those whom Ratzel terms exclusively herdsmen ‘the subject of at least 99 per cent of all conversations is cattle, their origin, habits, merits and defects’. [102] For instance, the unfortunate Hereros, whom the ‘civilised’ Germans recently ‘pacified’ with such brutality, were such ‘exclusively herdsmen’. [103]

If beasts are the primitive hunter’s foremost source of experience, and if his whole world-outlook was based on that experience, then it is not surprising that the mythology of hunting tribes, which at that stage takes the place of philosophy, theology and science, draws all its content from the same source. ‘The peculiarity of Bushman mythology’, Andrew Lang writes, ‘is the almost absolute predominance of animals. Except “an old woman” who appears now and then in these incoherent legends, their myths have scarcely one human figure to show.’ [104] According to Brough Smith, the Australian aborigines – like the Bushmen, who have not yet emerged from the hunting stage – have as their gods mostly birds and beasts. [105]

The religion of primitive tribes has not yet been adequately studied. However, what we already know fully confirms the correctness of the brief thesis of Feuerbach and Marx that ‘it is not religion that makes man, but man who makes religion’. As E Tylor says: ‘Among nation after nation it is still clear how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became the model on which divine society and government were shaped.’ [106] This is unquestionably a materialist view on religion: it is known that Saint-Simon held the opposite view, explaining the social and political system of the ancient Greeks through their religious beliefs. It is, however, far more important that science has already begun to discover the causal link between the technical level of primitive peoples and their world-outlook. [107] In this respect valuable discoveries evidently await science. [108]

In the sphere of the ideology of primitive society, art has been studied better than any other branch: an abundance of material has been collected, testifying in the most unambiguous and convincing manner to the soundness and, one might say, the inevitability of the materialist explanation of history. So copious is this material that I can here enumerate only the most important of the works dealing with the subject: Schweinfurth, Artes Africanae (Leipzig, 1875); R Andrée, Ethnographische Parallelen; the article entitled ‘Das Zeichnen bei den Naturvölkern’; Von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens (Berlin, 1894); G Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians, Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, 1893, reports for other years contain valuable material on the influence of the mechanical arts, especially weaving, on ornamental design); Hörnes, Urgeschichte der bildenden Kunst in Europa (Wien, 1898); Ernst Grosse, Die Anfänge der Kunst, also Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien (Tübingen, 1900); Yrjö Hirn, Der Ursprung der Kunst (Leipzig, 1904); Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (third edition, 1902); Gabriel et Adrien de Mortillet, Le préhistorique (Paris, 1900), pp 217-30; Hörnes, Der diluviale Mensch in Europa (Braunschweig, 1903); Sophus Müller, L’Europe préhistorique (trad du danois par E Philippot, Paris, 1907); Richard Wallaschek, Anfänge der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1903). [109]

The conclusions arrived at by modern science as regards the question of the beginnings of art will be shown by the following quotations from the authors enumerated above.

‘Decorative design’, says Hörnes, ‘can develop only from industrial activity, which is its material precondition... Peoples without any industry... have no ornamental design either.’ [110]

Von den Steinen thinks that drawing (Zeichnen) developed from designation of the object (Zeichen), used with the practical aim.

Bücher has formed the conclusion that ‘at the primitive stage of their development, work, music and poetry were a fused whole, work being the chief element in this trinity, and music and poetry of secondary importance’. In his opinion, ‘the origin of poetry is to be sought in labour’, and he goes on to remark that no language arranges in a rhythmical pattern words making up a sentence. It is therefore improbable that men arrived at measured, poetical speech through the use of their everyday language – the inner logic of that language operates against that. How, then, is one to explain the origin of measured, poetical speech? Bücher is of the opinion that the measured and rhythmical movements of the body transmitted the laws of their coordination to figurative, poetical speech. This is all the more probable if one recalls that, at the lower stages of development, rhythmical movements of the body are usually accompanied by singing. But what is the explanation of the coordination of bodily movements? It lies in the nature of the processes of production. Thus, ‘the origin of poetry is to be sought in productive activities’. [111]

R Wallaschek formulates his view on the origin of dramatic performances among primitive tribes in the following way: [112]

The subjects of these dramatic performances were:

1. The chase, war, paddling (among hunters – the life and habits of animals; animal pantomimes; masks). [113]

2. The life and habits of cattle (among pastoral peoples).

3. Work (among agriculturists: sowing, threshing, vine-dressing).

The entire tribe took part in the performance, all of them singing (in chorus). The words sung were meaningless, the content being provided by the performance itself (pantomime). Only actions of everyday life were represented, such as were absolutely essential in the struggle for existence.

Wallaschek says that in many primitive tribes, during such performances, the chorus split into two opposite parts. ‘Such’, he adds, ‘was the origin of Greek drama, which was also an animal pantomime at the outset. The goat was the animal that played the most important part in the economy of the Greeks, which accounts for the word “tragedy” being derived from “tragos,” the Greek for “goat.”’

It would be difficult to give a more striking illustration of the proposition that it is not being that is determined by thinking, but thinking that is determined by being.

IX

But economic life develops under the influence of a growth in the productive forces. Therefore the mutual relations of people engaged in the process of production undergo changes, and, together with them, changes take place in human mentality. As Marx puts it:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure... No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. [114] Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. [115]

Here we have before us a genuine ‘algebra’ – and purely materialist at that – of social development. This algebra has room both for ‘leaps’ (of the epoch of social revolutions) and for gradual changes. Gradual quantitative changes in the properties of a given order of things lead ultimately to a change in quality, that is, to the downfall of the old mode of production – or, as Marx expresses it here, of the old social order – and to its replacement by a new mode. As Marx remarks, in broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as successive epochs (‘marking progress’) in the economic development of society. [116] There is however reason to believe that later, when he had read Morgan’s book on primitive society, he modified his view as to the relation of the mode of production in antiquity to that of the East. Indeed, the logic of the economic development of the feudal mode of production led to a social revolution that marked the triumph of capitalism. But the logic of the economic development of China or ancient Egypt, for example, did not at all lead to the appearance of the antique mode of production. In the former instance we are speaking of two phases of development, one of which follows the other, and is engendered by it. The second instance, on the other hand, represents rather two coexisting types of economic development. The society of antiquity took the place of the clan social organisation, the latter also preceding the appearance of the oriental social system. Each of these two types of economic structure was the outcome of the growth in the productive forces within the clan organisation, a process that inevitably led to the latter’s ultimate disintegration. If these two types differed considerably from each other, their chief distinctive features were evolved under the influence of the geographic environment, which in one case prescribed one kind of aggregate production relations to a society that had achieved a certain degree of growth in the productive forces, and in the other case, another kind, greatly differing from the first.

The discovery of the clan type of social organisation is evidently destined to play the same part in social science as was played in biology by the discovery of the cell. While Marx and Engels were unfamiliar with this type of organisation, there could not but be considerable gaps in their theory of social development, as Engels himself subsequently acknowledged.

But the discovery of the clan type of organisation, which for the first time provided a key to an understanding of the lower stages of social development, was but a new and powerful argument in favour of the materialist explanation of history, not against that concept. It provided a closer insight into the way in which the first phases of social being take shape, and social being then determines social thinking. The discovery thereby gave amazing clarity to the truth that social thinking is determined by social being.

I mention all this only in passing. The main thing deserving of attention is Marx’s remark that the property relations existing when the productive forces reach a certain level encourage the further growth of those forces for a time, and then begin to hamper that growth. [117] This is a reminder of the fact that, though a certain state of the productive forces is the cause of the given production relations, and in particular of the property relations, the latter (once they have arisen as a consequence of the aforementioned cause) begin themselves to influence that cause. Thus there arises an interaction between the productive forces and the social economy. Since a whole superstructure of social relations, sentiments and concepts grows on the economic basis, that superstructure first fostering and then hindering the economic development, there arises between the superstructure and the basis an interaction which provides the key to an understanding of all those phenomena which at first glance seem to contradict the fundamental thesis of historical materialism.

Everything hitherto said by ‘critics’ of Marx concerning the supposed one-sidedness of Marxism and its alleged disregard of all other ‘factors’ of social development but the economic, has been prompted by a failure to understand the role assigned by Marx and Engels to the interaction between ‘basis’ and ‘superstructure’. To realise, for instance, how little Marx and Engels ignored the significance of the political factor, it is sufficient to read those pages of the Communist Manifesto which make reference to the liberation movement of the bourgeoisie. There we are told:

An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable ‘third estate’ of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. [118]

The importance of the political ‘factor’ is so clearly revealed here that some ‘critics’ consider it even unduly stressed. But the origin and the force of this ‘factor’, as well as the mode of its operation in each given period of the bourgeoisie’s development, are themselves explained in the Manifesto by the course of economic development, in consequence of which the variety of ‘factors’ in no way disturbs the unity of the fundamental cause.

Political relations indubitably influence the economic movement, but it is also indisputable that before they influence that movement they are created by it.

The same must be said of the mentality of man as a social being, of that which Stammler [119] has somewhat one-sidedly called social concepts. The Manifesto gives convincing proof that its authors were well aware of the importance of the ideological ‘factor’. However, in the same Manifesto we see that, even if the ideological ‘factor’ plays an important part in the development of society, it is itself previously created by that development.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. [120]

In this connection, however, the concluding chapter of the Manifesto is even more convincing. Its authors tell us that the Communists never cease to instil into the minds of the workers the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between the interests of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat. It is easy to understand that one who attaches no importance to the ideological ‘factor’ has no logical ground for trying to instil any such recognition whatsoever into the minds of any social group.

X

I have quoted from the Manifesto, in preference to other works by Marx and Engels, because it belongs to the early period of their activities when – as some of their critics assure us – they were especially ‘one-sided’ in their understanding of the relation between the ‘factors’ of social development. We see clearly, however, that in that period too they were distinguished, not by any ‘one-sidedness’, but only by a striving towards monism, an aversion for the eclecticism, so manifest in the remarks of their ‘critics’.

Reference is not infrequently made to two of Engels’ letters, both published in Sozialistischer Akademiker. One was written in 1890, the other in 1894. There was a time when Herr Bernstein made much of these letters which, he thought, contained plain testimony of the evolution that had taken place in the course of time in the views of Marx’s friend and collaborator. He made two extracts from them, which he thought most convincing in this respect, and which I consider necessary to reproduce here, inasmuch as they prove the reverse of what Herr Bernstein was out to prove.

Here is the first of these extracts:

Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event. This may in its turn again be regarded as the product of a power which operates as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one intended. [Letter of 1890] [121]

Here is the second extract: ‘Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc, development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis.’ [Letter of 1894] [122] Herr Bernstein finds that ‘this sounds somewhat different’ than the preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, which speaks of the links between the economic ‘basis’ and the ‘superstructure’ that rises above it. But in what way does it sound different? Precisely what is said in the preface, is repeated, viz, political and all other kinds of development rest on economic development. Herr Bernstein seems to have been misled by the following words, ‘but all these react upon one another and also on the economic basis’. Herr Bernstein himself seems to have understood the preface to Zur Kritik differently, that is, in the sense that the social and ideological ‘superstructure’ that grows on the economic ‘basis’ exerts no influence, in its turn, on that ‘basis’. We already know, however, that nothing can be more mistaken than such an understanding of Marx’s thought. Those who have observed Herr Bernstein’s ‘critical’ exercises can only shrug their shoulders when they see a man who once undertook to popularise Marxism failing to go to the trouble – or, to be more accurate, proving incapable – of first getting an understanding of that doctrine.

The second of the letters quoted by Herr Bernstein contains passages that are probably of greater importance for an understanding of the causal significance of the historical theory of Marx and Engels, than the lines I have quoted, which have been so poorly understood by Herr Bernstein. One of these passages reads as follows:

The economic situation therefore does not produce an automatic effect as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, but men make their history themselves, they do so however in a given environment, which conditions them, and on the basis of actual, already existing relations, among which, the economic relations – however much they may be influenced by other, political and ideological, relations – are still ultimately the decisive ones, forming the keynote which alone leads to understanding. [123]

As we see, Herr Bernstein himself, in the days of his ‘orthodox’ mood, was among the people ‘here and there’, who interpret the historical doctrine of Marx and Engels in the sense that in history ‘the economic situation produces an automatic effect’. These also include very many ‘critics’ of Marx who have switched into reverse ‘from Marxism to idealism’. These profound thinkers reveal great self-satisfaction when they confront and reproach the ‘one-sided’ Marx and Engels with the formula that history is made by men and not by the automatic movement of the economy. They offer Marx what he himself gave, and in their boundless simplicity of mind, do not even realise that the ‘Marx’ they are ‘criticising’ has nothing except the name in common with the real Marx, since he is the creation of their own and really many-sided non-understanding of the subject. It is natural that ‘critics’ of such calibre are utterly incapable of ‘supplementing’ or ‘amending’ anything in historical materialism. Consequently, I shall not deal with them any longer, and shall go over to the ‘founders’ of that theory.

It is of the utmost importance to note that when Engels, shortly before his death, denied the ‘automatic’ understanding of the historical operation of the economy, he was only repeating (almost in the same words) and explaining what Marx had written as far back as 1845, in the third Thesis on Feuerbach, quoted above. There Marx reproached the earlier materialists with having forgotten that if ‘men are products of circumstances... it is men who change circumstances’. [124] Consequently, the task of materialism in the sphere of history lay, as Marx understood it, precisely in explaining in what manner ‘circumstances’ can be changed by those who are themselves created by them. This problem was solved by the reference to the relations of production that develop under the influence of conditions independent of the human will. Production relations are the relations among human beings in the social process of production. Saying that production relations have changed means saying that the mutual relations have changed among people engaged in that process. A change in these relations cannot take place ‘automatically’, that is, independently of human activity, because they are relations established among men in the process of their activities.

But these relations may undergo changes – and indeed often do undergo changes – in a direction far from that in which people would like them to change. The character of the ‘economic structure’ and the direction in which that character changes depend, not upon human will but on the state of the productive forces and on the specific changes in production relations which take place and become necessary to society as a result of the further development of those forces. Engels explains this in the following words:

Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan or even in a clearly defined given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, whose complement and manifestation is accident. [125]

Here human activity is itself defined as being not free, but necessary, that is, as being in conformity with a law, and therefore capable of becoming an object of scientific study. Thus, while always pointing out that circumstances are changed by men, historical materialism at the same time enables us, for the first time, to examine the process of this change from the standpoint of science. That is why we have every right to say that the materialist explanation of history provides the necessary prolegomena to any doctrine on human society claiming to be a science.

This is so true that at present the study of any aspect of social life acquires scientific significance only in the measure in which it draws closer to a materialist explanation of that life. Despite the so vaunted ‘revival of idealism’ in the social sciences, that explanation is becoming more and more common wherever researchers refrain from indulging in edifying meditation and verbiage on the ‘ideal’, but set themselves the scientific task of discovering the causal links between phenomena. Today even people who not only do not adhere to the materialist view on history, but have not the slightest idea of it, are proving materialists in their historical researches. It is here that their ignorance of this view, or their prejudice against it, which hinders an understanding of all its aspects, does indeed lead to one-sidedness and narrowness of concepts.

XI

Here is a good illustration. Ten years ago Alfred Espinas, [126] the French scholar (and incidentally a bitter enemy of the present-day socialists), published a highly interesting – at least in conception – ‘sociological study’ entitled Les origines de la technologie. In this book, the author, proceeding from the purely materialist proposition that practice always precedes theory in the history of mankind, examines the influence of technology on the development of ideology, or to be more precise, on the development of religion and philosophy in ancient Greece. He arrives at the conclusion that, in each period of that development, the ancient Greeks’ world-outlook was determined by the state of their productive forces. This is, of course, a highly interesting and important conclusion, but anyone accustomed consciously to applying materialism to an explanation of historical events may, on reading Espinas’ ‘study’, find that the view expressed therein is one-sided. That is so for the simple reason that the French scholar has paid practically no attention to other ‘factors’ in the development of ideology, such as, for example, the class struggle. Yet the latter ‘factor’ is of really exceptional importance.

In primitive society, which knows no division into classes, man’s productive activities exert a direct influence on his world-outlook and his aesthetic tastes. Decorative design draws its motifs from technology, and dancing – probably the most important of the arts in such a society – often merely imitates the process of production. That is particularly to be seen in hunting tribes, which stand at the lowest known level of economic development. [127] That is why I referred chiefly to them when I was discussing the dependence of primitive man’s mentality on his activities in the economy he conducts. However, in a society that is divided into classes the direct impact of those activities on ideology becomes far less discernible. That is understandable. If, for instance, one of the Australian aboriginal women’s dances reproduces the work of root-gathering, it goes without saying that none of the graceful dances with which, for instance, the fine ladies of eighteenth-century France amused themselves could depict those ladies’ productive work, since they did not engage in such work, preferring in the main to devote themselves to the ‘science of tender passion’. To understand the Australian native women’s dance it is sufficient to know the part played in the life of the Australian tribe by the gathering of wild roots by the womenfolk. But to understand the minuet, for instance, it is absolutely insufficient to have a knowledge of the economy of eighteenth-century France. Here we have to do with a dance expressive of the psychology of a non-productive class. A psychology of this kind accounts for the vast majority of the ‘customs and conventions’ of so-called good society. Consequently, in this case the economic ‘factor’ is second to the psychological. It should, however, not be forgotten that the appearance of non-productive classes in a society is a product of the latter’s economic development. Hence, the economic ‘factor’ preserves its predominant significance even when it is second to others. Moreover, it is then that this significance makes itself felt, for it is then that it determines the possibility and the limits of the influence of other ‘factors’. [128]

Nor is that all. Even when it participates in the productive process in the capacity of leader, the upper class looks upon the lower class with a disdain they do not trouble to conceal. This, too, is reflected in the ideologies of the two classes. The French medieval fabliaux, and particularly the chansons de gestes depict the peasant of the time in a most unattractive way. If we are to believe them, then:

Li vilains sont de laide forme

Ainc si très laide ne vit home;

Chaucuns a XV piez de granz;

En auques ressemblent jâianz,

Mais trop sont de laide manière

Boçu sont devant et derrière... [129]

The peasants, of course, saw themselves in a different light. Indignant at the arrogance of the feudal seigneurs, they sang:

Nous sommes des hommes, tous comme eux,

Et capable de souffrir, tout autant qu’eux. [130]

And they asked:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

In a word, each of these two classes looked upon things from its own point of view, which was determined by its position in society. The psychology of the contending sides was coloured by the class struggle. Such, of course, was the case, not only in the Middle Ages and not only in France. The more acute the class struggle grew in a given country and at a given time, the stronger was its influence on the psychology of the conflicting classes. He who would study the history of ideologies in a society divided into classes must give close consideration to this influence; otherwise he will be all at sea. Try to give a bluntly economic explanation of the fact of the appearance of the David school of painting in eighteenth-century France: nothing will come of your attempt except ridiculous and dull nonsense. But if you regard that school as an ideological reflection of the class struggle in French society on the eve of the Great Revolution, the matter will at once assume an entirely different aspect: even such qualities in David’s art which, it would seem, were so far removed from the social economy that they can in no way be linked up with it, will become fully comprehensible.

The same has also to be said of the history of ideologies in ancient Greece, a history that most profoundly experienced the impact of the class struggle. That impact was insufficiently shown in Espinas’ interesting study, in consequence of which his important conclusions were marked by a certain bias. Such instances might be quoted today in no small number, and they would all show that the influence of Marx’s materialism on many present-day experts would be of the utmost value in the sense that it would teach them also to take into account ‘factors’ other than the technical and the economic. That sounds paradoxical, yet it is an undeniable truth, which will no longer surprise us if we remember that, though he explains any social movement as the outcome of the economic development of society, Marx very often thus explains that movement only as the ultimate outcome, that is, he takes it for granted that a number of various other ‘factors’ will operate in the interim.

XII

Another trend, diametrically opposed to that which we have just seen in Espinas, is beginning to reveal itself in present-day science – a tendency to explain the history of ideas exclusively by the influence of the class struggle. This perfectly new and as yet inconspicuous trend has arisen under the direct influence of Marxist historical materialism. We see it in the writings of the Greek author A Eleutheropoulos, [131] whose principal work Wirtschaft und Philosophie, Volume 1: Die Philosophie und die Lebensauffassung des Griechentums auf Grund der gesellschaftlichen Zustände; and Volume 2: Die Philosophie und die Lebensauffassung der germanisch-romanischen Völker was published in Berlin in 1900. Eleutheropoulos is convinced that the philosophy of any given period expresses the latter’s specific ‘world-outlook and views on life’ (Lebens- and Weltanschauung). Properly speaking, there is nothing new about this. Hegel already said that every philosophy is merely the ideological expression of its time. With Hegel, however, the features of the various epochs, and, consequently, of the corresponding phases in the development of philosophy, were determined by the movement of Absolute Idea, whereas with Eleutheropoulos any given epoch is characterised primarily by its economic condition. The economy of any particular people determines its ‘life- and world-understanding’, which is expressed, among other things, in its philosophy. With a change in the economic basis of society, the ideological superstructure changes too. Inasmuch as economic development leads to the division of society into classes, and to a struggle between the latter, the ‘life- and world-understanding’ peculiar to a particular period is not uniform in character. It varies in the different classes and undergoes modification in accordance with their position, their needs and aspirations, and the course of their mutual struggle.

Such is the viewpoint from which Eleutheropoulos regards the entire history of philosophy. It is self-evident that this point of view deserves the closest attention and the utmost approval. For quite a considerable period there has been discernible in philosophical literature a dissatisfaction with the usual view on the history of philosophy as merely a filiation of philosophical systems. In a pamphlet published in the late 1880s and dealing with ways of studying the history of philosophy, the well-known French writer Picavet declared that, taken by itself, filiation of this kind can explain very little. [132] The appearance of Eleutheropoulos’ work might have been welcomed as a new step in the study of the history of philosophy, and as a victory of historical materialism in its application to an ideology far removed from economics. Alas, Eleutheropoulos has not displayed much skill in making use of the dialectical method of that materialism. He has oversimplified the problems confronting him, and for that reason alone has failed to bring forward any solutions other than the very one-sided and therefore most unsatisfactory. Let us cite his 