42

p At the great historical breaking-point between feudalism and capitalism, the vision of a fair social system continued to be no more than a vision. The very notion of regularity in mankind’s historical development was just emerging, supplanting the theological notions of predestination.

p By the 17th century vast knowledge of social history had been gained, and there were many facts not only about antiquity, but also about the tribes living in primitive society. Earlier on, at the beginning of the 16th century, there appeared some fundamental reports about the customs and usages of various tribes and peoples,  [42•24  containing fairly detailed descriptions of primitive society. In their works, the English materialists of the 17th century used such descriptions of the way of life and mores 43 of tribes inhabiting America and had a knowledge of tribal and patriarchal communities. Thus, Locke refers to the life of the peoples in Brazil, Peru and Africa. In the 17th and 18th centuries many books were published about the “innocent savage”, and the happy life of men who as yet had no knowledge of government or wealth. The point was whether man was good by nature, or whether he was in need of the harsh bridle of power and man’s domination of man.  [43•25  For its criticism of the exploitative system, mankind was already in possession of the historical experience of the primitive commune and the peasant commune, which had survived until the Middle Ages. This experience suggested the image of a society based on the peasant egalitarianism and equal sharing which the leaders of peasant uprisings had looked to.

p Maxim Kovalevsky, the 19th-century Russian sociologist, was quite right when he said the following about the social order reflected in the Utopias of More and Campanella: “This order was apparently quite similar to the family communes which at one time were known not only among the Southern Slavs as zadrugas or common kupas, but also among the West European people under various names."  [43•26  Kovalevsky also points out that the Utopians had a preference for the “city-republic or a federation of city-republics”,  [43•27  notions which must have arisen from a knowledge of ancient history. Neither More nor Campanella could have been inspired in their visions of better societies by the absolutist feudal state which had taken shape by that time. These forward-looking thinkers saw no way of changing these feudal states, and so transferred their visions of a new system to distant lands lost in the ocean.

p By contrast, the advocates of the rising bourgeoisie praised private property and extolled the state, an instrument in the hands of the ruling class. Their theory of society was perhaps most clearly formulated by Thomas Hobbes: the state, a peace-making power which saves men from the condition of war of everyone against everyone, from lack of government and total chaos, and leads mankind out of a semisavage state. The ideologists of the bourgeoisie campaigned for unlimited domination by the upper classes, having abandoned the medieval theories of the “divine” origin of the state, and having divested all political institutions of the aura of sanctity. That was of course a step forward from the theories of “divine” predestination in the political organisation of society and the historical process as a whole.

p Relying on the knowledge already gained by then, the rising 44 bourgeoisie proclaimed the idea of a “natural” advance of mankind, which was not subject to god’s will, but bourgeois society was the ultimate goal of that movement. The works of Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes and many other bourgeois writers were keynoted with the idea that the pillars of the exploitative society and the state ^were unshatterable. More and Campanella refused to accept this idea’, and abandoned the present for a vision of Utopia contrasted to reality.

p In the early 18th century, the idea of law-governed social development occurred here and there in the writings of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico, who refused either to sing the praises to the new age of the bourgeoisie or to entertain any visions of a happier society. Indeed, his theory of social development had no future. Vico’s world history goes through three main stages: the divine period, the heroic period, and the human period. The initial period is described in mythology, a chronicle of mankind’s early advances in culture; the second period is that of Homer’s epic poems and the rule of the aristocracy; the third opens when the people become stronger and the domination of those of “noble” birth comes to an end. However, the “human age" is once again followed by decline, and the whole cycle is repeated.

p Bourgeois historians of social thought have written many absurdities about this “mysterious” thinker, but have studiously obscured the main point that helps to explain Vico’s attitude. What were the historical conditions for the emergence of Vico’s ideas? Italy, Vico’s native land, was then in a state of decline, which is why he did not become a troubadour of the rising bourgeoisie and of capitalist civilisation. In history, this Italian thinker saw not only progress, but also decline.

p What were the notions of history and its periods that Vico had to deal with? The humanist writers were using the term “Middle Ages" to denote the interval between the ancient world and the epoch of the Renaissance, to which they themselves belonged. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this division of history was being ever more widely accepted with the Middle Ages regarded as a period of regress, while the Renaissance opened a “golden age”. Voltaire subsequently said that the Middle Ages had to be studied for noother purpose than to be despised. Among the works which appeared in the late 17th century some were entitled Ancient History, History of the Middle Ages from the Period of Constantine the Great to the Sack of Constantinople by the Turks, and Modern History.  [44•28  In the latter the Renaissance was at first given pride of place, and attention was centered on Italy, with the whole of this period regarded as an age of its glory. But the thinking Italian was coming to realise that by the 18th 45 century that period, for Italy at any rate, had come to a close and that a new dark period had begun. This question arose: was this only the individual lot of Italy or was the “human age”, which had opened in Italy in a flood of light, entirely to be lost in the twilight?

p Vico was faced with two fatal enigmas in social development. How did it happen that mankind, having advanced from barbarism to Greco-Roman civilisation, had then come to lose itself in the barbaric Middle Ages? Italy, which in the age of the Renaissance was the cynosure of all the progressive minds, and which had proudly been the first to enter the “human age”, was it too moving into decline? In other words, why was the civilisation of the 17th-18th centuries, that is, bourgeois society, emerging with the stamp of doom, of acute contradictions and patent imperfection?

p Vico was sure that the “human age" was in no sense a period of lasting prosperity: morals and manners were deteriorating, while self-seeking and the lust for power were spreading. Beyond the horizon of this age once again lurked barbarism, which had once advanced to replace Roman civilisation. With evidence of barbarism in the new “human age”, Vico reached the conclusion that the seeds of decline and destruction were also latent in that period of history. This was a new idea voiced by a lone individual in the midst of general jubilation over the entry of society into the “human age”. But Vico saw no way leading to the future; history had to reverse its advance. Consequently, the visions of More and Campanella were not to be realised.

p However, the Enlighteners of the 18th century, who reflected the views of the rising bourgeoisie, did not believe it possible for history to reverse its march and to give way to another epoch of decline, and accordingly insisted on the idea of mankind’s boundless progressive advance. This social development, they asserted, was not a divine but a natural process. In the 17th century, Spinoza already insisted that man was a part of nature, that reason impelled man to pool his efforts with other men and that the banding of men into society was a natural process, while the state expressed the power of the men it brought together.

p Montesquieu’s L ’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) appeared in 1748 and gave even greater depth to the idea of natural causes underlying the existence and change in state and society. In explaining the development of human society, Montesquieu laid emphasis on geographical conditions, the nature of the soil and the climate, but he was still far from conceiving the idea of social development, for his thoughts were concentrated on political institutions, state power in the first place.

p The idea of mankind’s boundless development was propounded in his own way by Turgot. He was not entirely free of Machiavelli’s influence and in his Discourse on Universal History (1751) said that “through the alternation of agitation and calm, of good and evil, the total mass of the 46 human race keeps marching ceaselessly towards its perfection".  [46•29  Another French Enlightener, Condorcet, spoke of progress in virtue of which man “has been able to enrich his mind with new truths, to cultivate his intelligence, to develop his faculties, to learn them better to employ them both for his own wellbeing and for the common good".  [46•30 

p Nor was the idea of boundless social progress alien to the men of the German Enlightenment, among them Herder, a thinker of the second half of the 18th century, who first clearly expressed the idea that social development was a process rooted in nature. The men of the German Enlightenment believed that if history did have an epoch of decline—the Middle Ages—it had ultimately nevertheless served to educate mankind, for the substance of world history was man’s education and the unfolding of his spiritual potentialities. However, social progress was a question that remained obscure.

p The stumbling block for the emergent theory of social development was idealism. Notions of the historical process were made rigid by the too straightforward and metaphysical approach. All the Enlighteners were agreed that progress manifested itself in the advances of science, the spread of knowledge and the decline of superstition and prejudice, which gave way to reason overcoming darkness. That is the main idea of the theory of social development propounded by the French Enlighteners. Generations of thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries showed the vast importance for mankind’s development of science and knowledge which helped it to conquer nature. They also pointed to the relation between mankind’s moral and intellectual progress but reduced the whole idea to the view that the spread of knowledge ultimately also determined the changes in the sphere of ethics.

p Apart from spiritual improvement, progress, they held, included the development of political institutions, notably the state, which were stripped of the medieval aura of supernatural, divine origin, being now regarded as the handiwork of man. This put on the order of the day the question of society’s political development, but the thinkers of the rising bourgeoisie believed that the progress of society’s political organisation was ultimately connected with the spread of knowledge, the moderation of morals and manners, and the development of the intellect.

p The social organisation of society was a concept the 18th-century Enlighteners identified with its political organisation, with the state. The early notions of the “civil society"—as the social structure was being increasingly designated—were just being formulated, but there were no clear-cut ideas on this point and the term “civil society" itself remained very vague. The basic question of social theory—the origins of man’s exploitation of man and his lot in the development of society—had not 47 been posed, leaving a great number of unsolved problems which failed to fit into the scheme of straightforward progress.

p That is when Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the great Enlighteners of the 18th century, sounded his warning. His first dissertation, presented at the Academy of Dijon, sharply criticised culture and civilisation, which he believed, were in no sense an unmixed blessing. Wealth was a great evil, while science and art sprang from wealth and luxury. Rousseau’s reasoning once again echoed the legend of a “golden age" lying somewhere in the past, of the “happy savage”, both echoing idealised epochs of the distant past.

p Rousseau’s writings show that there was no plain sailing for the bourgeois theory of straightforward progress. Indeed, if progress did exist why did it carry with it domination by the strong and suppression of the weak?

p Was society capable of escaping from the tight grip of social injustice?

p Rousseau did not issue a call for a return to the “golden age”. He wrote:~“What then are we to do? Are we to destroy society? To annihilate the thine and the mine, and to return to a life in the forest alongside the bears?"  [47•31  Rousseau had no positive answer to that question. He believed that man had to advance and not retreat if he was to solve the difficult problem posed by history. But which way was he to advance? His only answer, as he peered into the future, was improvement of the political structure of bourgeois society and the establishment of a democratic bourgeois regime.

p It is true that now and again Rousseau spoke of a state and a society which were “better organised”. In his Social Contract he wrote: “The better the constitution of the state, the more public affairs prevail in the minds of citizens. Indeed, there are fewer private affairs because out of the sum total of common welfare a more considerable portion is being provided for the welfare of each individual, so that it remains for him to seek less in his private concern."  [47•32  Latter-day thinkers concerned with problems in social development, its tendencies and prospects were influenced by such just and profound ideas. But neither Rousseau nor those who came after him knew what had to be done to produce an abundance of “public welfare" for each individual to draw on and to lay aside his “private concerns”. More and Campanella had already realised that that could not be done without the establishment of public property. But they did not know either how the historical process was to lead to such a state, or whether it would do so at all. That is a question which they, too, were in effect unable to answer. Rousseau held that to bring 48 about the welfare of men one need merely avoid the extremes of wealth and poverty, for which purpose private property had to be equally distributed. That was the vain ideal of the petty bourgeoisie. We find, therefore, that neither Rousseau nor his followers considered the all-important question, that of exploitation, private property and what to do with it.

p Rousseau’s followers saw a way out in spreading the ideas of abstract, nominal bourgeois equality and freedom. They believed that changing political institutions would do the trick. Many leaders of the French revolution of 1789 were inspired by these ideas, and the ideologists of the bourgeoisie sang paeans of praise in many voices to its “millennium”, calling it an era of freedom, equality and even brotherhood. They declared that the new system held in store constant happiness for the human race, exhausted and languishing in the fetters of feudalism and the Middle Ages. The brotherhood of men would be established once the proud and impregnable castles of the feudals and the bishops were destroyed, their walls razed to the ground, and their moats filled up. All one had to do to establish equality among men was to abolish the monstrous privileges of the feudal lords, for apart from the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal everyone else belonged to the “third estate”. The bourgeoisie, which had not yet had much opportunity to show its true colours, was not expected to do much harm to those who toiled, and so was not considered apart from the general notion of the “people”. Because the question of man’s exploitation of man had not been sharply formulated, the notions of social development and its prospects were also hazy and vague.

p The bourgeois slogans of freedom in effect meant freedom only for private enterprise, and the abolition of rights which sprang from feudal landholdings, while the slogans of equality amounted to no more than a proclamation of formal rights, which workers and toiling peasants had no actual possibility of enjoying.

The 18th century was one of the most important periods in the history of social thought. The bourgeoisie was preparing to storm the pillars of the feudal system with masses of people under the banner of progress, claiming that the new social system to be established in place of feudalism would meet the requirements of reason and historical justice. That is an important idea because it implied the possibility, the necessity of transforming the social order, and had the future on its side. It marked the first important advance in the emergent theory of social development, which is inseparable from the historical, revolutionary activity of the masses. From then on, the history of social thought consisted in the blasting of illusions, in the course of the class struggle, about the capability of capitalism to establish freedom, equality and brotherhood, thereby opening the way to the real triumph of progress and social justice.