G.P. FRANTSOV
__TITLE__ PHILOSOPHY and SOCIOLOGY __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-06-06T01:54:09-0700 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"Progress Publishers.
Moscow
[1] rTranslated from the Russian by YURI SDOBN1KOV
T. n. 4>panuoB
d>HJIOCO*Hfl H COIJHOJIOrHfl
Ha aiujiuticKOM JHMKC
__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1975Georgy Frantsov (1903--1969) was a leading scientist who specialised in philosophy, history, scientific communism and sociology, an ardent propagandist of Marxism-Leninism, a prominent public figure and political leader, a gifted journalist and a man of great erudition and charm. He was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge. With his broad philosophical and, simultaneously, Party approach to problems in social development, he was able creatively to work on many key problems of historical materialism and scientific communism, and to produce a profound critical analysis of present-day bourgeois sociological conceptions. In his lifetime, he helped many young scientists to start out on the path of sociological research and criticism of bourgeois sociological conceptions. G.~P. Frantsov^^*^^ generously shared his knowledge, thoughts and plans with them. A man of great erudition himself, Frantsov sought to foster in his students a keen dedication to science.
He was well known and respected as a public figure, an organiser of scientific activity and training of personnel. He was Director of the Institute of International Relations, head of the Press Department of the USSR Foreign Ministry, Rector of the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, Editor-in-Chief of World Marxist Review, and Deputy Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee, in all these posts revealing his brilliant personality and keen mind. Above all, G. P. Frantsov was a fighter for the cause of Marxism-Leninism.
His books, pamphlets and articles constitute a large and valuable scientific, literary and journalistic legacy, which in his lifetime commanded much interest among a large readership. The reason is that his writings were a blend of scientific and profound philosophical _-_-_
^^*^^ Many of his works were published under various pseudonyms, including Y. P. Frantsov and Yu. Frantsev.
7 analysis, and impassioned Communist Party spirit, for he took a militantly implacable stand on present-day reactionary bourgeois and petty-bourgeois trends. We find this in his capital scientific works and in his articles for the periodical press. Concise and short the latter may well have been, but they, too, were a blend of his scientific knowledge and brilliant skill of a Party journalist.The bulk of the book consists of his work, The Historical Path of Social Thought, which was first published in 1965. The author himself regarded it as summing up his research into the history of social thinking. It presents a broad panorama of the dialectics of social thought, closely connected with the advance of history itself, and with the class struggle, which permeates the whole history of human society. In this book, Frantsov displayed his talent of philosopher and historian, giving a profound summary of the prehistory of scientific ideology, and showing how progressive thinkers had probed their way to the truth, until the fundamental turning point in its evolution when the founders of Marxism gave scientific answers to the questions the course of history itself had posed.
The author shows the revolution in social science carried out by the founders of Marxism, and also the crisis of present-day bourgeois thinking, its reactionary and unscientific nature, its abandonment of the scientific approach to the analysis of social progress, and its theoretical impotence.
The sections of the book dealing with Lenin's development of the Marxist doctrine contain a wealth of concrete facts and scientific treatment of historical events. He shows the emergence of Leninism in the struggle with ideological and political bourgeois and petty-bourgeois trends, which were hostile to the cause of the working class and social progress as a whole. He shows very well the worldwide historical importance of Leninism as the ideological banner of social progress throughout the world, and the greatness of the world's first triumphant socialist revolution, exploding the attempts by our ideological adversaries to minimise its importance and confine its experience to a regional framework. He does this by giving a scientific analysis of the role of the principal and universal regularities governing socialist revolution. He also shows how the ideas of the October Revolution and its experience have been spreading across the globe and providing an inexhaustible and life-giving source of revolutionary thought and action.
The book includes chapters on the historical importance of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and its role in the development of socialist culture and ideological struggle.
G. P. Frantsov gives a deep analysis of the development of the Marxist doctrine and shows very well how Lenin organically combined unbending loyalty to the scientific principles of the founders of the Marxist doctrine and a profoundly innovatory and creative approach, 8 together with boldness in generalising new phenomena and tendencies in world social practice throughout history.
G. P. Frantsov's articles on Marx and Lenin, the founders of Marxism-Leninism, and the problems of scientific communism were mostly written in the last few years of his life. Each of these is a well-rounded work in itself, but all are connected by a single line of thought which runs organically through them all. In these articles, G. P. Frantsov put forward many ideas, which were theoretically novel and practically important and which undoubtedly deserve further elaboration as independent studies. Some of these articles are presented in abridged form.
G. P. Frantsov was closely in touch with the practice of communist construction, and these pages show him once again as a scientist of great intellect and theoretical boldness, and an impassioned fighter for the communist cause.
[9] ~ [10] __ALPHA_LVL1__ INTRODUCTIONThe world is peering ever more intently into the future. The Programme of the CPSU has indicated the way along which the Soviet people are advancing into it. Once again, this puts one in mind of what Engels said in 1883: ``Russia is the France of the present century. To her belongs rightfully and lawfully the revolutionary initiative of a new social reorganisation...."^^1^^
The French revolution key noted the end of the 18th and a large part of the 19th century, including the period of the Paris Commune. The French revolution paved the way into the future. Marxism was tempered in the flames of the 1848 and 1871 revolutions, followed by the emergence of the Social-Democratic parties, which gained much experience in organising the working class. The early years of the 20th century were marked by the emergence in the arena of world history of the Leninist Party, which gave a lead to the masses and made the Russian proletariat---as Lenin had predicted at the beginning of the century---the vanguard of the international revolutionary movement. It was its initiative that sparked off major transformations of society and fresh advances in social thought.
Marx, Engels and Lenin attached much importance to revolutionary initiative and the power of example. Revolutionary initiative is highly important in helping the new elements that have matured to defeat the old in social development. Revolutionary initiative has helped to realise the historical possibilities that have been comprehended and to blend revolutionary thought and revolutionary acts.
A new stage has now been reached in mankind's long development and in the history of social thought. Marxism-Leninism has provided a scientific analysis of the prospects of social development and activity by masses of people in making a reality of the unfolding historical possibilities.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, Moscow, 1957, p. 205.
11To discover the objective dialectics of the historical process, to analyse social development, one needs to analyse its source and to study the self-movement of the social whole. Therein lies, in effect, the power of materialist dialectics, which has enabled it to revolutionise social thinking. The Marxist-Leninist doctrine of society is permeated with the historical approach and one of its great achievements is the establishment of the stages of society's development. Lenin used to stress that historical approach to social phenomena was typical of Marxism\thinspace``... not only in the sense of explaining the past but also in the sense of a bold forecast of the future and of bold practical action for its achievement".^^2^^ These remarkable words define the revolution in social thinking which Marxism has carried out. Creative Marxist thinking helps to bring out the potentialities of social development and, accordingly, to set new and concrete tasks in men's practical activity. Therein lies the importance of the political line pursued by the Marxist-Leninist parties. In this way, theory is transformed into policy, into a system of actions, into concrete tasks facing the historical movement of working mankind.
An understanding of the objective tendencies of development inevitably sets one thinking about the future, about the historical prospects and the possibility of man's taking vigorous action to realise these prospects. This is the touchstone for assessing the role of social thought in the objective historical process. That is why scientific communism is the supreme achievement in social thinking.
Once the possibility of changing the social state is recognised, one needs to consider the possibility of man's exerting a conscious influence on such change. The connection between the development of social science and revolutionary theory is not a casual or unnatural one, as bourgeois sociologists seek to prove by rewriting history according to their own lights. The history of social thought shows this growing connection, its emergence and development.
Social thought can originate and develop only when men do not regard the present as being lasting and immutable, for when social phenomena are taken to be fixed once and for all, the way to any reasoning about them is closed.
Man's conscious attitude to social development has its origins in his understanding that the existing order is not in any sense a lasting state, without beginning or end, established by the gods for all time. That is not an idea which emerged in history all at once. It marks the beginnings of social thinking, and it is the task of science to determine its stages.
The development of social thought is closely connected with an analysis of the past, an understanding of the present and efforts to divine the future, for a profound understanding of the present involves a clarification of tendencies and widening prospects. What do men need to _-_-_
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 72.
12 do to translate into reality the potential of the historical process? The answer is provided by the historical and materialist approach to social phenomena.That is something bourgeois theorists today refuse to accept and in a chorus of discordant voices keep singing the old song: scientific analysis of reality, they claim, rules out consideration of the future, which remains a dim dream instead of being the object of scientific analysis. This is one of the important issues in the ideological struggle today.
Bourgeois theorists cannot admit that the true theory of social development is also a theory for the fundamental transformation of society. In the light of their class preconceptions, they have falsified the history of social thought, alleging that it comes to no more than a succession of diverse subjective wishes and armchair ideas and declaring war on any idea of a fundamental transformation of society.
Bourgeois scientists have written many books about the history of social thought but these have distorted the concept, giving it all sorts of twisted readings. But what is the real meaning of this concept? It includes trends in social thinking which seek to shed light on social development and tackle social problems. Of course, the history of social thought is closely bound up with the history of political thought, which mainly brings out various questions bearing on the political organisation of society, and also with philosophical trends. The main question thinkers have tried to answer over the centuries was that of the origin and essence of social and national oppression. That is a question social thinkers have tried to answer from time immemorial. At first, the answers were naive, for they were not based on science. As social science developed more and more data were available for a scientific answer that carried conviction. The true answer came only with the emergence of the proletariat, the grave-digger of capitalism, when history first posed the question of whether the exploitative system could be destroyed. Scientific communism has provided the answer.
Bourgeois theorists refuse to see the logic in the development of social thought and seek to distort its history in every way. They have done their utmost to twist the idea of the past, the present and the future of the working people. They want the working-class movement to have no historical prospect and to deceive the working people into thinking that they must be satisfied with capitalism, reformed and refurbished, because history allegedly offers no other alternative. To suggest the contrary is to draw charges of being a Utopian. The reformists have cursed scientific communism and branded it as utopianism, denying the possibility of socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and fabricating out of various elements of capitalism their own ``ideal society" which continues to have private property in the means of 13 production and capitalist free enterprise. Their ``socialism'' is nothing but an embellished capitalism at its last, monopoly stage. Bourgeois ideologists present the history of social thought in a light that suggests that they have provided scientific proof of a reformed capitalism being the final stage in the long development of society. They have tried to present the history of social thought in such a way as to suggest that socialism, once a Utopia, has never developed into a science, these allegedly being ``the two main streams" of social thinking---the Utopian and the scientific---with the latter not allowing any consideration of the future society.
Bourgeois ideology and capitalist society, which have produced these views, now confront a mighty and developing socialist system of society and its ideology, which corresponds to the new stage in mankind's social progress. The struggle between these two opposite ideologies on various aspects of social development is highly important, because it is a struggle over the issue of mankind's future. Now that the majestic edifice of communism, which is being built by the labour endeavour of millions of men, is acquiring ever more distinct contours, bourgeois ideology is being dealt its heaviest blow since the appearance of Marxism. The revolutionary initiative of the CPSU and the Soviet country, now building communism, have been exerting their transforming influence on millions upon millions of men and women in the struggle for a better future, for a new world. It has had a regenerating effect on the whole of mankind's political and spiritual life. Bourgeois views of social development now appear to all honest-minded men in their true colours, as vindicating stagnation and as urging regress.
Consider the praises sung by bourgeois ideologists to militarisation, which is a product of the rotting present-day capitalism. These praises show very well the reactionary nature of bourgeois ideology and the drag monopoly domination tends to exert on social development. Defence ministries are the most powerful clients ordering large consignments of rapidly obsolescent goods at high prices. This is a good business. Perhaps never since the period of feudal absolutist regimes have the military played such an important role in state machinery. Feudal monarchs and their vassals suffocated in fancy gold-braid military uniforms. Earlier on, slave-holding Rome, armed to the teeth, according to the standards of the age, had hoped that its legions would stop the tide of history. However, all of this is merely a sign of the old system going down to its destruction.
The outcome of the competition between the new and the old system was ultimately decided in production, the most important sphere of human activity. Indeed, this also gave the new system its military advantage. Today, the situation has changed in the sense that the new social system which has set the task of eliminating wars from the life of society, has also established its superiority in the military sphere, 14 thereby preventing the reactionaries from carrying the issue in the great historical contest between the new and the old world onto the field of bloody battles. The new system looks confidently to the future, well aware that it will win out in peaceful competition. The idea of lasting peace, also resulting from the long development of social thought, has been winning ever more supporters and active fighters all over the world. In the minds of masses of people this idea is being wedded to the ideas of communism, which advances under the banner of peace and carries peace to mankind.
Some of the more farsighted theorists in the West realise that the prestige of capitalism has been plummeting, while that of socialism has been soaring. More and more intellectuals in the West have been criticising capitalism, giving greater recognition to the forces of scientific communism. What bourgeois theorists fear most of all is that in the capitalist countries men cannot help thinking more and more about the objectively possible future, about the need to work for the triumph of the progressive tendencies carrying mankind forward. All of this means that men have been ever more active in taking a conscious attitude to social reality. The awakening of a conscious attitude to reality and correct assessment of the possibilities for massive activity are an important aspect of historical progress itself. We find evidence of this in the whole history of social thought.
That is why bourgeois ideologists seek to prove that any assessment of the prospects before social development has always been and will always continue to be subjective and never a scientific conclusion based on a profound analysis of historical tendencies. For roughly a century now, bourgeois theorists have tried hard to prove that the ultimate goals of the working-class struggle are not rooted in the objective course of social development. These old objections to the Marxist theory of social development are now being put forward in a somewhat refurbished form, because the ultimate aims of the working-class struggle have become practical tasks in the activity of millions of working people in the countries of the world socialist system. Indeed, bourgeois ideologists have appealed to dialectics to back up their objections to the Marxist theory of social development. Thus, Professor Georges Gurvitch of the Sorbonne wrote a book about dialectics and sociology in which he urges the need for applying the dialectical method if sociology is to develop successfully. That would, of course, be fine, but for the fact that Professor Gurvitch takes a curious view of dialectics and the dialectical method. He starts by extolling dialectics for its critical and revolutionary character, which makes it irreconcilable to any dogmas or preconceptions. But then he goes on to say that dialectics in sociology is incompatible with any idea of progress. However, for Marxism dialectics continues to be the line of man's ascent to a radiant future. Marx's dialectics is a triumphant march through revolution towards a 15 humanity finally rid of all servitude and reconciled with itself.^^3^^ Professor Gurvitch has, in effect, invented a special term for the dialectics which he cannot accept. He calls it the ``dialectique ascendante'', the ``ascendant dialectics''.
Like many other modern ``critics'' of Marx, Professor Gurvitch declares that ``Marx's 'historical dialectics' tends to cover up a 'philosophy of history' and serves to confound the reality of history, historiography (or historical knowledge) and an eschatological and Utopian view of the future of society".^^4^^ He adds that the Marxist theorist is aware of mankind's future even ``without dialectics" which is why Marx's ``historical dialectics" becomes ``dogmatic'', because it allegedly allows a preconception of the human destiny. Gurvitch also claims that this dialectics becomes ``the apology for the second phase of communism".^^5^^ I have quoted these assertions at some length because they appear to be typical of modern bourgeois sociologists who have been putting up a stubborn fight in face of the Marxist-Leninist offensive along the whole front of the social sciences.
Bourgeois theorists refuse to accept the incontestable fact that a great revolution in social thought took place a century ago. They refuse to be reconciled with the fact that socialism has ceased to be a Utopia and has become a science, and that scientific communism has emerged and is developing. The various forms of neopositivism, including Gurvitch's ``dialectical empiricism'', seek to assure men that the question of the direction the historical process is to take allegedly lies outside the framework of science. Neopositivism denies sociology any philosophical content and any connection between sociological theories and philosophical doctrines. But to deny human thought the right to make generalisations about the development of social life is to kill social thought itself, to deny it any future and to scrap its past.
It took centuries of efforts to produce a generalised picture of the development of social life, these efforts being naive, weak and Utopian so long as the working people's class struggle against the exploiters was being carried on at a low level. These attempts were idealistic and metaphysical until the emergence of revolutionary materialist dialectics, the weapon of the working class whose historic mission is to transform the world. This weapon has been sharpened in class battles. It is being used with great skill today in the working people's struggle against capital and in their construction of the new life.
Today dialectical materialism ousts bourgeois neopositivist conceptions everywhere, dealing them shattering blows. Some sociologists who have criticised the ``ascendant dialectics" inevitably ended up by denying _-_-_
~^^3^^ G. Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie, Paris, 1962, p. 155.
~^^4^^ Ibid., p. 149.
~^^5^^ Ibid., p. 149.
16 the very idea of development, assuming that the dialectics of the ascent from the lower forms to the higher in the history of society could not possibly serve as a basis for a scientific theory of society.From that standpoint, the history of social thought is a history of the gradual oblivion of the surges towards a radiant future, with these surges being replaced by positivist ``scientific'' formulas, which put a ban even on thinking about fundamental social change. Such is the bourgeois caricature of the history of social thought. Such is the bourgeois distortion of the role of social thought in the history of mankind's struggle for emancipation.
However, when social science ceases to shape men's convictions and their motivations for activity for the sake of progress, it begins to serve reaction, whatever its advocates may say concerning their claims to ``objectivity'', and the separation of ``science'' and ``ideology''. Of this some of the modern scientists in the West, who are not in any sense Marxists, are also aware.
Professor Alvin Gouldner, who delivered the report at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in the USA, sharply attacked the fundamental tenets of the leading US sociologists who claim that it is not their business to assess the facts of social life, and who try to release the concept of sociology from value judgements so as to make sociologists indifferent to the moral conclusions suggested by their work. Professor Gouldner also attacked various objectivist claims which, he believed, sprang from the huckstering that determined the sociologist's status in this world, forcing him to supply ideologically neutral and purely technical studies which could be offered to any prospective buyer. Gouldner gave a reminder that before Hiroshima, physicists likewise claimed to be ``neutral'' with respect to social phenomena. Today, he added, many physicists are not as convinced of this. Gouldner held that concentration on the technical training of US students and the elimination of any responsibility for their ethical sense or lack of it could produce a generation eager to serve a future Auschwitz (Oswiecim). That was an excellent warning to those who take the neopositivist view of social science. A social science that does not serve the great cause of social progress ceases to be a science, for it abandons the quest for scientific truth, for the sake of which generations of forward-looking men went to the stake and the gallows. This kind of ``science'', said Professor Gouldner, can be no more than a checklist of technical rules.
However, Professor Gouldner failed to show the true and objective connectiop between human ideals and the dialectics of social development. Whereas Professor Gurvitch insists that the dialectics of social development should make do without ideals, Professor Gouldner considers various ideals outside the context of the dialectics of social development. But what is the real answer?
17There can be no depth to men's conscious attitude to their environment without a scientific knowledge of the facts, but this can be obtained only by connecting the facts to discover the regularities and trends of development. Any conscious attitude to existing reality rests on a scientific cognition of the potentialities, prospects and trends of historical development. Scientific cognition establishes the potentialities latent in historical reality and consequently gives a realistic definition of the potential possibilities in men's historical activity.
The less scientific the method of cognising reality, the less clearly are the real possibilities for massive historical action brought out. In the period when social thought was still forced to make do with a vague Utopia, it was unable to determine how precisely the masses were to act. Scientific communism showed the working people the real path of struggle.
Many social scientists in the West have been confused by the following ``argument'' in defence of the neopositivist, empirical approach to the study of social phenomena. Men in the West are taught at school that social theory should never allow any confusion between two types of judgement: judgement about the existence of facts and judgement about their value. Science, they are told, must operate only with judgement of the first type, for evaluation of the facts is a matter of personal convictions, which are subjective, and therefore arbitrary. Evaluations are best left to ``ideology'', because they belong to ethical and political convictions, to visions and Utopias.
The statement that ``so many per cent of the population in society are poor" is a judgement concerning the existence of a fact. But can social thought confine itself to stating the existence of such a social phenomenon? Does it not require the working out of a science-based attitude on man's part to the existence of such a phenomenon? These attitudes will differ in depth depending on the level of the class struggle. Only a high level of social development and the class struggle helps to provide a truly profound and scientific analysis of this phenomenon and to show its origins and trend of development, and the possibility of eliminating it depending on certain conditions. In a naive form these questions were also considered by social thought even in the prescientific period of its development, when it was dominated by various Utopian projects. But even then social thought developed on the basis of existing knowledge, however inadequate, leaving much room for imagination and invention. At the time, history was yet to pose the question of eliminating poverty in the world, for the force that could cope with the task was yet to emerge in society. The embryonic state of social life itself and the inadequacy of knowledge about it determined the level of social thinking at its prescientific stage.
When we say that capitalism must give way to socialism we express the necessity for social development, a historical regularity that has been 18 well established. At the same time, we determine, on the strength of this, our duty, the duty of the working class and of all the forward-looking forces. That is the way the notion of ultimate aim in the struggle is formed and the possibility of the working class taking historical action determined.
The class stand of the person concerned may either hamper or help him to gain a knowledge of social phenomena and their objective connections. That is the most important aspect of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the Party approach to social science. However, for that reason the phenomena and their connections do not become subjective, for they exist outside the cognising subject. Indeed, his social stand itself is ultimately a phenomenon determined by objective conditions and not merely a result of his subjective preferences, arbitrary approach or play of the imagination.
To return to the question of moral values, let us add that moral duty and moral inducement to activity can be fully developed only when man comes to comprehend existing reality.
Among modern Marxist theorists who have written on the subject, it was Antonio Gramsci who attached special importance to massive understanding of the need for the historical process. He wrote: ``The scientific base for a morality of historical materialism is to be looked for, in my opinion, in the affirmation that 'society does not pose for itself tasks the conditions for whose resolution do not already exist'. Where these conditions exist the 'solution of the tasks becomes ``duty'', ``will'' becomes free'.'' Morality would then become a ``search for the conditions necessary for the freedom of the will in a certain sense, aimed at a certain end, and the demonstration that these conditions exist".^^6^^ That is, indeed, one of the key tasks of social thinking. Cognition of historical necessity and the urgent tasks and purposes of social activity provides the basis for the moral activity of individuals, and the groups and classes to which these individuals belong. Man comes to comprehend what he must seek, which tasks are dictated by the epoch, which aims the given stage of social development sets before him. The deeper his comprehension, the firmer his convictions and the stronger the material and moral incentives, the more effective his activity. This is provided by social science, the scientific theory of social development. Therein lies the strength of the Marxist-Leninist parties, which formulate their sciencebased policies, the demands and the tendencies of social development, and mobilise the masses for historical activity in the fulfilment of urgent tasks.
The Marxist-Leninist parties' science-based political line is now the highroad for massive activity and development of social thought. Utopianism has been left to the reactionaries, and it is the theorists of _-_-_
~^^6^^ Antonio Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York, 1973, pp. 409--10
19 imperialism who tend to produce more and more reactionary Utopias. Where utopianism has penetrated the minds of working people chiefly under the influence of petty-bourgeois trends in social thought, it hampers the advance of the masses in the present-day ideological struggle. The invasion of social science by reactionary utopianism kills its probing scientific thought. Science is also ruined by uninspired empiricism which is essentially an attempt to return social thought to stages it had passed long ago, a period in which science was still unable to shape man's convictions concerning his social environment.The following pages deal with some of the basic aspects in the formation of social thought, its development from Utopia to science, and the development of Marxist-Leninist science into a great force in the revolutionary transformation of reality on communist lines.
[20] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Section One __ALPHA_LVL1__ SOCIAL THOUGHT SEEKSBourgeois sociologists today are inclined to start their account of the origins of social thought in almost any imaginable manner: by relating the myths of man's origin; the early guesswork about the origination of the power of kings, and so on. But they always avoid putting the question of great philosophical importance about how men came to realise that their social state was not something eternal and immutable, inexorably foreordained by nature.
That is the very idea Marx stressed with remarkable profundity and brilliance when analysing the spiritual world of the ancient rural communities. He wrote: ``...they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny.''^^1^^
There we find the essence of various mythological and religious conceptions in antiquity relating to men's social life. Strictly speaking, when applied to social phenomena the myth does not explain anything but merely transfers this or that phenomenon to hoary antiquity and ascribes its emergence to the will of the gods. Only a few of the features of any myth providing the framework for its basic anaemic idea bear the marks of the power of human observation, and the features of historical epochs and social relations. The answer any scientific history of social thought must provide is where and when these religious conceptions, fettering man's mind, were broken. Mankind's release from the harmful preconception that its social state is a foreordained natural destiny---that is one of the great achievements of awakened social thought.
Religious legends sanctified and gave religious sanction to existing social relations and consequently recognised the existing order as being immutable.
_-_-_~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1973, pp. 492--93.
23The earliest attempts to explain the origins of inequality, as the Soviet ethnographer L. Y. Sternberg has shown,^^2^^ were connected with religious ideology. In the period in which the primitive communal society disintegrates, men first developed the notion of inequality and of riches as resulting from a special ``benevolence of the gods": good fortune is bestowed by the gods on their favourites. Sternberg called this the ``divine election ideas" complex, which was largely stimulated by the fact that the emergent rich elite performed the functions of the priesthood and had a direct bearing on the cult and the realm of the supernatural. But this question inevitably arises: how and when does this group of ideas begin to disintegrate, how and when do men cease to regard oppression as a fate foreordained by the gods? That is the key question in the history of social thought.
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel correctly pointed to the distinction between philosophy and religion which lay in the fact that truth needs to be cognised, whereas for religion it is already given, although we do not know where it comes from, so that it only remains for man to accept its truths in all humility. Reference to the will of God and to Divine Providence amounts to no more than an unfounded assertion that the principles of social life are primordeal and that their origins cannot be explained. It is impossible to eliminate the contradiction between blind faith and knowledge from the history of human consciousness, just as from the history of social thought.
Let us also recall this idea of Marx's about another obstacle which emergent social thought met on its way and which it subsequently overcame. Marx wrote that in antagonistic class society ``the social power ... appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant...".^^3^^
With the emergence of class society the notion of social force assumed the distorted form of notion of power, of domination by the exploiters. Religious legends were told about the origins of this power, deifying the oppressors and investing them with supernatural antecedents. The great achievement of human thought in the process of social development was the destruction of the idea that the social force was a kind of supernatural power standing over and above men and oppressing them.
Examination of the historical facts also allows us to consider the time at which the science of society emerged. Indeed, today, we have detailed _-_-_
~^^2^^ See L. Y. Sternberg, Primitive Religion in the Light of Ethnography, Leningrad, 1936, pp. 140--78. See also the journal Ethnography, 1927, No. 1 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, 1964, p. 46.
24 studies of the early stages in the emergence of the science of nature. It is well known that natural science and materialistic philosophy arose in a single process. Following the initial period in which empirical knowledge about nature was being accumulated came a period in Ancient Greece, China and India, in which the first scientific philosophical theories were propounded, including the atomic theory, which had a great future before it. But how are we to determine the date at which the science of society emerged? This question has been extremely confused by bourgeois theorists who, as I have said, have sought to find the origins of scientific knowledge about society in religious views, in mythology and in mysticism.The prominent 19th-century historian and ethnographer, Heinrich Schurtz, wrote the following about the development of primitive culture: ``The odds with the demands of society at which one's ego frequently finds itself makes one think and, however frequently ossified custom may be taken as something immutable, however frequently the sequence of logical thought may have broken off to be replaced by some myth or fable lulling the strident question of the causes, mankind nevertheless entered upon the path which will ultimately carry it to self-awareness. There is a growing understanding of the difference between the immutable laws of nature and the transient customs and usages of men."^^4^^ There is here one erroneous assumption: like all other social conflicts, the conflict between the individual and society sprang only in the period when class society was taking shape. The primitive communal society had no such conflicts. Engels compared life in primitive communal society and in class slave-holding society and stressed: ``There the mode of production of the means of subsistence, which, year in and year out, remained unchanged, could never give rise to such conflicts, imposed from without, as it were; to antagonism between rich and poor, between exploiters and exploited."^^5^^ With the disintegration of communal relations under which the way of life remained unchanged, man's attitude to his social being tended to change with the development of class differentiation and the class struggle. Life posed before him more and more questions. A number of ancient literary memorials describe the break up of communal relations, the rupture of tribal bonds, the crisis of patriarchal morality and the emergence of an order in which some men plundered others, when violence reigned everywhere, and when some were all-powerful and others without rights. However, these changes were accepted as divine punishment, as divine retribution.
Nor is Schurtz right in saying that the history of social thought began with the contrast between the immutability of nature and the historical _-_-_
~^^4^^ Heinrich Schurtz, Urgeschichte der Kuttur, Leipzig und Wien, 1912, S. 639.
~^^5^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, p. 278.
25 mutability of men's life. Actually, the process ran a different course. The fact is that both natural and social phenomena ceased to appear to men as being immutable and as being subject only to the arbitrary acts of some supernatural force, some fate or the gods.Science stems from scattered knowledge. But as this is accumulated it is arranged in a system in accordance with the aspects of objective social life and the regularities they express. This gives rise to the individual social disciplines. Generalisation of all the concrete social sciences is contained in historical materialism which means an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to social phenomena.
However, it does not mean that there were no initial attempts to generalise this inadequate social knowledge. Very early on, knowledge ran into conflict with blind faith.
At the early stages of slave-holding society, the social and political orders were declared to be an extension of the order established by nature and the gods. They it was who had appointed the rulers to rule, just as they had created plants, animals and the whole world. They too were to blame that people on the earth were divided into the happy rich and the unhappy poor. That was the overriding idea that the order established by Divine Providence was immutable. Any violation of this order by men was considered to be a sin, which was frequently regarded as being the result of intervention by evil supernatural forces. It is wrong to regard these notions as the starting point for the development of social thought, as the idealists insist. On the contrary, social thought has its beginning in the overthrow of this social theological dogma.
Spontaneous materialism developed in slave-holding society and dealt a blow at these rigid religious notions. In a naive form, it asserted that there was no divine will in the world, either in nature or in society. The world developed in accordance with its own laws. Men had to shed their fear of divine power and the so-called world to come. ``Songs of the Harpist'', a text popular in Ancient Egypt, urged that men should arrange their affairs on earth. Similar ideas were developed in Ancient China, India and then in Greece. The idea was gradually shaped in men's minds about a common regularity which operated in nature, society and all over the world. In Ancient Greece, this was designated as Logos. On that basis, men hazarded all kinds of guesses about the origination of various social phenomena and institutions, and this paved the way for the accumulation of more knowledge about social relations.
Heraclitus appeared to be close to discovering the idea that the struggle of opposites reigned not only in nature but also in society. Some remarkable conjectures about the origins of some social phenomena were hazarded by Democritus. Lucretius, taking his ideas from Epicurus, essayed a history of social development. There is no doubt at all that all of these were the beginnings of the science of society, embryonic ideas evaluating social phenomena. All these thinkers sought 26 to purge ethics from the influence of faith in the supernatural and insisted that the will of the gods had nothing to do with the standards of human behaviour.
However, spontaneous materialism did not consider the relationship between consciousness and being, for it assumed its materialistic principles to be given. But without an answer to this question it was impossible to understand men's conscious activity, and consequently the development of society. Once the question of the relationship between consciousness and being was posed, the thinkers of the ancient world saw the world as being split into the spiritual and the material, into the celestial and the terrestrial. What came to prevail was the idealistic explanation of human activity, the habit of starting from consciousness in order to explain the ``works of the hands'', as the Egyptian priests put it.
However, it would be wrong to assume that knowledge of social relations, phenomena and processes disappeared or that it was no longer being accumulated. The idealistic approach hampered the correct generalisation of this knowledge but could not eliminate it. Life set before man more and more questions as the class struggle developed and life itself gained in complexity.
Social thought is not in any sense rooted in the ``supersensual'', which is the sphere of faith, but in practice, in the social life of men. This does not contradict the fact that initially social thought was unable firmly to rely on science, to give a scientific prospect for social development and largely had to deal in fantasy and Utopia.
Bourgeois philosophers and sociologists have been unable to explain the prescientific and the scientific stages in the development of social thought, preferring to consider two forms, instead of two stages, of social thought, which they metaphysically separate from each other. The first, prescientific form is frequently designated as ``ideology'', in contrast to scientific knowledge, a division which rests on the positivist contrast of philosophical thought and empirical knowledge. From this standpoint, philosophy is not a generalisation of available knowledge, but something extraneous to this knowledge. The actual relationship between social thought and social science is a totally different one.
Before any truly scientific theory of social development evolved, men still strove to comprehend social phenomena, and the less knowledge of social phenomena they had, the more they were guided by their everyday notions, and the more they succumbed to illusion and fantasy.
The history of social thought, that is, the history of men's conscious attitude to social phenomena and their own social condition has its beginning in their struggle against the exploiters, which they initially carried on instinctively and with very little awareness. This struggle inevitably carries within itself doubt about the given social condition 27 having always existed. This inevitably made men think about whether it would last forever. Consequently, the very assumption of the possibility of social change is of tremendous revolutionary importance.
On the one hand, such an assumption was impossible without marked changes in men's social being, changes which would impel men to think along these lines. When the struggle of the exploited against their exploiters is in its early stages, it is spontaneous and involves no more than an embryonic awareness. On the other hand, in that period social science itself was embryonic and was still unable to be of effective assistance in that struggle. The development of social science implies a relatively high level of social development and class struggle, and the emergence of social forces with a stake in scientific knowledge about society so as to establish the prospects and trends of its development.
It is wrong to assume that the growth of scientific knowledge about social phenomena and the development of the class struggle are two unrelated processes. Actually, the growth of the class struggle poses the most important questions in social thinking. At first, social thinkers try to answer these questions merely on the basis of their fragmentary knowledge and observation, using their imagination to fill in the gap.
Historically speaking, the idea of a self-developing social state in contrast to the age-old notions of its foreordainment by nature, fate or the gods did not, of course, arise in the abstract form of ``social state in general''. In antiquity, men's first concern was to decide their attitude to that social state, but recently inaugurated, in virtue of which some were plunged into the bestial life of slaves while others wallowed in riches and luxury. Some insisted that this order had been ordained by the gods, and others claimed it to be the handiwork of nature itself, both being no more than references to a divine will or a fatal predestination by nature. Indeed, if social thought had been satisfied with that kind of answer it would have remained in the cradle for all time. However, social thought was powerfully stimulated by life with its social cataclysms, the transformation of free men into slaves, the ruin and destruction of some men and the triumph of others, who amassed vast wealth. Social life did not develop as a result of some accidental falling away of scales from men's eyes, but as a result of class battles flaring up in society across its history.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ SOCIAL THOUGHT IN ANTIQUITYThe early successes of spontaneous materialist thinking, denying the creation of the world by the gods and the existence of any divine Providence, created an important prerequisite for the advance of social thought. The materialists of Ancient Greece helped to destroy the 28 religious notions of nature and had some brilliant insights about development and change in human life.
The thinkers of antiquity tried to explain social phenomena on the strength of their naive materialist conceptions according to which the social order had not been created by the gods and that social phenomena were not ruled by supernatural forces. Blind faith was being pushed into the background and the field cleared for the activity of social science. But that is as far as the social thinkers of antiquity ever went.
The idea that social change was possible in contrast to the idea of social immobility implied this question: were the relations of lord and master, oppression and slavery in the human community everlasting? That is a key question that the social thinkers of antiquity did not pose, because the real conditions in which such questions are posed were yet to develop. The condition of slavery also provided the foundation for all the social theories developed in antiquity, including Utopian dreams of a better society.
The transition from primitive communal society to slavery was the most powerful social upheaval in the lifetime of several generations in ancient society. The great swing from preclass society to slave-holding society left a deep and peculiar mark on the minds of masses of men and on their legends and traditions.
That is the period which produced the fairy tale of a ``golden age" allegedly lying somewhere in the hoary past. The legend about a happy life having existed on the Earth some time in the past before giving way to the fierce realm of evil and violence is a reflection of the emergence of slave-holding society, where antagonistic classes first arose in history. That was perhaps the first dim notion of social change. The myths of the primitive communal society bear no comparison with these notions, although one must admit that even the myths were a record of realistic observations about men's social relations. But these myths ``explained'' through the medium of faith in supernatural forces the emergence of various social institutions, etc. The new legends were an attempt by men to contrast two major stages in the history of society---the primitive communal system and the slave-holding system---in an effort to comprehend and evaluate the transition from the one stage to the other. Those who had fallen into slavery were nostalgic over the state of men in the tribal system that had gone for ever. When thinking of the future they had visions of nothing but the past.
The legend of the ``golden age" suggested that the happy life of men was either a thing of very distant past or had been lost somewhere in the boundless expanses of the land or the sea, a place some fortunate traveller had once stumbled on by chance. Since then the way to that country had been lost. Such legends were known in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
29With the emergence of the first more or less correct data about the primitive system the ``golden age" legend was discovered to be untenable, for it tended to obscure the fact that slave-holding society brought with it a flourishing of culture as compared with its state in the primitive period. That is a fact the early scientific thinkers of antiquity re-established, but that is a point beyond which they never went.
The ``golden age" legend, as we have it from Ovid, for instance, not only stressed the idea that in that earlier period men had lived without coercion, revenge or retribution but also that they had not had to do arduous labour, because ``the earth itself bore them fruit of everything''. That was clearly an idealisation of the past, a fantastic distortion of the real historical picture. This notion was at once shaken by scientific thought, but there remained the vision of a ``golden age" and the question posed by the legend---whether this age should be sought in the past or in the future---remained unanswered.
The slave-holding states were surrounded by various barbaric tribes. Comparing the life of the two, thinkers of antiquity realised that there were two stages in social development, and one of the most striking achievements in the social thinking of the period was the juxtaposition of barbarism and civilisation (a concept that was taking shape, even if the term had not yet been established). Then came the early theories of the state, of political activity and political struggle. However, in all these slave labour was the inevitable basis of society, of civilisation and of men's political activity.
Thinkers of antiquity did not assume that slavery would disappear and be replaced by another social system. They envisaged no other stages in the development of society. Beyond the narrow horizon of the relations based on slavery it was still impossible to discern mankind's subsequent future or to imagine other kinds of social relations between men. This is well illustrated by Plato's (4277--347 B.C.) discourse about a better society, which never went beyond the framework of slave-holding. In his ideal state, which is ruled by philosophers and warriors, the condition of artisans and farmers is little better than that of slaves. Academician V. P. Volgin is quite right when he says that ``in Plato we find that the members of the communist society do not work, while the working people live outside the communist system".^^6^^ That was an attempt to usurp the idea of the ``golden age" in the interests of the slave-owners, closed castes of aristocrats and military men who stood at the head of Plato's ideal state. It was a vision of a better and more rational life for the slave-owners. Even so Plato's work exerted some influence on the development of the Utopian ideas in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Plato did not even try to produce a historical picture of social _-_-_
~^^6^^ V. P. Volgin, ``Campanella: Communist''. See T. Campanella, City of the Sun, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934, pp. 11--12 (in Russian).
30 development and was concerned only with his logical scheme. His idea of the everlasting ``division of labour" between men was designed merely to establish that in any future society inequality of social status and the social functions performed by men would remain. Indeed, the more one considers Plato's conception, the clearer it becomes that it did not contain even in embryonic form any idea of a self-developing social state. On the contrary, his conception was designed to back up the idea that slavery as a social state had been predestined by nature itself, a state which Plato transferred into the future society in a slightly modified form. Soviet scientists, in their polemics with advocates of the patently bourgeois view of Plato's theory, have long since established that his Utopian views tend to restore the social relations which by the early 6th century B. C. had already worked themselves out and which had been characteristic of early Greek history. Other Greek thinkers likewise proposed a caste structure for the ideal society, being inspired by the social order at the early stages in the development of slave-holding society in the Ancient East. They did not look to the future, but to the past, to a re-establishment of this or that order which had gone down in history. Having failed to decide on the ultimate destiny of exploitation, social thinkers in that period lost their bearings and became superficial, so being condemned in one way or another to provide an apology for the existing state of things.It is true that Aristotle (384--322 B. C.), who discerned a general regularity in the transition of the peoples from family life to urban life and then on to the establishment of big states, inquired into whether the establishment of slavery had not done violence to nature. The question itself was an indication of the awakening of social thought. But having taken this timid step, it began to mark time. Aristotle's answer was unequivocal: some were born to rule and others to be ruled, and this was necessary and useful, because some were destined by birth to submit and others to dominate. It is a curious fact that the US sociologists H. E. Barnes and H. Becker comment on Aristotle's idea as follows: ``There can be no doubt that Aristotle was much nearer the truth than certain democratic writers of later days, particularly those of the eighteenth century and after, who discoursed about the natural biological equality of all men."^^7^^ Indeed, the slave-owners of our day appear to be seeking support among the slave-owners of antiquity.
The most striking insight into the history of society will be found in the writings of Titus Lucretius Carus (99--55 B. C.) one of the great materialists of antiquity. His poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), gives a picture of the change in men's lives from a state of barbarity to the beginnings of culture and men's domination of the forces _-_-_
~^^7^^ H. E. Barnes and H. Becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science, Vol. I. Washington, 1952, p. 189.
31 of nature. Here we find the beginnings of scientific knowledge of the history of society and an insight into the idea of development, of ascent from the lower forms of social life to the higher. The ``golden age" legend gives way to a true picture of the hard and barren life primitive men had actually led. But that was only one aspect of the matter.Lucretius was delighted with mankind's successes in its ascent from the state of barbarity to ancient civilisation, and had none of the doubts which Rousseau subsequently expressed about men having lost their precious equality of the primitive period by entering the epoch of civilisation.
Thinkers in Ancient Greece and Rome looked only to the past and the present in an effort to connect the first two stages in the development of society. The present had been prepared by the long and arduous effort of the past---that was the fruitful idea without which there could have been no notion of social development even in the most primitive form. However, the great minds of antiquity did not consider the future state of mankind. What they did note was that by their time men had travelled a long way, having mastered what then looked like many kinds of skills and knowledge. The mental horizon of the thinkers of antiquity was limited to the past epoch of barbarism, followed by a period dominated by slave-holding relations, carrying with it civilisation, a flourishing of science and art, the rule of law and state power.
Thinkers who could not or would not praise the present as being lasting and immutable ended up by denying any further development of society. In the writings of the materialist LucretiusTwe find hints of an inevitable end of the world, a disaster threatening mankind in some distant future. The Pythagoreans, a school of idealists, developed this expectation of a world disaster into a theory of cycles, each of which started afresh and ended with another cataclysm.
Some thinkers wanted to re-establish the ``golden age" legend, but they could not add anything to it and it remained a fairy-tale dream. It took ages for this legend to give way to Utopias, the first projects for a future society which tackled the question of the essence and ultimate destiny of exploitation.
There was no class in ancient society capable of making a marked advance in social thinking. Whenever social thought begins to look to the future, this means that social groups have emerged in society to which the future belongs. In ancient society, neither the slaves nor their masters had any future to look to, for with the emergence of the new, feudal system, both these classes were doomed. The slaves had visions of a return to the past to regain their lost freedom. The slave-owners could not conceive of a society or civilisation resting otherwise than on slavery.
There arose various theories, like the one about the origin of religion and the state, theories oriented mainly upon the past. Some contained 32 very keen observations about the present state of society and the current social struggle, and these beginnings of social thought were broadly used in the subsequent period. But in the ancient world social thought did not go beyond its first beginnings.
The future was dealt with by the writers of fiction. Virgil, the Roman poet, had visions of the future veiled in religious obscurity: he suggested that the ``golden age" could return with the miraculous arrival of a man elected by the gods. This idea of supernatural deliverance was very popular among the early Christians. The dim visions of a return of the ``golden age'', of equality in distribution and consumption, including a community of wives, urged men to live in the ``sanctity of poverty'', to renounce the sinful world with all its riches and luxuries, and to live as the birds of the air do, relying in all things on the supernatural force, on the redeemer, on divine salvation. While these ideas may have appeared rebellious, they did not in any sense present a danger to the exploitative system. As time went on and men from the upper classes joined the Christian community, these fantastic and rebellious attitudes, expressive of the impotence of the exploited, were suppressed and replaced by a law which referred to the same supernatural force and which ordered slaves to obey their masters.
Social thinking in ancient society shows that the prospects of social development constitute the key question in the theory of society. To inderstand the present, there is need to discern in it its tendencies of development. The present paves the way for the future. An analysis of the present is inevitably bound up with evaluations of the past and the possibility of looking into the future. Such is the logic of the theory of social development. When thinkers in ancient society insisted that slavery was a lasting state and could disappear only with the disappearance of the world itself they were, in effect, testifying to the fact that the idea of a self-developing social state did not exist in the ancient world.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ MEDIEVAL THEORIESIn the Middle Ages, social thought was strongly influenced by official Christian doctrine, which declared that men were absolutely unable to make any changes in society at will. Beginning with St. Augustine (354--430), the Church insisted on a theological conception of social development which boiled down to the idea of a gradual establishment of the ``Kingdom of God'', that is, the establishment and triumph of the power of the Church in all secular matters. Augustine's main idea was that the whole of history was predetermined by God, a supernatural power, that all the defects of social life resulted from the Fall, and that it was a part of Divine Providence to convert men into __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---594 33 slaves. Perhaps never before was the ancient idea that the social state had been foreordained by divine fate expressed with such repugnant straightforwardness as in the writings of the ``fathers of the Church".
Thomas Aquinas (1225--1274) asserted that human society was based on inequality, to which men had to reconcile themselves. The ruling classes had the duty to deal mercifully with their inferiors, while the latter, for their part, had the duty to exercise patience and humility. Inequality was not in any sense the result of the Fall, and was inevitable because God had willed it so.
For centuries, the Church drove home to the working people that they could expect a happy life only in the world to come, and that in this world their lot was patience and humility, because no power on earth was capable of changing their social state which had been supernaturally foreordained.
Nevertheless it would be wrong to assume that human reason had entirely reconciled itself with this medieval dogma. Men rebelled against it as the oppressed intensified their class struggle. It is true that religious illusions, faith in a supernatural deliverance and hope of miracles were also major ingredients of the visions of a ``millennium of justice" among the medieval rebels. Here is what a 19th-century Russian historian wrote about medieval ideas: ``Just as the individual's spiritual activity does not cease even in sleep, while assuming fantastic forms, so in the dark period of the Middle Ages man's spirit did not for a moment cease to work and, just as dreams reiterate what man sees in his waking hours, so it retains some connection with the ideas of sounder epochs."^^8^^ It was the idea of God's will, of a supernatural force allegedly holding sway everywhere in nature and society that prevented the rebel mind from arriving at a true understanding of the social and political principles on which the landowners' secular power was based. It appeared that the most radical way out was intervention by the supernatural force in human affairs in the form of a chastising ``Hand of God'', which alone was able to establish justice on earth.
It is true that now and again this chastising divine force put in an appearance in the form of peasant bands armed with axes and scythes. However, this was only the very beginning of the break with the idea that the social state was foreordained by some divine power. While the idea of changing the social order did emerge, change itself was still inconceivable without ``divine succour'', because the idea of a social force had yet to be realised, and its real potentialities were still being minimised.
The religious integument covering the hopes and aspirations of masses of people tended to break whenever the tide of peasant and plebeian _-_-_
~^^8^^ M. Stasyulevich, The Philosophy of History in Its Principal Systems, St. Petersburg, 1902, p. 106 (in Russian).
34 movements against the rule of the landowners and the Church reached a high point.However, the more spontaneous the mass revolutionary movement, the less evidence we find in it of any positive programme, of any clearcut notions of the goals of the struggle or the possibilities of social reform. Thus, Fra Dolcino, who led a peasant uprising in Northern Italy in the early fourteenth century, did not consider the abolition of private property in general, but confined himself to the requirement that the leaders should adopt an ``apostolic'' way of life, have no property of their own, and ``set for others an example of the holy life, that is, a life without property as an ideal, a life in poverty, an apostolic life as the perfect life".^^9^^ At the same time, Dolcino urged that all churchmen, clericals and monks should be punished by a ``cruel death" (morte crudelissima). There alone his programme is extremely concrete. Consequently, the whole attack was aimed to eliminate the top section of society.
The positive programme put forward two centuries later by Thomas Miinzer, who led a peasant war in Germany, has much more gist than Dolcino's programme, but his ideal---the establishment of the `` Kingdom of God" on earth---is still very vague and merely includes the demand to destroy oppression, private property and power which holds sway over men. Indeed, the leader of the peasant uprising seems to have a vague notion of a social system without estates or class distinctions and private property, or a government alien to the people. Subsequently, this vague urge and general ideas were to be unfolded in various versions of Utopia in the form of more or less detailed scenes of human life to which the working people aspired.
About these spontaneous movements of the urban poor and the peasantry, Engels said: ``There were theoretical enunciations corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions; in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably)."~^^10^^ This is of great importance for the history of social thought. Utopians from the 16th to the 18th centuries should not be presented as daydreamers, head in the clouds and out of touch with reality. Indeed, their visions and extreme utopianism were determined by the level of the class struggle in that period.
That was precisely Lenin's approach in analysing the development of social thought in Russia in the first half of the 19th century. Reactionary theorists who published their writings in the Vekhi (Milestones) collection held the ideas expounded by Belinsky and other enlighteners to be expressive only of the views of the intelligentsia, the upper section of _-_-_
~^^9^^ S. D. Skazkin, ``Dolcino's First Epistle''. In the collection: From the History of Socio-Political Ideas, Moscow, 1955, p. 129 (in Russian).
~^^10^^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1959, p. 27.
35 society. In response, Lenin wrote: ``Perhaps, in the opinion of our wise and educated authors, Belinsky's sentiments in the letter to Gogol did not depend on the feelings of the serf peasants? The history of our publicist literature did not depend on the indignation of the popular masses against the survivals of feudal oppression?"^^11^^ Social thought is fed and given powerful impulses by the attitude of the mass of working people fighting against the exploiters. An inadequate level of development in the class struggle is expressed in the immaturity and utopianism of social thought.In his work, What Is To Be Done? Lenin wrote this about the spontaneous element in the working-class movement: ``Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began ... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle."^^12^^
Social thought has its beginnings and powerful impetus for development in the emergent awakening of consciousness in spontaneous popular revolts, an awakening which is expressed in the fact that the working people begin to see that the oppressive order is not immutable. This takes the form of visions about a social system free from such oppressive elements. In the minds of masses of people this vision does not at first acquire any definite contours or elaborate forms, which first appear in the early Utopias. But these too boil down to the announcement of what their ideal society is free of, namely, oppression, money and private property. Social thought had to travel a long way before it produced the systematic answer to the question of what the ideal and rationally structured society should be free from, including the social order which had but recently appeared to be quite solid.
Of course, that does not yet amount to a theory of social development, however embryonic, but it was a suggestion that another social order could exist. The feudal order was being eroded by time, which carried society closer to the inevitable victory of bourgeois relations. Ultimately, this determined the great changes in world outlook which were characteristic of the 16th and the 17th century. The spiritual atmosphere was largely determined by the discovery of Copernicus and the revolutionary advances in natural science, which also heralded a new society with its new requirements. As the ``motionless'' Earth began to rotate round the Sun, the idea that all things terrestrial and celestial were immutable began to lose ground. The solidly entrenched age-old social _-_-_
~^^11^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16. p. 125.
~^^12^^ Ibid., Vol. 5, pp. 374--75.
36 order in the form of a hierarchy of ranks and powers running from the intricate hierarchy of feudal lords to the angels and archangels in the skies---all this was shaken. The order on earth was likewise subject to change. The feudal, medieval outlook quavered and shook as the chain of rigid dogmas was broken at one of its key links. But changes in the views of the social process did not follow all at once. The idea of social development had to make headway through a thick veil of age-old preconceptions. __ALPHA_LVL3__ ATTEMPTS TO PRODUCE A SOCIAL THEORYPresent-day bourgeois social scientists willingly start the history of modern social thought with Niccolo Machiavelli (1469--1527), and his views open a work published by two prominent US sociologists. Why is that so? Because, H. E. Barnes and H. Becker tell us, ``Machiavelli's analysis was frankly based upon the premise that intriguing self-interest and insatiable desires constitute the mainsprings of all human activity".^^13^^ The explanation is that Machiavelli's epoch marked the start of capitalism's sanguinary advance heralding the rule of hard cash, the advent of the period of primitive accumulation, one of the most terrible periods in human history. That is what suggested the idea of self-interest and insatiable desires as the mainsprings of history. One cannot deny the great importance for social science of the exposure in exploitative society of self-interest as the method behind social action, but if it was to become truly scientific there was need to bring out the existence of classes and their conflicting interests and to understand that exploitation was the basis of that society. What Machiavelli had was no more than individuals in the grip of insatiable lust, leaving in the dark the main point of exploitation, of private property and social inequality. Indeed, it was not Machiavelli but other men who blazed the trail for advanced social thought and a theory of social development, going much farther in bringing out the motives behind the individual's social action.
The emergence of bourgeois relations carried great calamities for the people. Those who saw this in the 16th and 17th centuries reasoned on lines different from those of Machiavelli's, who made insatiable lusts legitimate by deriving them from human nature. These other men came out against the bloody world of private property, a world in which everything was up for sale.
Forward-looking social thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries were still to discover the possibility of human society existing without exploitation. How was this discovery made and in what terms?
_-_-_~^^13^^ H. E. Barnes and H. Becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science, p. 302.
37The sharp criticism of the system of exploitation and oppression and yearning hopes for a better life and happy, future were expressed in the Utopias which emerged in the epoch in which capitalism was taking shape. These writings first expressed the vision of social justice and the idea that an order under which there were rich and poor was unjust. Some Utopian writings reflect the idea of egalitarian communism, as an expression of the peasant ideal of social relations under which all goods were equally shared out. But Utopian writings also suggested that society could exist without private property, and that its elimination would not result in the destruction of mankind, but in its prosperity. That was, in that period, the main advance in social thought. It is hard to overrate the vast importance of this idea, however abstract and naively expressed. It showed that the notion of society had, even in the form of a vision, gone beyond the framework of private-property relations.
At first, this idea was expressed in the form of a logical assumption. Even in that period, some thinkers felt that bourgeois relations, which were taking over from feudal relations, held no promise of happiness for the people. These thinkers got to thinking about the kind of social system that would truly bring happiness to men. It is safe to say that in the history of social thought the Utopias were the forerunners of the theory of society's progressive development. In one form or another, they contained criticism of the contemporary order, and of private ownership as a principle of social life, and suggested that men could arrange their social life without the bonds of private property, gross self-seeking or money-grubbing.
At the dawn of capitalism, Machiavelli saw self-interest as the motive force behind society's advance, while the authors of the great Utopias asked themselves whether this force could be eliminated, and what would happen to society if it were. But at the time, no one was yet prepared to say that this kind of social order was inevitable, let alone suggest a real way for reaching it. Nevertheless, the very approach to this question sprang from the conditions of social being, in the great period of the breakup of social relations.
Thomas More's (1478--1535) main idea was expressed in these words in the first book of his Utopia: ``Thus I doe fullye persuade me selfe, that no equall and juste distribution of thinges can be made, nor that perfecte wealthe shal ever be among men, onles this propriety be exiled and bannished. But so long as it shal continewe, so long shal remaine among the most and best part of men the hevy, and inevitable burden of poverty and wretchednes."^^14^^
How did More arrive at this radical conclusion? His line of reasoning in the Utopia shows that he was a man of humane instincts and profound _-_-_
~^^14^^ Thomas More, Utopia, L.J.M. Dent & Sons LTD, 1935, p. 44.
38 sensitivity to social matters. According to his contemporaries, More had obtained an excellent knowledge of property relations through his work at the bar. What is more, he had given much thought to the relationship between property, wealth and power. He had a good knowledge of the law, had penetrated deep into the secrets of government, and had the keen critical mind to assess its substance. Starting out from humanistic principles, he compared these with reality. ``Is not this an unjust and an unkynde publyque weale, whyche gyveth great fees and rewardes to gentlemen, as they call them, and to goldsmythes, and to suche other, [elsewhere More adds usurers to this list---G. F.] whiche be either ydle persones, or els onlye flatterers, and devysers of vayne pleasures: And of the contrary parte maketh no gentle provision for poore plowmen, collars, laborers, carters, yronsmythes, and carpenters: without whome no commen wealthe can continewe?"~^^15^^ Considering the period, that was an idea worthy of a genius. He goes on with equally telling force: ``Therfore when I consider and way in my mind all these commen wealthes, which now a dayes any where do florish, so god helpe me, I can perceave nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of the commen wealth....^^16^^ These devises, when the riche men have decreed to be kept and observed under coloure of the comminaltie, that is to saye, also of the pore people, then they be made lawes."^^17^^ Can there be any doubt in anyone's mind that in his Utopia More comes down on the side of the ``pore'' against the ``riche''? Of course, at the time the notion of a ``third estate" was just taking shape in contrast to the idlers and the spongers from among the aristocracy, so that More's ``riche'' are the elite of the absolutist feudal state, the noblemen, the usurers, and all the servants and menials catering for the royal court and its entourage. More had no illusion about the nature of the absolutist feudal state which issued its laws on behalf of both rich and poor but favouring only the rich, and which constituted a peculiar and legalised conspiracy of the rich against the people. Wealth and idleness undermined the very basis of society---the working people, without whom there can be no society. That is a view which may have been accepted by many of those who, like More, came from the midst of the bourgeoisie. But More went much farther, for he did in effect proclaim that society could exist and develop without the idlers and the rich.Another tragic question More posed in his Utopia was whether a man with such radical views could achieve anything with the use of political means, as we would now put it. This is a matter which causes More to have doubt and do some serious thinking. The only way to influence _-_-_
~^^15^^ Ibid., p. 112.
~^^16^^ Ibid.
~^^17^^ Ibid.
39 politics is to be a state councillor, but More is aware that not much can be gained in that way.In the first book of his work, More shows the tragedy of the radical-minded and well-educated man of the 16th century. He himself rose high in government office, but expressed his distaste for the absolutist feudal monarchy by supporting Catholicism, when the King of England himself came into conflict with the Catholic Church. This cost More his life. He failed to find a political line that would accord with his radical views. He supported Catholicism and opposed Luther and the Reformation in Germany. His political credo seems to boil down to the view that while the King should not abuse his power, the people should not be too wilful. He was aware that this was a makeshift, but failed to find any outlet for his radical views in politics.
The thoughts of Tommazo Campanella (1568--1639) ran on somewhat different lines. The outlook of this Dominican monk was highly contradictory, including both visions of a communist society and plans for the establishment of a religious and political unity of the contemporary world which he hoped to achieve mainly with the aid of Catholicism. Together with an element of materialism and a passionate faith in the power of human knowledge we find him believing in astrology, which he held to be the most important science, and still clinging to some elements of scholastic philosophy. In that contradictory age this kind of outlook was fairly widespread, so that the fierce advocate of atheism, Lucilio Vanini, who was burnt at the stake in 1619, believed that the stars had an influence on human destiny. On the strength of his astrological findings, Campanella predicted an early end of the old world and the advent of a ``golden age''. He regarded as remarkable the invention of printing, firearms and the use of the magnet, which he believed to be the means for integrating humanity. He was proud of the fact that there were more developments in his century than had occurred all over the world over the preceding 4,000 years; that more books had been published in his century than over the preceding 5,000 years.^^18^^
He has a strong premonition of great changes but ascribes these to the juxtaposition of planets and stars, ``which promote ... new navigations, new realms and new weapons'', and under whose influence ``there will be a transformation and renewal of the laws and sciences".^^19^^
How did Campanella come to have such ideas? Academician V.P.Volgin says th;il Campanella may have been influenced byDoni, the 16th-century Florentine writer, who produced one of the earliest outlines of Utopia. In a preface to Campanella's City of the Sun, Volgin says that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries there emerged a _-_-_
~^^18^^ See Tommazo Campanella. City of the Sun, MOSCOW, 1954, p. 120 (in Russian).
~^^19^^ Ibid.
40 ``stratum of intellectuals who had no place in the existing social hierarchy, who were naturally sharply opposed to it, and were accordingly highly sensitive to the sufferings of the people".^^20^^Campanella says: ``Those have honour as the noblest and the most deserving who have studied more arts and crafts and who are able to apply these with much knowledge. That is why they ridicule us for calling craftsmen ignoble and regarding as noble those who know no craft, who live in idleness and keep a great many servants for their idleness and debauchery."^^21^^ The City of the Sun is a republic of working people, and has no idlers or spongers. Campanella's main idea is that society can be organised on a scientific basis with scientists at its head, so that even children would be able to learn much merely by looking at the drawings of stars, plants and animals on the walls in the city. Let us note, however, that Campanella's scientific basis also includes astrology.
As a youth, Campanella took part in a revolutionary plot in Calabria, in the south of Italy. The plot was discovered, and Campanella spent almost 25 years in prison. The plotters had ties with the people and had hoped to rouse the peasants to revolt. At that time, much was being said about the early Christians, and of the apostolic life without wealth or public honours. These ideas were interpreted in the spirit of peasant egalitarianism and equal sharing. These ideas are echoed in Campanella's work, and he refers to Christian writers and explains his demand for a community of wives by the early Christian tradition. He says that in the society in which he lives ``property originates from and is maintained by the fact that each has his own individual home and his own wife and children'',^^22^^ whence the efforts to amass riches and to leave them to one's children, etc. Campanella's writing was also influenced by Plato's ideas, especially his presentation of marital relations.
In many respects, Campanella's work falls short of the level of elaboration and thought that we find in More's Utopia, but it was still an advance on the latter. More was a radical-minded humanist, a great thinker who was incapable of applying his views to political reality. Campanella was the first exponent of the ideals of Utopian communism, a man of passionate convictions and seeking to convince others of their truth. It is true that Campanella did not find any real ways to implement his ideals either. No wonder he had recourse to astrology. Like More, he was a Catholic and hostile to Protestantism. But in his criticism of Protestantism he levelled his attacks on the dogma of predestination and the denial of free will. Of course, he himself was not altogether clear on this question, for he was influenced by the will of God and by astrology. _-_-_
~^^20^^ Tommazo Campanella, City of the Sun, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934, p. 15 (in Russian).
~^^21^^ Tommazo Campanella, City of the Sun, Moscow, 1954, p. 50.
~^^22^^ Ibid., p. 45.
41 But Campanella, an impassioned fighter, who had withstood torture, wrote the following towards the close of his book about the views of the citizens of the City of the Sun: ``Man is free, and it is said that if in the course of fierce torture lasting for 40 hours to which a respected philosopher was subjected by his enemies [meaning Campanella himself---G. F.] they failed to get him during the interrogation to utter a single word in admission of what they wanted him to admit, because in his heart of hearts he had decided to say nothing, it follows that the stars, which exert their influence softly and from afar, cannot make us act against our determination either."^^23^^ The voice of Campanella was that of a fighter, which comes to us for the first time in the history of Utopian communism through the then conventional roar of the waves of mysticism, astrology and Catholic scholasticism.The idea that had made More and Campanella write their works was that men will not be happy so long as private property is there, so long as the public wealth falls into the hands of the few, while masses of men and women are doomed to poverty.
More's Utopia and Campanella's City of the Sun are the first two well-considered schemes for a society without private property and exploitation, and that is why they have gone down in history. Even the abstract assumption that society could exist without private property naturally impelled men to consider ways of social development, especially in view of the fact that both writers constantly drew analogies between the present and the social order to come.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ THE IDEAL OF PROGRESSAt 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.
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,^^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 _-_-_
~^^23^^ Tommazo Campanella, City of the Sun, Moscow, 1954,p. 45.
~^^24^^ P. Saintyves, ``Les origines de la methode comparative et la naissance du folklore. Des supersitions aux survivances'', Revue de I'histoire des religions, t. CV, No 1, Paris, 1932.
42 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.^^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.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."^^26^^ Kovalevsky also points out that the Utopians had a preference for the ``city-republic or a federation of city-republics'',^^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.
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.
Relying on the knowledge already gained by then, the rising _-_-_
~^^25^^ See R. Y. Vipper, Social Doctrines and Historical Theories in the 18th-19th centuries, Moscow, 1908, pp. 19--30 (in Russian).
~^^26^^ M. Kovalevsky, From Direct Popular Rule to Representative Rule and from the Patriarchal Monarchy to Parliamentarism, Vol. I, Moscow, 1906, p. 500 (in Russian).
~^^27^^ Ibid., p. 483.
43 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.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.
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.
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.^^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 _-_-_
~^^28^^ See V. N. Lazarev, ``The Problem of the Renaissance as Described by Renaissance Writers and `Enlighteners'\thinspace''. In the collection: From the History of Socio-Political Ideas. Moscow, 1955 p. 137 (in Russian).
44 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?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?
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.
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.
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.
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 45 human race keeps marching ceaselessly towards its perfection".^^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".^^30^^
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.
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.
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.
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 _-_-_
~^^29^^ H. E. Barnes and H. Becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science, Vol. I, p. 413
~^^30^^ Ibid., p. 474.
46 been posed, leaving a great number of unsolved problems which failed to fit into the scheme of straightforward progress.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.
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?
Was society capable of escaping from the tight grip of social injustice?
Rousseau did not issue a call for a return to the ``golden age''. He wrote:\thinspace``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?"^^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.
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."^^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 _-_-_
~^^31^^ Collection complete des oeuvres de J. J. Rousseau, Geneve, 1782, tome premier, p. 209, Note 9.
~^^32^^ J. J. Rousseau. Le Control social, Paris, Livre III, Ch. XV. p. 305.
47 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.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.
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.
48 __NUMERIC_LVL2__ Chapter Two __ALPHA_LVL2__ HARBINGERS OF THE GREAT FUTURE __ALPHA_LVL3__ [introduction.]However, even in the 18th century, the boldest minds in the society emerging from the entrails of feudalism strove to peer into the future, beyond the period which was becoming historical reality. While discussing freedom, equality and brotherhood and the possibility of changing the social order, these thinkers once again considered the possibility of eliminating man's exploitation of man and class-based inequality. They had visions of a different social system which was to do away with the age-old division of men into rich and poor, into the haves and the have-nots. In the period when the bourgeois revolutions in Britain and France were being prepared, and when the peasantry and the plebeian elements of the towns were set in motion, giving scope and strength to these revolutions, the best minds of the period were necessarily influenced by the people's moods and aspirations. That was of tremendous importance for the theory of social development and the quest for ways of historical progress. These thinkers appeared to say: if the new society being discussed on every hand is bound to appear, if it is to meet the requirements of human nature, there is need to go beyond the proposals of many advocates of a new society.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY UTOPIAN COMMUNISTSOne of the boldest minds of the 18th century was the French writer Morelly, who in his Utopia made use of a new form of ``ready-made draft laws divided into articles".^^1^^ This was a peculiar feature reflecting the historical period which lies between Morelly's Utopia and those of More and Campanella. It was a time of great social and political change, and thinkers began to clothe their visions in the form of legislative acts ensuring the transformation of society.
Academician Volgin is quite right when he says that Morelly first formulated one of the basic principles of socialism: each must work according to his abilities, for the common weal. Morelly also inclined to the idea that distribution had to be in accordance with requirements. Volgin also observes that this idea also appears between the lines in the Utopias of More and Campanella. Thus, humanism, which started out by demanding the release of the individual from the fetters of feudalism, inevitably advanced to a new demand: the individual must have the _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. P. Volgin, ``Morelly's Communist Theory''. See Morelly's book, The Code of Nature, or the True Spirit of Its Laws, Moscow-Leningrad, 1956, p. 36 (in Russian).
__PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4---594 49 opportunity to develop his endowments, to use them for the common weal and to satisfy his requirements. Unless there is room for the expression of man's capabilities, unless his requirements are satisfied, there can be no question of individual development. That was a logically necessary stage in the development of humanism.Here, social thought is on the threshold of formulating one of the key principles of communism, the fundamental demand for social justice. But the question that remained unanswered was: when and how the new system was to be established, with the law that each was to work according to his abilities and to receive according to his needs?
The discussions of communist society still remained in the realm of speculative abstractions, some holding that communism was logically impracticable because it contradicted human nature, while others said that it was possible because it accorded with the demands of social justice and human nature. By contrast, Morelly argued that it was private property that had spoiled and distorted human nature. Having gone through the peculiar ordeal of the Fall---the introduction of private property---men would come to realise their mistakes and were bound to return to the order of the ``golden age''.
While these debates may have been speculative they were a necessary stage in paving the way for a new view of the historical process and the key problems of mankind's social development. The vision of social justice and a society without exploitation also flared brightly in the minds of masses of men, as it did, for instance, during the 17th-century Digger movement for common landownership. The working people hoped that the downfall of the absolute monarchies would usher in social emancipation, but this was no more than an abstract possibility because the real conditions for it were yet to be created. However, it marked an important advance in mankind's social thinking: the idea of revolution, of the opportunities open to revolutionary power, and the idea of social justice were moving closer together.
Two of the most radical trends in the English revolution were the Levellers, who stood for political equality, and the Diggers, who wanted the lands to be owned in common, with the people holding the land as social property. This movement first emerged in the early 17th century, when the peasants destroyed marks of property like hedges and ditches, in an effort to turn the land into common property. In 1607, they issued a proclamation which said: ``Encroaching tyrants ... grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty so that they may dwell by themselves in the midst of their herds of fat wethers. They have depopulated and overthrown whole towns and made thereof sheep pastures nothing profitable to our commonwealth."^^2^^ The views of the Diggers were set out _-_-_
~^^2^^ W.H.R. Curlier, The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land. Oxford, 1920, p. 132.
50 as a more or less coherent system later, in the course of the revolution.In his Law of Freedom (1652), Gerrard Winstanley, depicted a society in which ``all the labours of husbandmen and tradesmen within the land, or by navigation to or from other lands, shall be all upon the common stock".^^3^^ From the common stock each was to have ``according to his need''. He wrote: ``And as everyone works to advance the common stock, so everyone shall have a free use of any commodity in the storehouse for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood, without buying and selling, or restraint from any."^^4^^ Social property is to prevail in the republic. Let us note that Winstanley, like Morelly, but a century earlier, presents his Utopia as a project to be carried out by an authority set up by the revolution.^^5^^ Winstanley pins his hopes for a republic on measures to be taken by the Cromwell Government, whereas in Morelly's Utopia it was not at all clear who was to put through the new laws. But both hoped to help carry society from the feudal order under an absolute monarchy to a communistic order ushered in by means of legislative enactments. Naturally, this kind of leap remained in the realm of the imagination. Winstanley hoped that the collapse of the absolutist feudal order in England could pave the way for fundamental social change, an idea that also gained ground in France as it approached the period of decisive battles for the overthrow of the absolutist feudal order. These early hopes for a fundamental transformation of the social system flickered and died.
The important thing about Winstanley's Utopia is that it was directly connected with massive revolutionary struggle. In the 18th century, social thinking also entered a new stage in France, where the connection between Utopian communist ideas and massive revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the absolutist feudal system was ever more pronounced. Jean Meslier, a rustic clergyman, witnessing the ruthless exploitation of the French peasants and their sufferings, set out in his Testament his vision of a communist new system without oppressors or oppressed, insisting that revolutionary struggle was the only way to deal with the private property system of oppression and injustice under which a handful of rich men ruled the working people.
Professor B. F. Porshnev says in his work about Meslier's views that ``all the popular disturbances, riots and uprisings, however immense the variety of the causes and circumstances in which they occurred, centered on questions of property and over the matter of property''. In _-_-_
~^^3^^ Gerrard Winstanley, Selections. Law of Freedom, London, MCMXLIV, p. 179.
~^^4^^ Ibid., p. 179.
~^^5^^ See M. A. Barg, ``Winstanley's Social Utopia''. In the collection: A History of Social Doctrines, Moscow, 1962, pp. 58--88 (in Russian).
51 all these riots ``it is hard to imagine that any of those who took part in sacking the manor-houses or castles should have regarded themselves as robbers and should not have sought to justify their actions to themselves and to their kith and kin, in the form of notions, however vague, of the injustice and illegitimacy of the wealth, itself plundered from the people, etc."^^6^^ These vague feelings and fragmentary ideas were brought together into a system and elaborated by Meslier. Porshnev stresses that while the popular aspirations may have been spontaneous and negative, they hinted at the idea of a victory for the popular uprising, overthrow of the existing authority and establishment of the people's power, an idea expressed and developed by Meslier. The peasant uprisings were a ``breach of the most solemn ban established by church and faith, the ban on rebellion''. These anti-clerical and anti-religious attitudes were elaborated by Meslier on a materialistic basis, and he himself ended up with an atheistic outlook.A further important advance in social thought and action was made in the period of the 18th-century bourgeois revolution in France. The conclusion that it would take a revolution to establish a communist society and the rule of justice was considerably enriched and developed. There appeared the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship. The Diggers pinned their hopes for social justice on Cromwell's dictatorship. Meanwhile, the French revolutionaries had already abandoned such illusions. The followers of Gracchus Babeuf, who expressed the aspirations of the preproletariat, the poor of Paris, the plebeian elements of the towns, hoped to establish a revolutionary dictatorship to reorganise society on communist lines.
The Manifeste des egaux, written by the poet and philosopher Pierre-Sylvain Marechal on behalf of a group of ``Equals'', said: ``The French revolution is only the front rider of a grander and more majestic revolution that will be the last one.... Equality has been nothing but the fine an