p The bourgeoisie was gradually shedding the burdensome stock of theories and views of social organisation which had spread in the second half of the 18th century. It was bourgeois liberalism, which became a most important political trend and a party of the bourgeoisie, that 310 undertook to reappraise the political legacy of the past in accordance with the new requirements.

p The theories of the 18th century had proclaimed popular sovereignty, recognising the people’s right to revolution. Among those who expressed the idea was Thomas Jefferson, a leading political light in America during its War of Independence. The triumphant bourgeoisie no longer needed such ideas. The liberal leaders, raising the banner of struggle for the “rights of man”, declared the Jacobin dictatorship and the undivided domination of feudal-absolutist reaction to be equally “illegitimate”. This idea was best expressed by Benjamin Constant, a founder of bourgeois liberalism in France.

p Considering the roots of bourgeois liberalism, Engels wrote: “They must merge all feudalistic privilege and monopoly of money. The political dominion of the middle classes is, therefore, of an essentially liberal appearance."  [310•5  Down with every privilege except the “natural” privilege of capital, declared the spokesmen of liberalism. The privileges of the estates had to be expunged from legislation, which had to provide complete freedom for the power of capital. It is on these lines that the old slogan of freedom was then resolutely reinterpreted.

p The bourgeoisie had no intention at all of interpreting freedom in such a way as to allow the emergence and strengthening in society of democratic organisations like the Jacobin Club or the organisation of “Equals” led by Babeuf, which had called for social equality during the French revolution. That is not the kind of unit that was to make up the political organisation of society after the victory of the bourgeoisie. This organisation was to ensure the domination of capital, which is why the old slogan of freedom had to be reinterpreted. The theorists of the victorious class now began to talk chiefly or even exclusively about the freedom of the individual.

p But what is this freedom of the individual in bourgeois society? It is a legal and ideological expression of the rights of the property owner, who is in a position to use these rights depending on the size of his property (capital). Even then, as bourgeois liberalism emerged and flourished the slogan of individual freedom came to be contrasted with the requirement of complete sovereignty for the people. The bourgeoisie, terrified by the French revolution, presented popular sovereignty as being despotism and violence over the individual. Popular sovereignty was furiously attacked for the sake of this illusory “rights of the individual”, which becomes an empty shell if the social and political organisation of society is not based on popular rule but on rule by the rich or the “noble”.

p Bourgeois ideologists also markedly modified their attitude to the theory of progress. Once in power, the bourgeoisie began, by the mid-19th century, to review its attitude to the theory of boundless 311 progress. Earlier it had made excessive use of the theory of progress to extol its own order, but this enthusiasm over the idea of progress did not last long. “The ideas of progress and evolution,” wrote Paul Lafargue, “enjoyed exceptional success in the early years of the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie was still intoxicated with its political victory and the remarkable growth of its economic wealth. Philosophers, historians, moralists, politicians, writers and poets presented their writings and speeches under the sauce of progressive development. ... But by the mid-19th century they had to moderate their boundless enthusiasm. The emergence of the proletariat in the political arena in Britain and France produced anxiety in the soul of the bourgeoisie about the lasting nature of its social domination—with the result that progress no longer appeared to be so admirable."  [311•6  The theory of boundless progress gave way to notions about the boundless determination of the bourgeois order, which was supposed to ensure mankind’s progressive development.

p Thus, while the landed reactionaries bridled at the very notion of social change and enshrined the immobility of social life as a principle, the liberal bourgeoisie opposed any radical changes in social life and any “rocking of principles”. In that light there was need to reformulate the theory of social development which was to glorify no more than the partial improvements in the various institutions of the bourgeois system.

p The key task which bourgeois liberalism set itself consisted in maintaining an ideological and political influence on the working people, the working class in the first place, and tying it to bourgeois policies. That is why the solidarity of all the elements of society and recognition of the possibility of improving the system based on bourgeois domination was proclaimed as the starting point for the theories of social development enunciated by bourgeois liberalism for the purpose of winning over the working people. This was a theoretical premise for declaring as superfluous and even as harmful any independent political line for the working class and its struggle for its interests and aims. The whole theory of social development put forward by the liberals served to justify the domination of bourgeois relations.

p In concrete conditions, depending on the state of the class struggle in the various countries where the roots of liberalism were not as strong or where the situation was different, liberalism had its own features but the general characteristics of bourgeois liberalism as a political and ideological trend were most pronounced as soon as it appeared.

p In that period the trend that was allied with bourgeois liberalism was the highly unstable bourgeois radicalism, which variously reflected the attitudes of the petty bourgeoisie. In the old days, bourgeois radicalism 312 as a rule differed from liberalism by taking an anti-clerical or even atheistic stand and attacking the Church, the policy of compromise with the landowning circles and the corruption and graft in the upper sections of society and the state. Subsequently, the radicals’ positive programme came to differ less and less from that of the bourgeois liberals.

p Of considerable importance for the history of social thought was the fact that the most prominent ideologists of the bourgeoisie came out in defence of the capitalist system under the banner of liberalism, criticising the “extremes” of openly reactionary theories and standing up for science and the scientific approach. That is when the term “sociology” appeared and Comte and Spencer propounded their sociological systems. First, they strove to create a climate of public opinion that would accord with the political line of liberalism. Second, they took account of the need to produce some kind of synthesis of the sciences, a general theory of knowledge to contrast the traditions of the Enlighteners and the materialists of the past, who had taken the scientific view, and also the newly emergent materialist and dialectical theory of Marxism, which had then scored its first victories. The authors of sociological schemes tried to take account of the rapid development of the natural sciences and to show the importance of their growth for social thought, together with the connection between the science of nature and the science of society. The ideologists of the bourgeoisie mechanically applied terms and concepts from the science of nature, biology in the first place, to designate social phenomena and believed this to be a solution for the problem of “synthesising the sciences”.

p By then, the social sciences had accumulated a considerable store of facts. Solid historical works had been written on ancient society, while the life of the peoples of the Ancient East was being studied scientifically for the first time. Important works appeared on the history of the Middle Ages, and many prominent scientists were engaged in a close study of the history of the French revolution. Ethnographers and archaeologists left their mark by publishing numerous data on life in primitive society.

p The old philosophy of history was no longer equal to the task of processing all this material in the light of the bourgeois outlook, for this did not fit into its schemes, while its categories did not meet the new requirements. The bourgeoisie was in need of pseudo-scientific schemes, and these soon appeared in the form of “sociological systems" claiming to explain the diversity and unity of the concrete material amassed by the various social sciences.

p Numerous works summing up the history of civilisation were published to show how the elements of barbarism and medievalism gradually gave way to the bourgeois democratic order in an age of “science and reason”. The bourgeois order was declared to be the 313 summit of civilisation, and the capitalist social and political system a real triumph for civilised mankind.

The most generalised works on the theory of social development in the light of bourgeois liberalism were produced by the positivist sociologists of the 19th century Comte and Spencer.