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Title: Modern Science and Anarchism Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1903 Language: en Topics: science, scientism, anarcho-communist, utopian socialism, Charles Fourier, Herbert Spencer, technology, scientific socialism Source: Retrieved on July 2, 2012 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/science/toc.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]], proofread source retrieved on July 25th, 2019, from [[https://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution/. Notes: This text was taken from the book translated from the Russian original by David A. Modell and published by The Social Science Club of Philadelphia in 1903.
governmental. — The Kinship of Anarchism and the Popular-creative
tendency.
Anarchism, like Socialism in general, and like every other social
movement, has not, of course, developed out of science or out of some
philosophical school. The social sciences are still very far removed
from the time when they shall be as exact as are physics and chemistry.
Even in meteorology we cannot yet predict the weather a month, or even
one week, in advance. It would be unreasonable, therefore, to expect of
the young social sciences, which are concerned with phenomena much more
complex than winds and rain, that they should foretell social events
with any approach to certainty. Besides, it must not be forgotten that
men of science, too, are but human, and that most of them either belong
by descent to the possessing classes, and are steeped in the prejudices
of their class, or else are in the actual service of the government. Not
out of the universities, therefore, does Anarchism come.
As Socialism in general, Anarchism was born among the people; and it
will continue to be full of life and creative power only as long as it
remains a thing of the people.
At all times two tendencies were continually at war in human society. On
the one hand, the masses were developing, in the form of customs, a
number of institutions which were necessary to make social life at all
possible — to insure peace amongst men, to settle any disputes that
might arise, and to help one another in everything requiring cooperative
effort. The savage clan at its earliest stage, the village community,
the hunters’, and, later on, the industrial guilds, the free
town-republics of the middle ages, the beginnings of international law
which were worked out in those early periods, and many other
institutions, — were elaborated, not by legislators, but by the creative
power of the people.
And at all times, too, there appeared sorcerers, prophets, priests, and
heads of military organizations, who endeavored to establish and to
strengthen their authority over the people. They supported one another,
concluded alliances, in order that they might reign over the people,
hold them in subjection, and compel them to work for the masters.
Anarchism is obviously the representative of the first tendency — that
is, of the creative, constructive power of the people themselves, which
aimed at developing institutions of common law in order to protect them
from the power-seeking minority. By means of the same popular creative
power and constructive activity, based upon modern science and technics,
Anarchism tries now as well to develop institutions which would insure a
free evolution of society. In this sense, therefore, Anarchists and
Governmentalists have existed through all historic times.
Then, again, it always happened also that institutions — even the most
excellent so far as their original purpose was concerned, and
established originally with the object of securing equality, peace and
mutual aid — in the course of time became petrified, lost their original
meaning, came under the control of the ruling minority, and became in
the end a constraint upon the individual in his endeavors for further
development. Then men would rise against these institutions. But, while
some of these discontented endeavored to throw off the yoke of the old
institutions — of caste, commune or guild — only in order that they
themselves might rise over the rest and enrich themselves at their
expense; others aimed at a modification of the institutions in the
interest of all, and especially in order to shake off the authority
which had fixed its hold upon society. All reformers — political,
religious, and economic — have belonged to this class. And among them
there always appeared persons who, without abiding the time when all
their fellow-countrymen, or even a majority of them, shall have become
imbued with the same views, moved onward in the struggle against
oppression, in mass where it was possible, and single-handed where it
could not be done otherwise. These were the revolutionists, and them,
too, we meet at all times.
But the revolutionists themselves generally appeared under two different
aspects. Some of them, in rising against the established authority,
endeavored, not to abolish it, but to take it in their own hands. In
place of the authority which had become oppressive, these reformers
sought to create a new one, promising that if they exercised it they
would have the interests of the people dearly at heart, and would ever
represent the people themselves. In this way, however, the authority of
the Cæsars was established in Imperial Rome, the power of the Church
rose in the first centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, and the
tyranny of dictators grew up in the mediaeval communes at the time of
their decay. Of the same tendency, too, the kings and the tsars availed
themselves to constitute their power at the end of the feudal period.
The belief in a popular emperor, that is, Cæsarism, has not died out
even yet.
But all the while another tendency was ever manifest. At all times
beginning with Ancient Greece, there were persons and popular movements
that aimed, not at the substitution of one government for another, but
at the abolition of authority altogether. They proclaimed the supreme
rights of the individual and the people, and endeavored to free popular
institutions from forces which were foreign and harmful to them, in
order that the unhampered creative genius of the people might remould
these institutions in accordance with the new requirements. In the
history of the ancient Greek republics, and especially in that of the
mediæval commonwealths, we find numerous examples of this struggle
(Florence and Pskov are especially interesting in this connection). In
this sense, therefore, Jacobinists and Anarchists have existed at all
times among reformers and revolutionists.
In past ages there were even great popular movements of this latter
(Anarchist) character. Many thousands of people then rose against
authority — its tools, its courts and its laws — and proclaimed the
supreme rights of man. Discarding all written laws, the promoters of
these movements endeavored to establish a new society based on equality
and labor and on the government of each by his own conscience. In the
Christian movement against Roman law, Roman government, and Roman
morality (or, rather, Roman immorality), which began in Judea in the
reign of Augustus, there undoubtedly existed much that was essentially
Anarchistic. Only by degrees it degenerated into an ecclesiastical
movement, modeled upon the ancient Hebrew church and upon Imperial Rome
itself, which killed the Anarchistic germ, assumed Roman governmental
forms, and became in time the chief bulwark of government authority,
slavery, and oppression.
Likewise, in the Anabaptist movement (which really laid the foundation
for the Reformation) there was a considerable element of Anarchism. But,
stifled as it was by those of the reformers who, under Luther’s
leadership, joined the princes against the revolting peasants, it died
out after wholesale massacres of the peasants had been carried out in
Holland and Germany. Thereupon the moderate reformers degenerated by
degrees into those compromisers between conscience and government who
exist to-day under the name of Protestants.
Anarchism, consequently, owes its origin to the constructive, creative
activity of the people, by which all institutions of communal life were
developed in the past, and to a protest — a revolt against the external
force which had thrust itself upon these institutions; the aim of this
protest being to give new scope to the creative activity of the people,
in order that it might work out the necessary institutions with fresh
vigor.
In our own time Anarchism arose from the same critical and revolutionary
protest that called forth Socialism in general. Only that some of the
socialists, having reached the negation of Capital and of our social
organization based upon the exploitation of labor, went no further. They
did not denounce what, in our opinion, constitutes the chief bulwark of
Capital; namely, Government and its chief supports: centralization, law
(always written by a minority in the interest of that minority), and
Courts of justice (established mainly for the defence of Authority and
Capital).
Anarchism does not exclude these institutions from its criticism. It
attacks not only Capital, but also the main sources of the power of
Capitalism.
traits: the investigation of all phenomena by the scientific method. —
The Stagnation of Thought at the Beginning of the XIX century. — The
Awakening of Socialism: its influence upon the development of science. —
The Fifties.
But, though Anarchism, like all other revolutionary movements, was born
among the people — in the struggles of real life, and not in the
philosopher’s studio, — it is none the less important to know what place
it occupies among the various scientific and philosophic streams of
thought now prevalent: what is its relation to them; upon which of them
principally does it rest; what method it employs in its researches — in
other words, to which school of philosophy of law it belongs, and to
which of the now existing tendencies in science it has the greatest
affinity.
We have heard of late so much about economic metaphysics that this
question naturally presents a certain interest; and I shall endeavor to
answer it as plainly as possible, avoiding difficult phraseology
wherever it can be avoided.
The intellectual movement of our own times originated in the writings of
the Scotch and the French philosophers of the middle and end of the
eighteenth century. The universal awakening of thought which began at
that time stimulated these thinkers to desire to embody all human
knowledge in one general system. Casting aside mediæval scholasticism
and metaphysics, till then supreme, they decided to look upon the whole
of Nature — the world of the stars, the life of the solar system and of
our planet, the development of the animal world and of human societies —
as upon phenomena open to scientific investigation and constituting so
many branches of natural science.
Freely availing themselves of the truly scientfic, inductive-deductive
method they approached the study of every group of phenomena — whether
of the starry realm, of the animal world, or of the world of human
beliefs and institutions — just as the naturalist approaches the study
of any physical problem. They carefully investigated the phenomena, and
attained their generalizations by means of induction. Deduction helped
them in framing certain hypotheses; but these they considered as no more
final than, for instance Darwin regarded his hypothesis concerning the
origin of new species by means of the struggle for existence, or
Mendeléeff his “periodic law.” They saw in these hypotheses suppositions
that were very convenient for the classification of facts and their
further study, but which were subject to verification by inductive
means, and which would become laws — that is, verified generalizations —
only after they have stood this test, and after an explanation of cause
and effect had been given.
When the centre of the philosophic movement had shifted from Scotland
and England to France, the French philosophers, with their natural sense
of harmony, betook themselves to a systematic rebuilding of all the
human sciences — the natural and the humanitarian sciences — on the same
principles. From this resulted their attempt to construct a
generalization of all knowledge, that is, a philosophy of the whole
world and all its life. To this they endeavored to give a harmonious,
scientific form. discarding all metaphysical constructions and
explaining all phenomena by the action of the same mechanical forces
which had proved adequate to the explanation of the origin and the
development of the earth.
It is said that, in answer to Napoleon’s remark to Laplace that in his
“System of the World” God was nowhere mentioned, Laplace replied, “I had
no need of this hypothesis.” But Laplace not only succeeded in writing
his work without this supposition: he nowhere in this work resorted to
metaphysical entities; to words which conceal a very vague understanding
of phenomena and the inability to represent them in concrete material
forms — in terms of measurable quantities. He constructed this system
without metaphysics. And although in his “System of the World” there are
no mathematical calculations, and it is written in so simple a style as
to be accessible to every intelligent reader, yet the mathematicians
were able subsequently to express every separate thought of this book in
the form of an exact mathematical equation — in terms, that is, of
measurable quantities. So rigorously did Laplace reason and so lucidly
did he express himself.
The French eighteenth-century philosophers did exactly the same with
regard to the phenomena of the spiritual world. In their writings one
never meets with such metaphysical statements as are found, say, in
Kant. Kant, as is well known, explained the moral sense of man by a
“categorical imperative” which might at the same time be considered
desirable as a universal law.[1] But in this dictum every word
(“imperative,” “categorical,” “law,” “universal”) is a vague verbal
substitute for the material fact which is to be explained. The French
encyclopædists, on the contrary, endeavored to explain, just as their
English predecessors had done, whence came the ideas of good and evil to
man, without substituting “a word for the missing conception,” as Goethe
put it. They took the living man as he is. They studied him and found,
as did Hutcheson (in 1725) and, after him, Adam Smith in his best work,
“The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” — that the moral sentiments have
developed in man from the feeling of pity (sympathy), through his
ability to put himself in another’s place; from the fact that we almost
feel pain and grow indignant when a child is beaten in our presence.
From simple observations of common facts like these, they gradually
attained to the broadest generalizations. In this manner they actually
did explain the complex moral sense by facts more simple, and did not
substitute for moral facts well known to and understood by us, obscure
terms like “the categorical imperative,” or “universal law,” which do
not explain anything. The merit of such a treatment is self-evident.
Instead of the “inspiration from above “ and a superhuman, miraculous
origin of the moral sense, they dealt with the feeling of pity, of
sympathy — derived by man through experience and inheritance, and
subsequently perfected by further observation of social life.
When the thinkers of the eighteenth century turned from the realm of
stars and physical phenomena to the world of chemical changes, or from
physics and chemistry to the study of plants and animals, or from botany
and zoology to the development of economical and political forms of
social life and to religions among men, — they never thought of changing
their method of investigation. To all branches of knowledge they applied
that same inductive method. And nowhere, not even in the domain of moral
concepts, did they come upon any point where this method proved
inadequate. Even in the sphere of moral concepts they felt no need of
resorting again either to metaphysical suppositions (“God,” “immortal
soul,” “vital force,” “a categorical imperative” decreed from above, and
the like), or of exchanging the inductive method for some other,
scholastic method. They thus endeavored to explain the whole world — all
its phenomena — in the same natural-scientific way. The encyclopædists
compiled their monumental encyclopædia, Laplace wrote his “System of the
World,” and Holbach “The System of Nature;” Lavoisier brought forward
the theory of the indestructibility of matter, and therefore also of
energy or motion (Lomonósoff was at the same time outlining the
mechanical theory of heat[2]); Lamarck undertook to explain the
formation of new species through the accumulation of variations due to
environment; Diderot was furnishing an explanation of morality, customs,
and religions requiring no inspiration from without; Rousseau was
attempting to explain the origin of political institutions by means of a
social contract — that is, an act of man’s free will.... In short, there
was no branch of science which the thinkers of the eighteenth century
had not begun to treat on the basis of material phenomena — and all by
that same inductive method.
Of course, some palpable blunders were made in this daring attempt.
Where knowledge was lacking, hypotheses — often very bold, but sometimes
entirely erroneous — were put forth. But a new method was being applied
to the development of all branches of science, and, thanks to it, these
very mistakes were subsequently readily detected and pointed out. And at
the same time a means of investigation was handed down to our nineteenth
century which has enabled us to build up our entire conception of the
world upon scientific bases, having freed it alike from the
superstitions bequeathed to us and from the habit of disposing of
scientific questions by resorting to mere verbiage.
However, after the defeat of the French Revolution, a general reaction
set in — in politics, in science and in philosophy. Of course the
fundamental principles of the great Revolution did not die out. The
emancipation of the peasants and townspeople, from feudal servitude,
equality before the law, and representative (constitutional) government,
proclaimed by the Revolution, slowly gained ground in and out of France.
After the Revolution, which had proclaimed the great principles of
liberty, equality, and fraternity, a slow evolution began — that is, a
gradual reorganization which introduced into life and law the principles
marked out, but only partly realized, by the Revolution. (Such a
realization through evolution of principles proclaimed by the preceding
revolution, may even be regarded as a general law of social
development). Although the Church, the State, and even Science trampled
on the banner upon which the Revolution had inscribed the words
“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”; although to be reconciled to the
existing state of things became for a time a universal watch-word; still
the principles of freedom were slowly entering — into the affairs of
life. It is true that the feudal obligations abolished by the republican
armies of Italy and Spain were again restored in these countries, and
that even the inquisition itself was revived. But a mortal blow had
already been dealt them — and their doom was sealed. The wave of
emancipation from the feudal yoke reached, first, Western, and then
Eastern Germany, and spread over the peninsulas. Slowly moving eastward,
it reached Prussia in 1848, Russia in 1861, and the Balkans in 1878.
Slavery disappeared in America in 1863. At the same time the ideas of
the equality of all citizens before the law, and of representative
government were also spreading from west to east, and by the end of the
century Russia alone remained under the yoke of autocracy, already much
impaired.
On the other hand, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, the ideas
of economic emancipation had already been proclaimed. In England, Godwin
published in 1793 his remarkable work, “An Enquiry into Political
Justice,” in which he was the first to establish the theory of
non-governmental socialism, that is, Anarchism; and Babeuf — especially
influenced, as it seems, by Buonarotti — came forward in 1796 as the
first theorist of centralized State-socialism.
Then, developing the principles already laid down in the eighteenth
century, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen came forward as the three
founders of modern socialism in its three chief schools; and in the
forties Proudhon, unacquainted with the work of Godwin, laid down anew
the bases of Anarchism.
The scientific foundations of both governmental and non-governmental
socialism were thus laid down at the beginning of the nineteenth century
with a thoroughness wholly unappreciated by our contemporaries. Only in
two respects, doubtless very important ones, has modern socialism
materially advanced. It has become revolutionary, and has severed all
connection with the Christian religion. It realized that for the
attainment of its ideals a Social Revolution is necessary — not in the
sense in which people sometimes speak of an “industrial revolution” or
of “a revolution in science,” but in the real, material sense of the
word “Revolution” — in the sense of rapidly changing the fundamental
principles of present society by means which, in the usual run of
events, are considered illegal. And it ceased to confuse its views with
the optimist reforming tendencies of the Christian religion. But this
latter step had already been taken by Godwin and R. Owen. As regards the
admiration of centralized authority and the preaching of discipline, for
which man is historically indebted chiefly to the mediæval church and to
church rule generally — these survivals have been retained among the
mass of the State socialists, who have thus failed to rise to the level
of their two English forerunners.
Of the influence which the reaction that set in after the Great
Revolution has had upon the development of the sciences, it would be
difficult to speak in this essay.[3] Suffice it to say, that by far the
greater part of what modern science prides itself on was already marked
out, and more than marked out — sometimes even expressed in a definite
scientific form — at the end of the eighteenth century. The mechanical
theory of heat and the indestructibility of motion (the conservation of
energy); the modification of species by the action of environment;
physiological psychology; the anthropological view of history, religion,
and legislation; the laws of development of thought — in short, the
whole mechanical conception of the world and all the elements of a
synthetic philosophy (a philosophy which embraces all physical, chemical
living and social phenomena), — were already outlined and partly
formulated in the preceding century.
But, owning to the reaction which set in, these discoveries were kept in
the background during a full half-century. Men of science suppressed
them or else declared them “unscientific.” Under the pretext of
“studying facts” and “gathering scientific material,” even such exact
measurements as the determination of the mechanical power necessary for
obtaining a given amount of heat (the determination by Séguin and Joule
of the mechanical equivalent of heat) were set aside by the scientists.
The English Royal Society even declined to publish the results of
Joule’s investigations into this subject on the ground that they were
“unscientific.” And the excellent work of Grove upon the unity of
physical forces, written in 1843, remained up to 1856 in complete
obscurity. Only on consulting the history of the exact sciences can one
fully understand the forces of reaction which then swept over Europe.
The curtain was suddenly rent at the end of the fifties, when that
liberal, intellectual movement began in Western Europe which led in
Russia to the abolition of serfdom, and deposed Schelling and Hegel in
philosophy, while in life it called forth the bold negation of
intellectual slavery and submission to habit and authority, which is
known under the name of Nihilism.
It is interesting to note in this connection the extent to which the
socialist teachings of the thirties and forties, and also the revolution
of 1848, have helped science to throw off the fetters placed upon it by
the post-revolutionary reaction. Without entering here into detail, it
is sufficient to say that the above-mentioned Séguin and Augustin
Thierry (the historian who laid the foundations for the study of the
folkmote regime and of federalism) were Saint-Simonists, that Darwin’s
fellow-worker, A. R. Wallace, was in his younger days an enthusiastic
follower of Robert Owen; that Auguste Comte was a Saint-Simonist, and
Ricardo and Bentham were Owenists; and that the materialists Charles
Vogt and George Lewis, as well as Grove, Mill, Spencer, and many others,
had lived under the influence of the radical socialistic movement of the
thirties and forties. It was to this very influence that they owed their
scientific boldness.
The simultaneous appearance of the works of Grove, Joule, Berthollet and
Helmholtz; of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Moleschott and Vogt; of Lyell,
Bain, Mill and Burnouf — all in the brief space of five or six years
(1856–1862), — radically changed the most fundamental views of science.
Science suddenly started upon a new path. Entirely new fields of
investigation were opened with amazing rapidity. The science of life
(Biology), of human institutions (Anthropology), of reason, will and
emotions (Psychology), of the history of rights and religions, and so on
— grew up under our very eyes, staggering the mind with the boldness of
their generalizations and the audacity of their deductions. What in the
preceding century was only an ingenious guess, now came forth proved by
the scales and the microscope, verified by thousands of applications.
The very manner of writing changed, and science returned to the
clearness, the precision, and the beauty of exposition which are
peculiar to the inductive method and which characterized those of the
thinkers of the eighteenth century who had broken away from metaphysics.
To predict what direction science will take in its further development
is, evidently, impossible. As long as men of science depend upon the
rich and the governments, so long will they of necessity remain subject
to influence from this quarter; and this, of course, can again arrest
for a time the development of science. But one thing is certain: in the
form that science is now assuming there is no longer any need of the
hypothesis which Laplace considered useless, or of the metaphysical
“words” which Goethe ridiculed. The book of nature, the book of organic
life, and that of human development, can already be read without
resorting to the power of a creator, a mystical “vital force,” an
immortal soul, Hegel’s trilogy, or the endowment of abstract symbols
with real life. Mechanical phenomena, in their ever-increasing
complexity, suffice for the explanation of nature and the whole of
organic and social life.
There is much, very much, in the world that is still unknown to us —
much that is dark and incomprehensible; and of such unexplained gaps new
ones will always be disclosed as soon as the old ones have been filled
up. But we do not know of, and do not see the possibility of
discovering, any domain in which the phenomena observed in the fall of a
stone, or in the impact of two billiard balls, or in a chemical reaction
— that is, mechanical phenomena — should prove inadequate to the
necessary explanations.
The causes of his failure: the religious explanation of the moral sense
in man.
It was natural that, as soon as science had attained such
generalizations, the need of a synthetic philosophy should be felt; a
philosophy which, no longer discussing “the essence of things,” first
causes,” the “ aim of life,” and similar symbolic expressions, and
repudiating all sorts of anthropomorphism (the endowment of natural
phenomena with human characteristics), should be a digest and
unification of all our knowledge; a philosophy which, proceeding from
the simple to the complex, would furnish a key to the understanding of
all nature, in its entirety, and, through that, indicate to us the lines
of further research and the means of discovering new, yet unknown,
correlations (so-called laws), while at the same time it would inspire
us with confidence in the correctness of our conclusions, however much
they may differ from current superstitions.
Such attempts at a constructive synthetic philosophy were made several
times during the nineteenth century, the chief of them being those of
Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer. On these two we shall have to
dwell.
The need of such a philosophy as this was admitted already in the
eighteenth century-by the philosopher and economist Turgot and,
subsequently, even more clearly by Saint-Simon. As has been stated
above, the encyclopædists, and likewise Voltaire in his “Philosophical
Dictionary,” had already begun to construct it. In a more rigorous,
scientific form which would satisfy the requirements of the exact
sciences, it was now undertaken by Auguste Comte.
It is well known that Comte acquitted himself very ably of his task so
far as the exact sciences were concerned. He was quite right in
including the science of life (Biology) and that of human societies
(Sociology) in the circle of sciences compassed by his positive
philosophy; and his philosophy has had a great influence upon all
scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century.
But why was it that this great philosopher proved so weak the moment he
took up, in his “Positive Politics,” the study of social institutions,
especially those of modern times? This is the question which most
admirers of Comte have asked themselves. How could such a broad and
strong mind come to the religion which Comte preached in the closing
years of his life? Littré and Mill, it is well known, refused even to
recognize Comte’s “Politics” as part of his philosophy; they considered
it the product of a weakened mind; while others utterly failed in their
endeavors to discover a unity of method in the two works.[4]
And yet the contradiction between the two parts of Comte’s philosophy is
in the highest degree characteristic and throws a bright light upon the
problems of our own time.
When Comte had finished his “Course of Positive Philosophy,” he
undoubtedly must have perceived that he had not yet touched upon the
most important point — namely, the origin in man of the moral principle
and the influence of this principle upon human life. He was bound to
account for the origin of this principle, to explain it by the same
phenomena by which he had explained life in general, and to show why man
feels the necessity of obeying his moral sense, or, at least, of
reckoning with it. But for this he was lacking in knowledge (at the time
he wrote this was quite natural) as well as in boldness. So, in lieu of
the God of all religions, whom man must worship and to whom he must
appeal in order to be virtuous, he placed Humanity, writ large. To this
new idol he ordered us to pray that we might develop in ourselves the
moral concept. But once this step had been taken — once it was found
necessary to pay homage to something standing outside of and higher than
the individual in order to retain man on the moral path — all the rest
followed naturally. Even the ritualism of Comte’s religion moulded
itself very naturally upon the model of all the preceding positive
religions.
Once Comte would not admit that everything that is moral in man grew out
of observation of nature and from the very conditions of men living in
societies, — this step was necessary. He did not see that the moral
sentiment in man is as deeply rooted as all the rest of his physical
constitution inherited by him from his slow evolution; that the moral
concept in man had made its first appearance in the animal societies
which existed long before man had appeared upon earth; and that,
consequently, whatever may be the inclinations of separate individuals,
this concept must persist in mankind as long as the human species does
not begin to deteriorate, — the anti-moral activity of separate men
inevitably calling forth a counter-activity on the part of those who
surround them, just as action causes reaction in the physical world.
Comte did not understand this, and therefore he was compelled to invent
a new idol — Humanity — in order that it should constantly recall man to
the moral path.
Like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and almost all his other contemporaries,
Comte thus paid his tribute to the Christian education he had received.
Without a struggle of the evil principles with the good — in which the
two should be equally matched — and without man’s application in prayer
to the good principle and its apostles on earth for maintaining him in
the virtuous path, Christianty cannot be conceived. And Comte, dominated
from childhood by this Christian idea, reverted to it as soon as he
found himself face to face with the question of morality and the means
of fortifying it in the heart of man.
Development of the Mechanical World-Conception, embracing the
Development of Human Ideas and Institutions. — A Theory of Evolution.
But it must not be forgotten that Comte wrote his Positivist Philosophy
long before the years 1856–1862, which, as stated above, suddenly
widened the horizon of science and the world-concept of every educated
man.
The works which appeared in these five or six years have wrought so
complete a change in the views on nature, on life in general, and on the
life of human societies, that it has no parallel in the whole history of
science for the past two thousand years. That which had been but vaguely
understood — sometimes only guessed at by the encyclopædists, and that
which the best minds in the first half of the nineteenth century had so
much difficulty in explaining, appeared now in the full armor of
science; and it presented itself so thoroughly investigated through the
inductive-deductive method that every other method was at once adjudged
imperfect, false and — unnecessary.
Let us, then, dwell a little longer upon the results obtained in these
years, that we may better appreciate the next attempt at a synthetic
philosophy, which was made by Herbert Spencer.
Grove, Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, and a whole group of physicists and
astronomers, as also Kirchhoff, who discovered the spectroscopic
analysis and gave us the means of determining the composition of the
most distant stars, — these, in rapid succession at the end of the
fifties, proved the unity of nature throughout the inorganic world. To
talk of certain mysterious, imponderable fluids — calorific, magnetic,
electrical — at once became impossible. It was shown that the mechanical
motion of molecules which takes place in the waves of the sea or in the
vibrations of a bell or a tuning fork, was adequate to the explanation
of all the phenomena of heat, light, electricity and magnetism; that we
can measure them and weigh their energy. More than this: that in the
heavenly bodies most remote from us the same vibration of molecules
takes place, with the same effects. Nay, the mass movements of the
heavenly bodies themselves, which run through space according to the
laws of universal gravitation, represent, in all likelihood, nothing
else than the resultants of these vibrations of light and electricity,
transmitted for billions and trillions of miles through interstellar
space.
The same calorific and electrical vibrations of molecules of matter
proved also adequate to explain all chemical phenomena. And then, the
very life of plants and animals, in its infinitely varied
manifestations, has been found to be nothing else than a continually
going on exchange of molecules in that wide range of very complex, and
hence unstable and easily decomposed, chemical compounds from which are
built the tissues of every living being.
Then, already during those years it was understood — and for the past
ten years it has been still more firmly established — that the life of
the cells of the nervous system and their property of transmitting
vibrations from one to the other, afforded a mechanical explanation of
the nervous life of animals. Owing to these investigations, we can now
understand, without leaving the domain of purely physiological
observations, how impressions and images are produced and retained in
the brain, how their mutual effects result in the association of ideas
(every new impression awakening impressions previously stored up), and
hence also — in thought.
Of course, very much still remains to be done and to be discovered in
this vast domain; science, scarcely freed yet from the metaphysics which
so long hampered it, is only now beginning to explore the wide field of
physical psychology. But the start has already been made, and a solid
foundation is laid for further labors. The old-fashioned classification
of phenomena into two sets, which the German philosopher Kant endeavored
to establish, — one concerned with investigations “in time and space”
(the world of physical Phenomena) and the other “in time only” (the
world of spiritual phenomena), — now falls of itself. And to the
question once asked by the Russian physiologist, Setchenov: “By whom and
how should psychology be studied?” science has already given the answer:
“By physiologists, and by the physiological method.” And, indeed, the
recent labors of the physiologists have already succeeded in shedding
incomparably more light than all the intricate discussions of the
metaphysicists, upon the mechanism of thought; the awakening of
impressions, their retention and transmission.
In this, its chief stronghold, metaphysics was thus worsted. The field
in which it considered itself invincible has now been taken possession
of by natural science and materialist philosophy, and these two are
promoting the growth of knowledge in this direction faster than
centuries of metaphysical speculation have done.
In these same years another important step was made. Darwin’s book on
“The Origin of Species” appeared and eclipsed all the rest.
Already in the last century Buffon (apparently even Linnæus), and on the
threshold of the nineteenth century Lamarck, had ventured to maintain
that the existing species of plants and animals are not fixed forms;
that they are variable and vary continually even now. The very fact of
family likeness which exists between groups of forms — Lamarck pointed
out — is a proof of their common descent from a common ancestry. Thus,
for example, the various forms of meadow buttercups, water buttercups,
and all other buttercups which we see on our meadows and swamps, must
have been produced by the action of environment upon descendants from
one common type of ancestors. Likewise, the present species of wolves,
dogs, jackals and foxes did not exist in a remote past, but there was in
their stead one kind of animals out of which, under various conditions,
the wolves, the dogs, the jackals and the foxes have gradually evolved.
But in the eighteenth century such heresies as these had to be uttered
with great circumspection. The Church was still very powerful then, and
for such heretical views the naturalist had to reckon with prison,
torture, or the lunatic’s asylum. The “heretics” consequently were
cautious in their expressions. Now, however, Darwin and A. R. Wallace
could boldly maintain so great a heresy. Darwin even ventured to declare
that man, too, had originated, in the same way of slow physiological
evolution, from some lower forms of ape-like animals; that his “immortal
spirit” and his “moral soul” are as much a product of evolution as the
mind and the moral habits of the ant or of the chimpanzee.
We know what storms then broke out upon Darwin and, especially, upon his
bold and gifted disciple, Huxley, who sharply emphasized just those
conclusions from Darwin’s work which were most dreaded by the clergy. It
was a fierce battle, but, owing to the support of the masses of the
public, the victory was won, nevertheless, by the Darwinians; and the
result was that an entirely new and extremely important science —
Biology, the science of life in all its manifestations — has grown up
under our very eyes during the last forty years.
At the same time Darwin’s work furnished a new key to the understanding
of all sorts of phenomena — physical, vitals and social. It opened up a
new road for their investigation. The idea of a continuous development
(evolution) and of a continual adaptation to changing environment, found
a much wider application than the origin of species. It was applied to
the study of all nature, as well as to men and their social
institutions, and it disclosed in these branches entirely unknown
horizons, giving explanations of facts which hitherto had seemed quite
inexplicable.
Owing to the impulse given by Darwin’s work to all natural sciences,
Biology was created, which, in Herbert Spencer’s hands, soon explained
to us how the countless forms of living beings inhabiting the earth may
have developed, and enabled Haeckel to make the first attempt at
formulating a genealogy of all animals, man included. In the same way a
solid foundation for the history of the development of man’s customs,
manners, beliefs and institutions was laid down — a history the want of
which was strongly felt by the eighteenth century philosophers and by
Auguste Comte. At the present time this history can be written without
resorting to either the formulæ of Hegelean metapysics or to “innate
ideas” and “inspiration from without” — without any of those dead
formulæ behind which, concealed bywords as by clouds, was always hidden
the same ancient ignorance and the same superstition. Owing, on the one
hand, to the labors of the naturalists, and, on the other, to those of
Henry Maine and his followers, who applied the same inductive method to
the study of primitive customs and laws that have grown out of them, it
became possible in recent years to place the history of the origin and
development of human institutions upon as firm a basis as that of the
development of any form of plants or animals.
It would, of course, be extremely unfair to forget the enormous work
that was done earlier — already in the thirties — towards the working
out of the history of institutions by the school of Augustin Thierry in
France, by that of Maurer and the “Germanists” in Germany, and in
Russia, somewhat later, by Kostomárov, Belyáev and others. In fact, the
principle of evolution had been applied to the study of manners and
institutions, and also to languages, from the time of the
encyclopædists. But to obtain correct, scientific deductions from all
this mass of work became possible only when the scientists could look
upon the established facts in the same way as the naturalist regards the
continuous development of the organs of a plant or of a new species.
The metaphysical formulæ have helped, in their time, to make certain
approximate generalizations. Especially did they stimulate the
slumbering thought, disturbing it by their vague hints as to the unity
of life in nature. At a time when the inductive generalizations of the
encyclopædists and their English predecessors were almost forgotten (in
the first half of the nineteenth century), and when it required some
civic courage to speak of the unity of physical and spiritual nature —
the obscure metaphysics still upheld the tendency toward generalization.
But those generalizations were established either by means of the
dialectic method or by means of a semi-conscious induction, and,
therefore, were always characterized by a hopeless indefiniteness. The
former kind of generalizations was deduced by means of really fallacious
syllogisms — similar to those by which in ancient times certain Greeks
used to prove that the planets must move in circles “because the circle
is the most perfect curve;” and the meagerness of the premises would
then be concealed by misty words, and, worse still, by an obscure and
clumsy exposition. As to the semi-conscious inductions which were made
here and there, they were based upon a very limited circle of
observations — similar to the broad but unwarranted generalization of
Weissmann, which have recently created some sensation. Then, as the
induction was unconscious the generalizations were put forth in the
shape of hard and fast laws, while in reality they were but simple
suppositions — hypotheses, or beginnings only of generalizations, which,
far from being “laws,” required yet the very first verification by
observation. Finally, all these broad deductions, expressed as they were
in most abstract forms — as, for instance, the Hegelean “thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis,” — left full play for the individual to come
to the most varied and often opposite practical conclusions; so that
they could give birth, for instance, to Bakunin’s revolutionary
enthusiasm and to the Dresden Revolution, to the revolutionary
Jacobinism of Marx and to the recognition of the “reasonableness of what
exists,” which reconciled so many Germans to the reaction then existing
— to say nothing of the recent vagaries of the so-called Russian
Marxists.
Spencer’s attempt: why it failed. — The Method not sustained. — A False
Conception of “The Struggle for Existence.”
Since Anthropology — the history of man’s physiological development and
of his religious, political ideals, and economic institutions — came to
be studied exactly as all other natural sciences are studied, it was
found possible, not only to shed a new light upon this history, but to
divest it for ever of the metaphysics which had hindered this study in
exactly the same way as the Biblical teachings had hindered the study of
Geology.
It would seem, therefore, that when the construction of a synthetic
philosophy was undertaken by Herbert Spencer, he should have been able,
armed as he was with all the latest conquests of science, to build it
without falling into the errors made by Comte in his “Positive
Politics.” And yet Spencer’s synthetic philosophy, though it undoubtedly
represents an enormous step in advance (complete as it is without
religion and religious rites), still contains in its sociological part
mistakes as gross as are found in the former work.
The fact is that, having reached in his analysis the psychology of
societies, Spencer did not remain true to his rigorously scientific
method, and failed to accept all the conclusions to which it had led
him. Thus, for example, Spencer admits that the land ought not to become
the property of individuals, who, in consequence of their right to raise
rents, would hinder others from extracting from the soil all that could
be extracted from it under improved methods of cultivation; or would
even simply keep it out of use in the expectation that its market price
will be raised by the labor of others. An arrangement such as this he
considers inexpedient and full of dangers for society. But, while
admitting this in the case of land, he did not venture to extend this
conclusion to all other forms of accumulated wealth — for example, to
mines, harbors, and factories.
Or, again, while protesting against the interference of government in
the life of society, and giving to one of his books a title which is
equivalent to a revolutionary programme, “The Individual vs. The State,”
he, little by little, under the pretext of the defensive activity of the
State in its entirety, — such as it is to-day, only slightly limiting
its attributes.
These and other inconsistencies are probably accounted for by the fact
that the sociological part of Spencer’s philosophy was formulated in his
mind (under the influence of the English radical movement) much earlier
than its natural-scientific part — namely, before 1851, when the
anthropological investigation of human institutions was still in its
rudimentary stage. In consequence of this, Spencer, like Comte, did not
take up the investigation of these institutions by themselves, without
preconceived conclusions. Moreover, as soon as he came in his work to
social philosophy — to Sociology — he began to make use of a new method,
a most unreliable one — the method of analogies — which he, of course,
never resorted to in the study of physical phenomena. This new method
permitted him to justify a whole series of preconceived theories.
Consequently, we do not possess as yet a philosophy constructed in both
its parts — natural sciences and sociology — with the aid of the same
scientific method.
Then, Spencer, it must also be added, is the man least suited for the
study of primitive institutions. In this respect he is distinguished
even among the English, who generally do not enter readily into foreign
modes of life and thought. “We are a people of Roman law, and the Irish
are common-law people: therefore we do not understand each other,” a
very intelligent Englishman once remarked to me. The history of the
Englishmen’s relations with the “lower races” is full of like
misunderstandings. And we see them in Spencer’s writings at every step.
He is quite incapable of understanding the customs and ways of thinking
of the savage, the “bloody revenge” of the Icelandic saga, or the stormy
life, filled with struggles, of the mediæval cities. The moral ideas of
these stages of civilization are absolutely strange to him; and he sees
in them only “savagery,” “despotism,” and “cruelty.”
Finally — what is still more important — Spencer, like Huxley and many
others, utterly misunderstood the meaning of “the struggle for
existence.” He saw in it, not only a struggle between different species
of animals (wolves devouring rabbits, birds feeding on insects, etc.),
but also a desperate struggle for food, for living-room, among the
different members within every species — a struggle which, in reality,
does not assume anything like the proportions he imagined.
How far Darwin himself was to blame for this misunderstanding of the
real meaning of the struggle for existence, we cannot discuss here. But
certain it is that when, twelve years after “The Origin of Species,”
Darwin published his “Descent of Man” he already understood struggle for
life in a different sense. “Those communities,” he wrote in the latter
work, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic
members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
The chapter devoted by Darwin to this subject could have formed the
basis of an entirely different and most wholesome view of nature and of
the development of human societies (the significance of which Goethe had
already foreseen). But it passed unnoticed. Only in 1879 do we find, in
a lecture by the Russian zoologist Kessler, a clear understanding of
mutual aid and the struggle for life. “For the progressive development
of a species,” Kessler pointed out, citing several examples, “the law of
mutual aid is of far greater importance than the law of mutual
struggle.” Soon after this Louis Buchner published his book “Love,” in
which he showed the importance of sympathy among animals for the
development of moral concepts; but in introducing the idea of love and
sympathy instead of simple sociability, he needlessly limited the sphere
of his investigations.
To prove and further to develop Kessler’s excellent idea, extending it
to man, was an easy step. If we turn our minds to a close observation of
nature and to an unprejudiced history of human institutions, we soon
discover that Mutual Aid really appears, not only as the most powerful
weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of
nature and all other enemies, but also as the chief factor of
progressive evolution. To the weakest animals it assures longevity (and
hence an accumulation of mental experience), the possibility of rearing
its progeny, and intellectual progress. And those animal species among
which Mutual Aid is practiced most, not only succeed best in getting
their livelihood, but also stand at the head of their respective class
(of insects, birds, mammals) as regards the superiority of their
physical and mental development.
This fundamental fact of nature Spencer did not perceive. The struggle
for existence within every species, the “free fight” for every morsel of
food, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine” — he
accepted as a fact requiring no proof, as an axiom. Only in recent years
did he begin in some degree to understand the meaning of mutual aid in
the animal world, and to collect notes and make experiments in this
direction. But even then he still thought of primitive man as of a beast
who lived only by snatching, with tooth and claw, the last morsel of
food from the mouth of his fellowmen.
Of course, having based the sociological part of his philosophy on so
false a premise, Spencer was no longer able to build up the sociological
part of his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series of
errors.
World is steeped in Sin.” — The Government’s Inculcation of the same
view of “Man’s Radical Perversity.” — The Views of Modern Anthropology
upon this subject. — The Development of forms of life by the “Masses,”
and the LAw. — Its Two-fold Character.
In these erroneous views, however, Spencer does not stand alone.
Following Hobbes, all the philosophy of the nineteenth century continues
to look upon the savages as upon bands of wild beasts which lived an
isolated life and fought among themselves over food and wives, until
some benevolent authority appeared among them and forced them to keep
the peace. Even such a naturalist as Huxley advocated the same views as
Hobbes, who maintained that in the beginning people lived in a state of
war, fighting “each against all,”[5] till, at last, owing to a few
advanced persons of the time, the “first society” was created (see his
article “The Struggle for Existence — a Law of Nature.”) Even Huxley,
therefore, failed to realize that it was not Man who created society,
but that social life existed among animals much earlier than the advent
of man. Such is the power of deep-rooted prejudice.
Were we, however, to trace the history of this prejudice, it would not
be difficult to convince ourselves that it originated chiefly in
religions and among their representatives. The secret leagues of
sorcerers, rain-makers, and so on, among primitive clans, and later on,
the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Indian, Hebrew and other
priesthoods, and later still the Christian priests, have always been
endeavoring to persuade men that they lay deep in sin, and that only the
intercession of the shaman, the magician, and the priest can keep the
evil spirit from assuming control over man, or can prevail with a
revengeful God not to visit upon man his retribution for sin. Primitive
Christianity, it is true, faintly attempted to break up this prejudice;
but the Christian Church, adhering to the very language of the gospels
concerning “eternal fire” and “the wrath of God,” intensified it still
more. The very conception of a son of God who had come to die for “the
redemption of sin,” served as a basis for this view. No wonder that
later on “the Holy Inquisition” subjected people to the most cruel
tortures and burned them slowly at the stake in order to afford them an
opportunity of repenting and of saving themselves thereby from eternal
torment. And not the Catholic Church alone, but all other Christian
Churches vied with one another in investing all kinds of tortures in
order to better people “steeped in sin.” Up to the present time, nine
hundred and ninety-nine persons in a thousand still believe that natural
calamities — droughts, floods, earthquakes, and epidemic diseases — are
sent by a Divine Being for the purpose of recalling sinful mankind to
the right path. In this belief an enormous majority of our children are
being brought up to this very day.
At the same time the State, in its schools and universities,
countenances the same belief in the innate perversity of man. To prove
the necessity of some power that stands above society and inculcates in
it the moral principles (with the aid of punishments inflicted for
violations of “moral law,” for which, by means of a clever trick, the
written law is easily substituted), — to keep people in this belief is a
matter of life or death to the State. Because, the moment people come to
doubt the necessity and possibility of such an inoculation of morality,
they will begin to doubt the higher mission of their rulers as well.
In this way everything — our religious, our historical, our legal, and
our social education — is imbued with the idea that man, left to
himself, would soon turn into a beast. If it were not for the authority
exercised over them, people would devour one another; nothing but
brutality and war of each against all can be expected from “the mob.” It
would perish, if the policeman, the sheriff and the hangman — the chosen
few, the salt of the earth — did not tower above it and interpose to
prevent the universal free-fight, to educate the people to respect the
sanctity of law and discipline, and with a wise hand lead them onward to
those times when better ideas shall find a nesting place in the “uncouth
hearts of men” and render the rod, the prison, and the gallows less
necessary than they are at present.
We laugh at a certain king who, on going into exile in 1848, said: “My
poor subjects; now they will perish without me!” We smile at the English
clerk who believes that the English are the lost tribe of Israel,
appointed by God himself to administer good government to “all other,
lower races.” But does not the great majority of fairly educated people
among all the nations entertain the same exalted opinion with regard to
itself?
And yet, a scientific study of the development of human society and
institutions leads to an entirely different conclusion. It shows that
the habits and customs for mutual aid, common defence, and the
preservation of peace, which were established since the very first
stages of human pre-historic times — and which alone made it possible
for man, under very trying natural conditions, to survive in the
struggle for existence, — that these social conventions have been worked
out precisely by this anonymous “mob.” As to the so-called “leaders” of
humanity, they have not contributed anything useful that was not
developed previously in customary law; they may have emphasized (they
nearly always vitiated) some useful existing customs, but they have not
invented them; while they always strove, on their side, to turn to their
own advantage the common-law institutions that had been worked out by
the masses for their mutual protection, or, failing in this, endeavored
to destroy them.
Even in the remotest antiquity, which is lost in the darkness of the
stone age, men already lived in societies. In these societies was
already developed a whole network of customs and sacred,
religiously-respected institutions of the communal regime or of the clan
which rendered social life possible. And through all the subsequent
stages of development we find it was exactly this constructive force of
the “uninformed mob” that worked out new modes of life and new means for
mutual support and the maintenance of peace, as new conditions arose.
On the other hand, modern science has proved conclusively that Law —
whether proclaimed as the voice of a divine being or proceeding from the
wisdom of a lawgiver — never did anything else than prescribe already
existing, useful habits and customs, and thereby hardened them into
unchangeable, crystallized forms. And in doing this it always added to
the “useful customs,” generally recognized as such, a few new rules — in
the interest of the rich, warlike and armed minority. “Thou shalt not
kill,” said the Mosaic law, “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not bear
false witness,” and then it added to these excellent injunctions: “Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, his slave, nor his ass,” which
injunction legalized slavery for all time and put woman on the same
level as a slave and a beast of burden.
“Love your neighbor,” said Christianity later on, but straightway added,
in the words of Paul the Apostle: “Slaves, be subject to your masters,”
and “There is no authority but from God,” — thereby emphasizing the
division of society into slaves and masters and sanctifying the
authority of the scoundrels who reigned at Rome. The Gospels, though
teaching the sublime idea of “no punishment for offences,” which is, of
course, the essence of Christianity — the token which differentiates it
and Buddhism from all other positive religions — speak at the same time
all the while about an avenging God who takes his revenge even upon
children, thus necessarily impressing upon mankind the opposite idea of
vengeance.
We see the same things in the laws of the so-called “Barbarians,” that
is, of the Gauls, the Lombards, the Allemains, and the Saxons, when
these people lived in their communities, free from the Roman yoke. The
Barbarian codes converted into law an undoubtedly excellent custom which
was then in the process of formation: the custom of paying a penalty for
wounds and killing, instead of practicing the law of retaliation (an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, wound for wound, and death for death).
But at the same time they also legalized and perpetuated the division of
freemen into classes — a division which only then began to appear. They
exacted from the offender varying compensations, according as the person
killed or wounded was a freeman, a military man, or a king (the penalty
in the last case being equivalent to life-long servitude). The original
idea of this scale of compensations to be paid to the wronged family
according to its social position, was evidently that a king’s family of
an ordinary freeman by being deprived of its head, was entitled to
receive a greater compensation. But the law, by restating the custom,
legalized for all time the division of people into classes — and so
legalized it that up to the present, a thousand years since, we have not
got rid of it.
And this happened with the legislation of every age, down to our own
time. The oppression of the preceding epoch was thus transmitted by law
from the old society to the new, which grew upon the ruins of the old.
The oppression of the Persian empire passed on to Greece; the oppression
of the Macedonian empire, to Rome; the oppression and cruelty of the
Roman empire, to the mediæval European States then just arising.
Every social safeguard, all forms of social life in the tribe, the
commune, and the early medæval town-republics; all forms of
inter-tribal, and later on inter-provincial, relations, out of which
international law was subsequently evolved; all forms of mutual support
and all institutions for the preservation of peace — including the jury,
— were developed by the creative genius of the anonymous masses. While
all the laws of every age, down to our own, always consisted of the same
two elements: one which fixed and crystallized certain forms of life
that were universally recognized as useful; the other which was a
superstructure — sometimes even nothing but a cunning clause adroitly
smuggled in in order to establish and strengthen the growing power of
the nobles, the king, and the priest — to give it sanction.
So, at any rate, we are led to conclude by the scientific study of the
development of human society, upon which for the last thirty years not a
few conscientious men of science have labored. They themselves, it is
true, seldom venture to express such heretical conclusions as those
stated above. But the thoughtful reader inevitably comes to them on
reading their works.
a Synthetic Conception of the World. — Its Object.
What position, then, does Anarchism occupy in the great intellectual
movement of the nineteenth century?
The answer to this question has already been partly formulated in the
preceding pages. Anarchism is a world-concept based upon a mechanical
explanation of all phenomena,[6] embracing the whole of Nature — that
is, including in it the life of human societies and their economic,
political, and moral problems. Its method of investigation is that of
the exact natural sciences, by which every scientific conclusion must be
verified. Its aim is to construct a synthetic philosophy comprehending
in one generalization all the phenomena of Nature — and therefore also
the life of societies, — avoiding, however, the errors mentioned above
into which, for the reasons there given, Comte and Spencer had fallen.
It is therefore natural that to most of the questions of modern life
Anarchism should give new answers, and hold with regard to them a
position differing from those of all political and, to a certain extent,
of all socialistic parties, which have not yet freed themselves from the
metaphysical fictions of old.
Of course, the elaboration of a complete mechanical world-conception has
hardly been begun in its sociological part — in that part, that is,
which deals with the life and the evolution of societies. But the little
that has been done undoubtedly bears a marked — though often not fully
conscious — character. In the domain of philosophy of law, in the theory
of morality, in political economy, in history, (both of nations and
institutions), Anarchism has already shown that it will not content
itself with metaphysical conclusions, but will seek, in every case a
natural-scientific basis. It rejects the metaphysics of Hegel, of
Schelling, and of Kant; it disowns the commentators of Roman and Canon
Law, together with the learned apologists of the State; it does not
consider metaphysical political economy a science; and it endeavors to
gain a clear comprehension of every question raised in these branches of
knowledge, basing its investigations upon the numerous researches that
have been made during the last thirty or forty years from a naturalist
point of view.
In the same way as the metaphysical conceptions of a Universal Spirit,
or of a Creative Force in Nature, the Incarnation of the Idea, Nature’s
Goal, the Aim of Existence, the Unknowable, Mankind (conceived as having
a separate spiritualized existence), and so on — in the same way as all
these have been brushed aside by the materialist philosophy of to-day,
while the embryos of generalizations concealed beneath these misty terms
are being translated into the concrete language of natural sciences, —
so we proceed in dealing with the facts of social life. Here also we try
to sweep away the metaphysical cobwebs, and to see what embryos of
generalizations — if any — may have been concealed beneath all sorts of
misty words.
When the metaphysicians try to convince the naturalist that the mental
and moral life of man develops in accordance with certain “Immanent
(in-dwelling) Laws of the Spirit,” the latter shrugs his shoulders and
continues his physiological study of the mental and moral phenomena of
life, with a view to showing that they can all be resolved into chemical
and physical phenomena. He endeavors to discover the natural laws on
which they are based. Similarly, when the Anarchists are told, for
instance, that — as Hegel says — every development consists of a Thesis,
an Antithesis, and a Synthesis; or that “the object of Law is the
establishment of Justice, which represents the realization of the
Highest Idea;” or, again, when they are asked, — What, in their opinion,
is “the Object of Life?” they, too, simply shrug their shoulders and
wonder how, at the present state of development of natural science, old
fashioned people can still be found who believe in “words” like these
and still express themselves in the language of primitive anthromorphism
(the conception of nature as of a thing governed by a being endowed with
human attributes). High-flown words do not scare the Anarchists, because
they know that these words simply conceal ignorance — that is,
uncompleted investigation — or, what is much worse, mere superstition.
They therefore pass on and continue their study of past and present
social ideas and institutions according to the scientific method of
induction. And in doing so they find, of course, that the development of
a social life is incomparably more complicated — and incomparably more
interesting for practical purposes — than it would appear from such
formulæ.
We have heard much of late about “the dialectic method,” which was
recommended for formulating the socialist ideal. Such a method we do not
recognize, neither would the modern natural sciences have anything to do
with it. “The dialectic method” reminds the modern naturalist of
something long since passed — of something outlived and now happily
forgotten by science. The discoveries of the nineteenth century in
mechanics, physics, chemistry, biology, physical psychology,
anthropology, psychology of nations, etc., were made — not by the
dialectic method, but by the natural-scientific method, the method of
induction and deduction. And since man is part of nature, and since the
life of his “spirit” — personal as well as social — is just as much a
phenomenon of nature as is the growth of a flower or the evolution of
social life amongst the ants and the bees, — there is no cause for
suddenly changing our method of investigation when we pass from the
flower to man, or from a settlement of beavers to a human town.
The inductive-deductive method has proved its merits so well, in that
the nineteenth century, which has applied it, has caused science to
advance more in a hundred years than it had advanced during the two
thousand years that went before. And when, in the second half of this
century, this method began to be applied to the investigation of human
society, no point was ever reached where it was found necessary to
abandon it and again adopt mediæval scholasticism — as revised by Hegel.
Besides, when, for example, philistine naturalists, seemingly basing
their arguments on “Darwinism,” began to teach, “Crush everyone weaker
than yourself; such is the law of nature,” it was easy for us to prove
by the same scientific method that no such law exists: that the life of
animals teaches us something entirely different, and that the
conclusions of the philistines were absolutely unscientific. They were
just as unscientific as, for instance, the assertion that the inequality
of wealth is a law of nature, or that capitalism is the most convenient
form of social life calculated to promote progress. Precisely this
natural-scientific method, applied to economic facts, enables us to
prove that the so-called “laws” of middle-class sociology, including
also their political economy, are not laws at all, but simply guesses,
or mere assertions which have never been verified at all. Moreover,
every investigation only bears fruit when it has a definite aim — when
it is undertaken for the purpose of obtaining an answer to a definite
and clearly worded question. And it is the more fruitful the more
clearly the observer sees the connect that exists between his problem
and his general concept of the universe — the place which the former
occupies in the latter. The better he understands the importance of the
problem in the general concept, the easier will the answer be. The
question, then, which Anarchism puts to itself may be stated thus: “What
forms of social life assure to a given society, and then to mankind
generally, the greatest amount of happiness, and hence also of
vitality?” “What forms of social life allow this amount of happiness to
grow and to develop, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, — that is,
to become more complete and more varied?” (from which, let us note in
passing, a definition of progress is derived). The desire to promote
evolution in this direction determines the scientific as well as the
social and artistic activity of the Anarchist.
Natural-Scientific Method.
Anarchism originated, as has already been said, from the demands of
practical life.
At the time of the great French Revolution of 1789–1793, Godwin had the
opportunity of himself seeing how the governmental authority created
during the revolution itself acted as a retarding force upon the
revolutionary movement. And he knew, too, what was then taking place in
England, under the cover of Parliament (the confiscation of public
lands, the kidnapping of poor workhouse children by factory agents and
their deportation to weavers’ mills, where they perished wholesale, and
so on). He understood that the government of the “One and Undivided”
Jacobinist Republic would not bring about the necessary revolution; that
the revolutionary government itself, from the very fact of its being a
guardian of the State, was an obstacle to emancipation; that to insure
the success of the revolution, people ought to part, first of all, with
their belief in Law, Authority, Uniformity, Order, Property, and other
superstitions inherited by us from our servile past. And with this
purpose in view he wrote “Political Justice.”
The theorist of Anarchism who followed Godwin, Proudhon, had himself
lived through the Revolution of 1848 and had seen with his own eyes the
crime perpetrated by the revolutionary republican government, and the
inapplicability of the state socialism of Louis Blanc. Fresh from the
impressions of what he had witnessed, Proudhon penned his admirable
works, “A General Idea of the Social Revolution” and “Confessions of a
Revolutionist,” in which he boldly advocated the abolition of the State
and proclaimed Anarchy.
And finally, the idea of Anarchism reappeared again in the International
Working Men’s Association, after the revolution that was attempted in
the Paris Commune of 1871. The complete failure of the Council of the
Commune and its capacity to act as a revolutionary body — although it
consisted, in due proportion, of representatives of every revolutionary
faction of the time (Jacobinists, the followers of Louis Blanc, and
members of the International Working Men’s Association), and, on the
other hand, the incapacity of the London General Council of the
International and its ludicrous and even harmful pretension to direct
the Paris insurrection by orders sent from England, — opened the eyes of
many. They forced many members of the International, including Bakunin,
to reflect upon the harmfulness of all sorts of government — even such
as had been freely elected in the Commune and in the International
Working Men’s Association. A few months later, the resolution passed by
the same general Council of the Association, at a secret conference held
in London in 1871 instead of an annual congress, proved still more the
inconvenience of having a government in the International. By this dire
resolution they decided to turn the entire labor movement into another
channel and convert it from an economic revolutionary movement — into an
elective parliamentary and political movement. This decision led to open
revolt on the part of the Italian, Spanish, Swiss, and partly also of
the Belgian, Federations against the London General Council, out of
which movement modern Anarchism subsequently developed.
Every time, then, the anarchist movement sprang up in response to the
lessons of actual life and originated from the practical tendencies of
events. And, under the impulse thus given it, Anarchism set to work out
its theoretic, scientific basis.
No struggle can be successful if it is an unconscious one, and if it
does not render itself a clear and concise account of its aim. No
destruction of the existing order is possible, if at the time of the
overthrow, or of the struggle leading to the overthrow, the idea of what
is to take place of what is to be destroyed is not always present in the
mind. Even the theoretical criticism of the existing conditions is
impossible, unless the critic has in his mind a more or less distinct
picture of what he would have in place of the existing state.
Consciously or unconsciously, the ideal of something better is forming
in the mind of every one who criticizes social institutions.
This is even more the case with a man of action. To tell people, “First
let us abolish autocracy or capitalism, and then we will discuss what to
put in its place,” means simply to deceive oneself and others. And power
is never created by deception. The very man who speaks thus surely has
some idea of what will take the place of the institutions destroyed.
Among those who work for the abolition — let us say, of autocracy — some
inevitably think of a constitution like that of England or Germany,
while others think of a republic, either placed under the powerful
dictatorship of their own party or modeled after the French
empire-republic, or, again, of a federal republic like that of the
United States or Switzerland; while others again strive to achieve a
still greater limitation of government authority; a still greater
independence of the towns, the communes, the working men’s associations,
and all other groups united among themselves by free agreements.
Every party thus has its ideal of the future, which serves it as a
criterion in all events of political and economic life, as well as a
basis for determining its proper modes of action. Anarchism, too, has
conceived its own ideal; and this very ideal has led it to find its own
immediate aims and its own methods of action different from those of the
socialist parties, which have retained the old Roman and ecclesiastic
ideals of governmental organization.
Morality. — Economic Ideas. — The Government.
This is not the place to enter into an exposition of Anarchism. The
present sketch has its own definite aim — that of indicating the
relation of Anarchism to modern science, — while the fundamental views
of Anarchism may be found stated in a number of other works. But two or
three illustrations will help us to define the exact relation of our
views to modern science and the modern social movement.
When, for instance, we are told that Law (written large) “is the
objectification of Truth;” or that “the principles underlying the
development of Law are the same as those underlying the development of
the human spirit;” or that “Law and Morality are identical and differ
only formally;” we feel as little respect for these assertions as does
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust.” We are aware that those who make
such seemingly profound statements as these have expended much thought
upon these questions. But they have taken a wrong path; and hence we see
in these high-flown sentences mere attempts at unconscious
generalization, based upon inadequate foundations and confused,
moreover, by words of hypnotic power. In olden times they tried to give
“Law” a divine origin; later they began to seek a metaphysical basis for
it; now, however, we are able to study its anthropological origin. And,
availing ourselves of the results obtained by the anthropological
school, we take up the study of social customs, beginning with those of
the primitive savages, and trace the origin and the development of laws
at different epochs.
In this way we come to the conclusion already expressed on a preceding
page — namely, that all laws have a two-fold origin, and in this very
respect differ from those institutions established by custom which are
generally recognized as the moral code of a given society. Law confirms
and crystallizes these customs, but, while doing so, it takes advantage
of this fact to establish (for the most part in a disguised form) the
germs of slavery and class distinction, the authority of priest and
warrior, serfdom and various other institutions, in the interest of the
armed and would be ruling minority. In this way a yoke has imperceptibly
been placed upon man, of which he could only rid himself by means of
subsequent bloody revolutions. And this is the course of events down to
the present moment — even in contemporary “labor legislation” which,
along with “protection of labor,” covertly introduces the idea of
compulsory State arbitration in the case of strikes,[7] a compulsory
eight-hour day for the workingman (no less than eight hours), military
exploitation of the railroads during strikes, legal sanction for the
dispossession of peasants in Ireland, and so on. And this will continue
to be so as long as one portion of society goes on framing laws for all
society, and thereby strengthens the power of the State, which forms the
chief support of Capitalism.
It is plain, therefore, why Anarchism — which aspires to Justice (a term
synonymous with equality) more than any other lawgiver in the world —
has from the time of Godwin rejected all written laws.
When, however, we are told that by rejecting Law we reject all morality
— since we deny the “categoric imperative” of Kant, — we answer that the
very wording of this objection is to us strange and
incomprehenesible.[8] It is as strange and incomprehensible to us as it
would be to every naturalist engaged in the study of the phenomena of
morality. In answer to this argument, we ask: “What do you really mean?
Can you not translate your statements into comprehensible language — for
instance, as Laplace translated the formulæ of higher mathematics into a
language accessible to all, and as all great men of science did and do
express themselves?”
Now, what does a man who takes his stand on “universal law” or “the
categorical imperative” really mean? Does he mean that there is in all
men the conception that one ought not to do to another what he would not
have done to himself — that it would be better even to return good for
evil? If so, well and good. Let us, then, study (as Adam Smith and
Hutcheson have already studied) the origin of these moral ideas in man,
and their course of development. Let us extend our studies to pre-human
times (a thing Smith and Hutcheson could not do). Then, we may analyze
the extent to which the idea of Justice implies that of Equailty. The
question is an important one, because only those who regard others as
their equals can accept the rule, “Do not to others what you would not
have done to yourself.” The landlord and the slave-owner, who did not
look upon “the serf” and the negro as their equals, did not recognize
the “categorical imperative” and the “universal law” as applicable to
these unhappy members of the human family. And then, if this observation
of ours be correct, we shall wee whether it is at all possible to
inculcate morality while teaching the doctrine of inequality.
We shall finally analyze, as Mark Guyau did, the facts of
self-sacrifice. And then we shall consider what has promoted the
development in man of moral feelings — first, of those which are
intimately connected with the idea of equality, and then of the others;
and after this consideration we should be able to deduce from our study
exactly what social conditions and what institutions promise the best
results for the future. Is this development promoted by religion, and to
what extent? Is it promoted by inequality — economic and political — and
by a division into classes? Is it promoted by law? By punishment? By
prisons? By the judge? The jailer? The hangman?
Let us study all this in detail, and then only may we speak again of
Morality and moralization by means of laws, law courts, jailers, spies,
and police. But we had better give up using the sonorous words which
only conceal the superficiality of our semi-learning. In their time the
use of these words was, perhaps, unavoidable — their application could
never have been useful; but now we are able to approach the study of
burning social questions in exactly the same manner as the gardener and
the physiologist take up the study of the conditions most favorable for
the growth of a plant — let us do so!
Likewise, when certain economists tell us that “in a perfectly free
market the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor
socially necessary for their production,” we do not take this assertion
on faith because it is made by certain authorities or because it may
seem to us “tremendously socialistic.” It may be so, we say. But do you
not notice that by this very statement you maintain that value and the
necessary labor are proportional to each other — just as the speed of a
falling body is proportional to the number of seconds it has been
falling? Thus you maintain a quantitative relation between these two
magnitudes; whereas a quantitative relation can be proved only by
quantitative measurements. To confine yourself to the remark that the
exchange-value of commodities “generally” increases when a greater
expenditure of labor is required, and then to assert that therefore the
two quantities are proportional to each other, is to make as great a
mistake as the man who would assert that the quantity of rainfall is
measured by the fall of the barometer below its average height. He who
first observed that, generally speaking, when the barometer is falling a
greater amount of rain falls than when it is rising; or, that there is a
certain relation between the speed of a falling stone and the height
from which it fell — that man surely made a scientific discovery. But
the person who would come after him and assert that the amount of rain
fall is measured by the fall of the barometer below its average height,
or that the space through which a falling body has passed is
proportional to the time of fall and is measured by it, — that person
would not only talk nonsense, but would prove by his very words that the
method of scientific research is absolutely strange to him; that his
work is unscientific, full as it may be of scientific expressions. The
absence of data is, clearly, no excuse. Hundreds, if not thousands, of
similar relationships are known to science in which we see the
dependence of one magnitude upon another — for example, the recoil of a
cannon depending upon the quantity of powder in the charge, or the
growth of a plant depending upon the amount of heat or light received by
it; but no scientific man will presume to affirm the proportionality of
these magnitudes without having investigated their relations
quantitatively, and still less would he represent this proportionality
as a scientific law. In most instances the dependence is very complex —
as it is, indeed, in the theory of value. The necessary amount of labor
and value are by no means proportional.
The same remark refers to almost every economic doctrine that is current
to-day in certain circles and is being presented with wonderful naivety
as an invariable law. We not only find most of these so-called laws
grossly erroneous, but maintain also that those who believe in them will
themselves become convinced of their error as soon as they come to see
the necessity of verifying their quantitative deductions by quantitative
investigation.
Moreover, the whole of political economy appears to us in a different
light from that in which it is seen by modern economists of both the
middle-class and the social-democratic camps. The scientific method (the
method of natural scientific induction) being utterly unknown to them,
they fail to give themselves any definite account of what constitutes “a
law of nature,” although they delight in using the term. They do not
know — or if they know they continually forget — that every law of
nature has a conditional character. It is always expressed thus: “If
certain conditions in nature meet, certain things will happen.” “If one
line intersects another, forming right angles on both sides of it, the
consequences will be these or those.” If two bodies are acted upon by
such movements only as exist in interstellar space, and there is no
third body within measurable distance of them, then their centres of
gravity will approach each other at a certain speed (the law of
gravitation).” And so on. In every case there is an “if” — a condition.
In consequence of this, all the so-called laws and theories of political
economy are in reality no more than statements of the following nature:
“Granting that there are always in a country a considerable number of
people who cannot subsist a month, or even a fortnight, without
accepting the conditions of work imposed upon them by the State, or
offered to them by those whom the State recognizes as owners of land,
factories, railways, etc., then the results will be so and so.”
So far middle-class political economy has been only an enumeration of
what happens under the just-mentioned conditions — without distinctly
stating the conditions themselves. And then, having described the facts
which arise in our society under these conditions, they represent to us
these facts as rigid, inevitable economic laws. As to socialist
political economy, although it criticises some of these deductions, or
explains others somewhat differently, — it has not yet been original
enough to find a path of its own. It still follows in the old grooves,
and in most cases repeats the very same mistakes.
And yet, in our opinion, political economy must have an entirely
different problem in view. It ought to occupy with respect to human
societies a place in science similar to that held by physiology in
relation to plants and animals. It must become the physiology of
society. It should aim at studying the needs of society and the various
means, both hitherto used and available under the present state of
scientific knowledge, for their satisfaction. It should try to analyze
how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory, economic or
wasteful and then, since the ultimate end of every science (as Bacon had
already stated) is obviously its practical application to life, it
should concern itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction
of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the
greatest benefit to mankind in general. Such means would be, in fact,
mere corollaries from the relative investigation mentioned above,
provided this last had been made on scientific lines.
It will be clear, even from the hasty hints given already, why it is
that we come to conclusions so different from those of the majority of
economists, both of the middle class and the social-democratic schools;
why we do not regard as “laws” certain of the temporary relations
pointed out by them; why we expound socialism entirely differently; and
why, after studying the tendencies and developments in the economic life
of different nations, we come to such radically different conclusions as
regards that which is desirable and possible; why we come to Free
Communism, while the majority of socialists arrive at State-capitalism
and Collectivism.
Perhaps we are wrong and they are right. But in order to ascertain who
is right, it will not do either to quote this and that authority, to
refer to Hegel’s trilogy, or to argue by the “dialectic method.” This
question can be settled only by taking up the study of economic
relations as facts of natural science.[9]
Pursuing the same method, Anarchism arrives also at its own conclusions
concerning the State. It could not rest content with current
metaphysical assertions like the following:
“The State is the affirmation of the idea of the highest Justice in
Society;” or “The State is the instigation and the instrument of
progress;” or, “without the State, Society is impossible.” Anarchism has
approached the study of the State exactly in the manner the naturalist
approaches the study of social life among bees and ants, or among the
migratory birds which hatch their young on the shores of sub-arctic
lakes. It would be useless to repeat here the conclusions to which this
study has brought us with reference to the history of the different
political forms (and to their desirable or probable evolution in the
future); if I were to do so, I should have to repeat what has been
written by Anarchists from the time of Godwin, and what may be found,
with all necessary explanations, in a whole series of books and
pamphlets.
I will say only that the State is a form of social life which has
developed in our European civilization, under the influence of a series
of causes,[10] only since the end of the sixteenth century. Before the
sixteenth century the State, in its Roman form, did not exist — or, more
exactly, it existed only in the minds of the historians who trace the
genealogy of Russian autocracy to Rurik and that of France to the
Merovingian kings.
Furthermore, the State (State-Justice, State-Church, State-Army) and
Capitalism are, in our opinion, inseparable concepts. In history these
institutions developed side by side, mutually supporting and reenforcing
each other. They are bound together, not by a mere coincidence of
contemporaneous development, but by the bond of cause and effect, effect
and cause. Thus, the State appears to us as a society for the mutual
insurance of the landlord, the warrior, the judge, and the priest,
constituted in order to enable every one of them to assert his
respective authority over the people and to exploit the poor. To
contemplate the destruction of Capitalism without the abolition of the
State — though the latter was created solely for the purpose of
fostering Capitalism and has grown up alongside of it — is just as
absurd, in our opinion, as it is to hope that the emancipation of the
laborer will be accomplished through the action of the Christian church
or of Caesarism. Many socialists of the thirties and forties, and even
the fifties, hoped for this; but for us, who have entered upon the
twentieth century, it is ridiculous to cherish such hopes as this!
Revolutions and their Birth. — The Creative Ingenuity of the People. —
Conclusion.
It is obvious that, since Anarchism differs so widely in its method of
investigation and in its fundamental principles, alike from the
academical sociologists and from its social-democratic fraternity, it
must of necessity differ from them all in its means of action.
Understanding Law, Right, and the State as we do, we cannot see any
guarantee of progress, still less of a social revolution, in the
submission of the Individual to the State. We are therefore no longer
able to say, as do the superficial interpreters of social phenomena,
that modern Capitalism has come into being through “the anarchy of
exploitation,” through “the theory of non-interference,” which we are
told the States have carried out by practicing the formula of “let them
do as they like” (laissez faire, laissez passer). We know that this is
not true. While giving the capitalist any degree of free scope to amass
his wealth at the expense of the helpless laborers, the government has
NOWHERE and NEVER during the whole nineteenth century afforded the
laborers the opportunity “to do as they pleased.” The terrible
revolutionary, that is, Jacobinist, convention legislated: “For strikes,
for forming a State within the State — death!” In 1813 people were
hanged in England for going out on strike, and in 1831 they were
deported to Australia for forming the Great Trades’ Union (Union of all
Trades) of Robert Owen; in the sixties people were still condemned to
hard labor for participating in strikes, and even now, in 1902, trade
unions are prosecuted for damages amounting to half a million dollars
for picketing — for having dissuaded laborers from working in times of
strike. What is one to say, then, of France, Belgium, Switzerland
(remember the massacre at Airolo!), and especially of Germany and
Russia? It is needless, also, to tell how, by means of taxes, the State
brings laborers to the verge of poverty which puts them body and soul in
the power of the factory boss; how the communal lands have been robbed
from the people, and are still robbed from them in England by means of
the Enclosure Acts. Or, must we remind the reader how, even at the
present moment, all the States, without exception, are creating directly
(what is the use of talking of “the original accumulation” when it is
continued at the present time!) all kinds of monopolies — in railroads,
tramways, telephones, gasworks, waterworks, electric works, schools,
etc., etc. In short, the system of non-interference — the laissez faire
— has never been applied for one single hour by any government. And
therefore, if it is permissible for middle-class economists to affirm
that the system of “non-interference” is practiced (since they endeavor
to prove that poverty is a law of nature), it is simply shameful that
socialists should speak thus to the workers. Freedom to oppose
exploitation has so far never and nowhere existed. Everywhere it had to
be taken by force, step by step, at the cost of countless sacrifices.
“Non-interference,” and more than non-interference — direct support;
help and protection — existed only in the interests of the exploiters.
Nor could it be overwise. The mission of the Church has been to hold the
people in intellectual slavery; the mission of the State was to hold
them, half starved, in economic slavery.
Knowing this, we cannot see a guarantee of progress in a still greater
submission of all to the State. We seek progress in the fullest
emancipation of the Individual from the authority of the State; in the
greatest development of individual initiative and in the limitation of
all the governmental functions, but surely not in the extension thereof.
The march forward in political institutions appears to us to consist in
abolishing, in the first place, the State authority which has fixed
itself upon society (especially since the sixteenth century), and which
now tries to extend its functions more and more; and, in the second
place, in allowing the broadest possible development for the principle
of free agreement, and in acknowledging the independence of all possible
associations formed for definite ends, embracing in their federations
the whole of society. The life of society itself we understand, not as
something complete and rigid, but as something never perfect — something
ever striving for new forms, and ever changing these forms in accordance
with the needs of the time. This is what life is in Nature.
Such a conception of human progress and of what we think desirable in
the future (what, in our opinion, can increase the sum of happiness)
leads us inevitably to our own special tactics in the struggle. It
induces us to strive for the greatest possible development of personal
initiative in every individual and group, and to secure unity of action,
not through discipline, but through the unity of aims and the mutual
confidence which never fail to develop when a area number of persons
have consciously embraced some common idea. This tendency manifests
itself in all the tactics and in all the internal life of every
Anarchist group, and so far we have never had the opportunity of seeing
these tactics fail.
Then, we assert and endeavor to prove that it devolves upon every new
economic form of social life to develop its own new form of political
relations. It has been so in the past, and so it undoubtedly will be in
the future. New forms are already germinating all round.
Feudal right and autocracy, or, at least, the almost unlimited power of
a tsar or a king, have moved hand in hand in history. They depended on
each other in this development. Exactly in the same way the rule of the
capitalists has evolved its own characteristic political order —
representative government — both in strictly centralized monarchies and
in republics.
Socialism, whatever may be the form in which it will appear, and in
whatever degree it may approach to its unavoidable goal — Communism, —
will also have to choose its own form of political structure. Of the old
form it cannot make use, no more than it could avail itself of the
hierarchy of the Church or of autocracy. The State bureaucracy and
centralization are as irreconcilable with Socialism as was autocracy
with capitalist rule. One way or another, Socialism must become more
popular, more communalistic, and less dependent upon indirect government
through elected representatives. It must become more self-governing.
Besides, when we closely observe the modern life of France, Spain
England, and the United States, we notice in these countries the evident
tendency to form into groups of entirely independent communes, towns and
villages, which would combine by means of free federation, in order to
satisfy innumerable needs and attain certain immediate ends. Of course,
neither the Russian Minister Witte nor the German William II, nor even
the Jacobinists who to-day rule Switzerland, are making for this goal.
All these work upon the old model for capitalist and governmental
centralization in the hands of the State; but the above-mentioned
dismemberment of the State, both territorial and functional, is
undoubtedly aimed at by the progressive part of West European society
and of the American people. In actual life this tendency manifests
itself in thousands of attempts at organization outside the State, fully
independent of it; as well as in attempts to take hold of various
functions which had been previously usurped by the State and which,of
course, it has never properly performed. And then, as a great social
phenomenon of universal import, this tendency found expression in the
Paris Commune of 1871 and in a whole series of similar uprisings in
France and Spain; while in the domain of thought — of ideas spreading
through society — this view has already acquired the force of an
extremely important factor of future history. The future revolutions in
France and in Spain will be communalist — not centralist.
On the strength of all this, we are convinced that to work in favor of a
centralized State-capitalism and to see in it a desideratum, means to
work against the tendency of progress already manifest. We see in such
work as this a gross misunderstanding of the historic mission of
Socialism itself — a great historical mistake, and we make war upon it.
To assure the laborers that they will be able to establish Socialism, or
even to take the first steps on the road to Socialism, by retaining the
entire government machinery, and changing only the persons who manage
it; not to promote, but even to retard the day on which the working
people’s minds shall be bent upon discovering their own, new forms of
political life, — this is in our eyes a colossal historical blunder
which borders upon crime.
Finally, since we represent a revolutionary party, we try to study the
history of the origin and development of past revolutions. We endeavor,
first of all, to free the histories of revolutions written up till now
from the partisan, and for the most part false, governmental coloring
that has been given them. In the histories hitherto written we do not
yet see the people; nor do we see how revolutions began. The stereotyped
phrases about the desperate condition of people previous to revolutions,
fail to explain whence, amid this desperation, came the hope of
something better — whence came the revolutionary spirit. And therefore,
after reading these histories, we put them aside, and, going back to
first sources, try to learn from them what caused the people to rise and
what was its part in revolutions.
Thus, we understand the Great French Revolution not at all as it is
pictured by Louis Blanc, who presents it chiefly as a great political
movement directed by the Jacobin Club. We see in it, first of all, a
chaotic popular movement, chiefly of the peasant folk (“Every village
had its Robespierre,” as the Abbe Gregoire, who knew the people’s
revolt, remarked to the historian Schlosser). This movement aimed
chiefly at the destruction of every vestige of feudal rights and of the
redemptions that had been imposed for the abolition of some of them, as
well as at the recovery of the lands which had been seized from the
village communes by vultures of various kinds. And in so far the peasant
movement was successful. Then, upon this foundation of revolutionary
tumult, of increased pulsation of life, and of disorganization of all
the powers of the State, we find, on the one hand, developing amongst
the town laborers a tendency towards a vaguely understood socialist
equality; and, on the other hand, the middle classes working hard, and
successfully, in order to establish their own authority upon the ruins
of that of royalty and nobility. To this end the middle classes fought
stubbornly and desperately that they might create a powerful, all
inclusive, centralized government, which would preserve and assure to
them their right of property (gained partly by plunder before and during
the Revolution) and afford them the full opportunity of exploiting the
poor without any legal restrictions. This power, this right to exploit,
the middle classes really obtained; and in the State centralization
which was created by the revolutionary Jacobinists, Napoleon found an
excellent soil for establishing his empire. From this centralized
authority, which kills all local life, France is suffering even to this
very day, and the first attempt to throw off its yoke — an attempt which
opened a new era in history — was made by the proletariat of Paris only
in 1871.
Without entering here upon an analysis of other revolutionary movements,
it is sufficient to say that we understand the coming social revolution,
not at all as a Jacobinist dictatorship — not at all as a reform of the
social institutions by means of laws issued by a Convention or a Senate
or a Dictator. Such revolutions have never occurred, and a movement
which should take this form would be doomed to inevitable death. We
understand the revolution as a widespread popular movement, during
which, in every town and village within the region of the revolt, the
masses will have to take upon themselves the task of rebuilding society
— will have to take up themselves the work of construction upon
communistic bases, without awaiting any orders and directions from
above; that is, first of all, they will have to organize, one way or
another, the means of supplying food to everyone and of providing
dwellings for all, and then produce whatever will be found necessary for
feeding, clothing, and sheltering everybody.
As to the representative government, whether self-appointed or elected —
be it “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as they said in the forties
in France and are still saying in Germany, or an elected “temporary
government,” or, again, a Jacobinist “convention,” — we place in it no
hopes whatever. Not because we personally do not like it, but because
nowhere and never in history do we find that people, carried into
government by a revolutionary wave, have proved equal to the occasion;
always and everywhere they have fallen below the revolutionary
requirements of the moment; always and everywhere they became an
obstacle to the revolution. We place no hope in this representation
because, in the work of rebuiding society upon new communist principles,
separate individuals, however wise and devoted to the cause, are and
must be powerless. They can only find a legal expression for such a
destruction as is already being accomplished — at most they can but
widen and extend that destruction so as to suggest it to regions which
have not yet begun it. But that is all. The destruction must be wrought
from below in every portion of the territory; otherwise it will not be
done. To impose it by law is impossible, as, indeed, the revolt of the
Vendée has proved. As for any new bases of life which are only growing
as yet, — no government can ever find an expression for them before they
become defined by the constructive activity of the masses themselves, at
thousands of points at once.
Looking upon the problems of the revolution in this light, Anarchism,
obviously, cannot take a sympathetic attitude toward the programme which
aims at “the conquest of power in present society” — la conquête des
pouvoirs as it is expressed in France. We know that by peaceful,
parliamentary means, in the present State such a conquest as this is
impossible. In proportion as the socialists become a power in the
present bourgeois society and State, their Socialism must die out;
otherwise the middle classes, which are much more powerful both
intellectually and numerically than is admitted in the socialist press,
will not recognize them as their rulers. And we know also that, were a
revolution to give France or England or Germany a socialist government,
the respective government would be absolutely powerless without the
activity of the people themselves, and that, necessarily, it would soon
begin to act fatally as a bridle upon the revolution.
Finally, our studies of the preparatory stages of all revolutions bring
us to the conclusion that not a single revolution has originated in
parliaments or in any other representative assembly. All began with the
people. And no revolution has appeared in full armor — born, like
Minerva out of the head of Jupiter, in a day. They all had their periods
of incubation, during which the masses were very slowly becoming imbued
with the revolutionary spirit, grew bolder, commenced to hope, and step
by step emerged from their former indifference and resignation. And the
awakening of the revolutionary spirit always took place in such a manner
that, at first, single individuals, deeply moved by the existing state
of things, protested against it, one by one. Many perished —
“uselessly,” the arm-chair critic would say; but the indifference of
society was shaken by these progenitors. The dullest and most
narrow-minded people were compelled to reflect, — Why should men, young,
sincere, and full of strength, sacrifice their lives in this way? It was
impossible to remain indifferent — it was necessary to take a stand, for
or against: thought was awakening. Then, little by little, small groups
came to be imbued with the same spirit of revolt; they also rebelled —
sometimes in the hope of local success — in strikes or in small revolts
against some official whom they disliked, or in order to get food for
their hungry children, but frequently also without any hope of success:
simply because the conditions grew unbearable. Not one, or two, or tens,
but hundreds of similar revolts have preceded and must precede every
revolution. Without these no revolution was ever wrought; not a single
concession was ever made by the ruling classes. Even the famous
“peaceful” abolition of serfdom in Russia, of which Tolstoy often speaks
as of a peaceful conquest, was forced upon the government by a series of
peasant uprisings, beginning with the early fifties (perpaps as an echo
of the European revolution of 1848), spreading from year to year, and
gaining in importance so as to attain proportions hitherto unknown,
until 1857. Alexander Herzen’s words, “Better to abolish serfdom from
above than to wait until the abolition comes from below,” — repeated by
Alexder II before the serf-owners of Moscow — were not mere phrases, but
answered to the real state of affairs. This was all the more true as to
the eve of every revolution. Hundreds of partial revolts preceded every
one of them. And it maybe stated as a general rule that the character of
every revolution is determined by the character and the aim of the
uprisings by which it is preceded.
To wait, therefore, for a social revolution to come as a birthday
present, without a whole series of protests on the part of the
individual conscience, and without hundreds of preliminary revolts, by
which the very nature of the revolution is determined, is, to say the
least, absurd. But to assure the working people that they will gain all
the benefits of a socialist revolution by confining themselves to
electoral agitation, and to attack vehemently every act of individual
revolt and all minor preliminary mass-revolts — even when they appear
among nations historically far more revolutionary than the Germans —
means to become as great an obstacle to the development of the
revolutionary spirit and to all progress as was and is the Christian
Church.
Whithout entering into further discussion of the principles of Anarchism
and the Anarchist programme of action, enough has been said, I think, to
show the place of Anarchism among the modern sociological sciences.
Anarchism is an attempt to apply to the study of the human institutions
the generalizations gained by means of the natural-scientific inductive
method; and an attempt to foresee the future steps of mankind on the
road to liberty, equality, and fraternity, with a view to realizing the
greatest sum of happiness for every unit of human society.
It is the inevitable result of that natural-scientific, intellectual
movement which began at the close of the eighteenth century, was
hampered for half a century by the reaction that set in throughout
Europe after the French Revolution, and has been appearing again in full
vigor ever since the end of the fifties. Its roots lie in the
natural-scientific philosophy of the century mentioned. Its complete
scientific basis, however, it could receive only after that awakening of
naturalism which, about forty years ago, brought into being the
natural-scientific study of human social institutions.
In Anarchism there is no room for those pseudo-scientific laws with
which the German metaphysicians of the twenties and thirties had to
consent themselves. Anarchism does not recognize any method other than
the natural-scientific. This method it applies to all the so-called
humanitarian sciences, and, availing itself of this method as well as of
all researches which have recently been called forth by it, Anarchism
endeavors to reconstruct all the sciences dealing with man, and to
revise every current idea of right, justice, etc., on the bases which
have served for the revision of all natural sciences. Its object is to
form a scientific concept of the universe embracing the whole of Nature
and including Man.
This world-concept determines the position Anarchism has taken in
practical life. In the struggle between the Individual and the State,
Anarchism, like its predecessors of the eighteenth century, takes the
side of the Individual as against the State, of Society as against the
Authority which oppresses it. And, availing itself of the historical
data collected by modern science, it has shown that the State — whose
sphere of authority there is now a tendency among its admirers to
increase, and a tendency to limit in actual life — is, in reality, a
superstructure, — as harmful as it is unnecessary, and, for us
Europeans, of a comparatively recent origin; a superstructure in the
interests of Capitalism — agrarian, industrial, and financial — which in
ancient history caused the decay (relatively speaking) of
poIitically-free Rome and Greece, and which caused the death of all
other despotic centers of civilization of the East and of Egypt. The
power which was created for the purpose of welding together the
interests of the landlord, the judge, the warrior, and the priest, and
has been opposed throughout history to every attempt of mankind to
create for themselves a more assured and freer mode of life, — this
power cannot become an instrument for emancipation, any more than
Cæsarism (Imperialism) or the Church can become the instrument for a
social revolution.
In the economic field, Anarchism has come to the conclusion that the
root of modern evil lies, not in the fact that the capitalist
appropriates the profits or the surplus-value, but in the very
possibility of these profits, which accrue only because millions of
people have literally nothing to subsist upon without selling their
labor-power at a price which makes profits and the creation of “surplus
values” possible. Anarchism understands, therefore, that in political
economy attention must be directed first of all to so-called
“consumption,” and that the first concern of the revolution must be to
reorganize that so as to provide food, clothing and shelter for all.
“Production,” on the other hand, must be so adapted as to satisfy this
primary, fundamental need of society. Therefore, Anarchism cannot see in
the next coming revolution a mere exchange of monetary symbols for
labor-checks, or an exchange of present Capitalism for State-capitalism.
It sees in it the first step on the road to No-government Communism.
Whether or not Anarchism is right in its conclusions, will be shown by a
scientific criticism of its bases and by the practical life of the
future. But in one thing it is absolutely right: in that it has included
the study of social institutions in the sphere of natural-scientific
investigations; has forever parted company with metaphysics; and makes
use of the method by which modern natural science and modern material
philosophy were developed. Owing to this, the very mistakes which
Anarchism may have made in its researches can be detected the more
readily. But its conclusions can be verified only by the same
natural-scientific, inductive-deductive method by which every science
and every scientific concept of the universe is created.
[1] Kant’s version of the ethical maxim, “Do to others as you would have
them do to you,” reads: “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at
the same time will that it should become a universal law.” — Translator.
[2] Readers of Russian literature to whom Lomonósoff is known only by
his literary work, may be surprised as much as I was to find his name
mentioned in connection with the theory of heat. On seeing the name in
the original, I promptly consulted the library — so sure was I that I
was confronted with a typographical error. There was no mistake,
however. For, Mikhail Vassilievich Lomonósoff (1712–1765), by far the
most broadly sifted Russian of his time, was — I have thus been led to
discover — even more ardently devoted to science than to the muses. His
accomplishments in the physical sciences alone, in which he experimented
and upon which he wrote and lectured extensively, would have won for him
lasting fame in the history of Russian culture and first mention among
its devotees. — Translator.
[3] Something in this line is set forth in my lecture “On the Scientific
Development in the XIX Century.”
[4] None that know the author’s fairness of mind will be likely to
accuse him of partiality in the scathing criticism he here makes of the
Apostle of Positivism. Lest any reader be inclined to do so, however, it
may not be amiss to cite on this point the opinion of a critic
unquestionably conservative and, presumably, impartial — an opinion I
came upon by mere chance while engaged on this translation. Scattered
through pages 560 to 563 of Falckenberg’s “History of Modern Philosophy”
(Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1893), I find the following estimate of
Comte and his uneven work: “The extraordinary character of which
[Comte’s philosophy] has given occasion to his critics to make a
complete di-vision between the second, ‘subjective or sentimental,’
period of his thinking, in which the philosopher is said to be
transformed into the high priest of a new religion, and the first, the
positivistic period....Beneath the surface of the most sober inquiry
mystical and dictatorial tendencies pulsate in Comte from the
beginning....The historical influence exercised by Comte through his
later writings is extremely small in comparison with that of his chief
work....Comte’s school divided into two groups — the apostates, who
reject the subjective phase and hold fast to the earlier doctrine, and
the faithful.” — Translator.
[5] Hobbes’ exact words are: “Bellum omnium contra omnes.” (The war of
everyone against everybody). — Translator
[6] It were more correct to say, a kinetic explanation, but this word is
not so commonly known.
[7] “Compulsory arbitration” — What a glaring contradiction!
[8] I am not quoting an imaginery example, but one taken from a
correspondence which I have recently carried on with a German doctor of
law.
[9] A few extracts from a letter written by a renowned Belgian biologist
and received when these lines were in print, will help me to make my
meaning clearer by a living illustration. The letter was not intended
for publication, and therefore I do not name its author: “The further I
read [such and such a work] — he writes — the surer I become that
nowadays only those are capable of studying economic and social
questions who have studied the natural sciences and have become imbued
with their spirit. Those who have received only a so-called classical
education are no longer able to understand the present intellectual
movement and are equally incapable of studying a mass of social
questions... . The idea of the integration of labor and of division of
labor in time only [the idea that it would be expedient for society to
have every person cultivating the land and following industrial and
intellectual pursuits in turn, thus varying his labor and becoming a
variously-developed individual] will become in time one of the
cornerstones of economic science. A number of biological facts are in
harmony with the thought just underlined, which shows that we are here
dealing with a law of nature [that in nature, in other words, an economy
of forces may frequently result in this way]. If we examine the vital
functions of any living being at different periods of its life, and even
at different times of the year, and sometimes at different moments of
the day, we find the application of the division of labor in time, which
is inseparably connected with the division of labor among the different
organs (the law of Adam Smith).
“Scientific people unacquainted with the natural sciences,are frequently
unable to understand the true meaning of a law of nature; the word law
blinds them, and they imagine that laws, like that of Adam Smith, have a
fatalistic power from which it is impossible to rid oneself. When they
are shown the reverse side of this last — the sad results of
individualism, from the point of view of development and personal
happiness, — they answer: this is an inexorable law, and sometimes they
give this answer so off-handedly that they thereby betray their belief
in a kind of infallibility. The naturalist, however, knows that science
can paralyze the harmful consequences of a law; that frequently he who
goes against nature wins the victory.
“The force of gravity compels bodies to fall, but it also compels the
balloon to rise. To us this seems so clear; but the economists of the
classical school appear to find it difficult to understand the full
meaning of this observation.
“The law of the division of labor in time will counter-balance the law
of Adam Smith, and will permit the integration of labor to be reached by
every individual.”
[10] An analysis of which may be found — say — in the pamphlet, “The
State and its Historic Role “ (Freedom pamphlets).