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Title: Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism Author: Michail Bakunin Date: 1867 Language: en Topics: federalism Source: Retrieved on February 23rd, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm
“Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism” was presented as a “Reasoned
Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom”,
by Bakunin at the first congress held in Geneva. The text was either
lost or destroyed and Bakunin wrote this work in the form of a speech,
never finished, like most of his works. It was divided into three parts.
The first and second parts, which follow, deal with federalism and
socialism, respectively; the third part, on “anti-theologism,” is
omitted here, except for the diatribe against Rousseau’s theory of the
state. Bakunin analyzes Rousseau’s doctrine of the social contract,
makes distinctions between state and society, and discusses the
relationship between the individual and the community, and the nature of
man in general.
The Central Committee of the League accepted Bakunin’s thesis, but the
congress rejected it and Bakunin and Bakunin’s supporters resigned in
1868.
We are happy to be able to report that the principle of federalism has
been unanimously acclaimed by the Congress of Geneva.... Unfortunately,
this principle has been poorly formulated in the resolutions of the
congress. It has not even been mentioned except indirectly... while in
our opinion, it should have taken first place in our declaration of
principles.
This is a most regrettable gap which we should hasten to fill. In
accordance with the unanimous sense of the Congress of Geneva, we should
proclaim:
justice, and of peace in Europe’s international relations, to make civil
war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European
family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe.
as they are now constituted, considering the monstrous inequality which
exists between their respective forces.
once and for all that a confederation of monarchies is a mockery,
powerless to guarantee either the peace or the liberty of populations.
militarist, even if it were to call itself republican, will be able to
enter an international confederation with a firm resolve and in good
faith. Its very constitution, which must always be an overt or covert
negation of enduring liberty, would necessarily remain a declaration of
permanent warfare, a threat to the existence of its neighbors. Since the
State is essentially founded upon an act of violence, of conquest, what
in private life goes under the name of housebreaking — an act blessed by
all institutionalized religions whatsoever, eventually consecrated by
time until it is even regarded as an historic right — and supported by
such divine consecration of triumphant violence as an exclusive and
supreme right, every centralized State therefore stands as an absolute
negation of the rights of all other States, though recognizing them in
the treaties it may conclude with them for its own political
interest....
toward reconstituting their respective countries, in order to replace
their old constitution — founded from top to bottom on violence and the
principle of authority — with a new organization based solely upon the
interests, the needs, and the natural preferences of their populations —
having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into
communes, of communes into provinces, of the provinces into nations,
and, finally, of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and
of the entire world eventually.
the historic right of the State; all questions relating to natural,
political, strategic, and commercial frontiers shall henceforth be
considered as belonging to ancient history and energetically rejected by
all the members of the League.
each people, weak or strong, of each province, of each commune, to
complete autonomy, provided its internal constitution is not a threat or
a danger to the autonomy and liberty of neighboring countries.
joined that State freely and of its own will, does not create an
obligation for that country to remain forever so attached. No perpetual
obligation could be accepted by human justice, the only kind of justice
that may have authority amongst us, and we shall never recognize other
rights or duties than those founded upon liberty. The right of free
union and of equally free secession is the first, the most important, of
all political rights, the one right without which the federation would
never be more than a centralization in disguise.
prohibit any alliance of any national faction whatsoever of the European
democracy with the monarchical State, even if the aim of such an
alliance were to regain the independence or liberty of an oppressed
country. Such an alliance could only lead to disappointment and would at
the same time be a betrayal of the revolution.
Peace and Freedom, and because it is convinced that peace can only be
won by and founded upon the closest and fullest solidarity of peoples in
justice and in liberty, should openly proclaim its sympathy with any
national insurrection, either foreign or native, provided this
insurrection is made in the name of our principles and in the political
as well as the economic interests of the masses, but not with the
ambitious intent of founding a powerful State.
glory, the grandeur, and the power of States. It will be opposed to all
these false and malevolent idols to which millions of human victims have
been sacrificed; the glories of human intelligence, manifested in
science, and universal prosperity founded upon labor, justice, and
liberty.
incontestable right to a free existence and development, but not as a
principle, since every principle should have the power of universality,
while nationality, a fact of exclusionist tendency, separates. The
so-called principle of nationality, such as has been declared in our
time by the governments of France, Russia, Prussia, and even by many
German, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian patriots, is a mere derivative
notion born of the reaction against the spirit of revolution. It is
aristocratic to the point of despising the folk dialects spoken by
illiterate peoples. It implicitly denies the liberty of provinces and
the true autonomy of communes. Its support, in all countries, does not
come from the masses, whose real interests it sacrifices to the
so-called public good, which is always the good of the privileged
classes. It expresses nothing but the alleged historic rights and
ambitions of States. The right of nationality can therefore never be
considered by the League except as a natural consequence of the supreme
principle of liberty; it ceases to be a right as soon as it takes a
stand either against liberty or even outside liberty.
it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the
well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without
regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any
theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That
patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil
patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the
country it claims to exalt and serve. Often, without wishing to be so,
it is a friend of reaction — an enemy of the revolution, i.e., the
emancipation of nations and men. The League can recognize only one
unity, that which is freely constituted by the federation of autonomous
parts within the whole, so that the whole, ceasing to be the negation of
private rights and interests, ceasing to be the graveyard where all
local prosperities are buried, becomes the confirmation and the source
of all these autonomies and all these prosperities. The League will
therefore vigorously attack any religious, political, or economic
organization which is not thoroughly penetrated by this great principle
of freedom; lacking that, there is no intelligence, no justice, no
prosperity, no humanity.
Such, gentlemen of the League for Peace and Freedom, as we see it and as
you no doubt see it, are the developments and the natural consequences
of that great principle of federalism which the Congress of Geneva has
proclaimed. Such are the absolute conditions for peace and for freedom.
Absolute, yes — but are they the only conditions? We do not think so.
The Southern states in the great republican confederation of North
America have been, since the Declaration of Independence of the
republican states, democratic par excellence and federalist to the point
of wanting secession. Nevertheless, they have drawn upon themselves the
condemnation of all friends of freedom and humanity in the world, and
with the iniquitous and dishonorable war they fomented against the
republican states of the North [the Civil War], they nearly overthrew
and destroyed the finest political organization that ever existed in
history. What could have been the cause of so strange an event? Was it a
political cause? NO, it was entirely social. The internal political
organization of the Southern states was, in certain respects, even freer
than that of the Northern states. It was only that in this magnificent
organization of the Southern states there was a black spot, just as
there was a black spot in the republics of antiquity; the freedom of
their citizens was founded upon the forced labor of slaves. This
sufficed to overthrow the entire existence of these states.
Citizens and slaves — such was the antagonism in the ancient world, as
in the slave states of the new world. Citizens and slaves, that is,
forced laborers, slaves not de jure but de facto [not in law but in
fact], such is the antagonism in the modern world. And just as the
ancient states perished through slavery, the modern states will likewise
perish through the proletariat.
It is in vain that we try to console ourselves with the idea that this
is a fictitious rather than a real antagonism, or that it is impossible
to establish a line of demarcation between the owning and the disowned
classes, since these two classes merge through many intermediate
imperceptible degrees. In the world of nature such lines of demarcation
do not exist either; in the ascending scale of life, for instance, it is
impossible to indicate the point at which the vegetable kingdom ends and
the animal kingdom starts, where bestiality ceases and Man begins.
Nevertheless, there is a very real difference between plant and animal,
between animal and Man. In human society likewise, in spite of the
intermediate stages which form imperceptible transitions between one
type of political and social life and another, the difference between
classes is nonetheless strongly marked. Anyone can distinguish the
aristocracy of noble birth from the aristocracy of finance, the upper
bourgeoisie from the petty bourgeoisie, the latter from the proletariat
of factories and cities, just as one can distinguish the great
landowner, the man who lives on his income, from the peasant landowner
who himself tills the soil, or the farmer from the landless agricultural
laborer.
All these varying types of political and social life may nowadays be
reduced to two main categories, diametrically opposed, and natural
enemies to each other: the political classes, i.e. privileged classes
constituting all those whose privilege stems from land and capital or
only from bourgeois education, and the disinherited working classes,
deprived of capital and land and even elementary schooling.
One would have to be a sophist to deny the existence of the abyss which
separates these two classes today. As in the ancient world, our modern
civilization, which contains a comparatively limited minority of
privileged citizens, is based upon the forced labor (forced by hunger)
of the immense majority of the population who are fatally doomed to
ignorance and to brutality.
It is in vain, too, that we would try to persuade ourselves that the
abyss could be bridged by the simple diffusion of light among the
masses. It is well enough to set up schools among the masses. It is well
enough to set up schools for the people. But we should also question
whether the man of the people, feeding his family by the day-to-day
labor of his hands, himself deprived of the most elementary schooling
and of leisure, dulled and brutalized by his toil — we should question
whether this man has the idea, the desire, or even the possibility of
sending his children to school and supporting them during the period of
their education. Would he not need the help of their feeble hands, their
child labor, to provide for all the needs of his family? It would be
sacrifice enough for him to send to school one or two of them, and give
them hardly enough time to learn a little reading and writing and
arithmetic, and allow their hearts and minds to be tainted with the
Christian catechism which is being deliberately and profusely
distributed in the official public schools of all countries — would this
piddling bit of schooling ever succeed in lifting the working masses to
the level of bourgeois intelligence? Would it bridge the gap?
Obviously this vital question of primary schooling and higher education
for the people depends upon the solution of the problem, difficult in
other ways, of radical reform in the present economic condition of the
working classes. Improve working conditions, render to labor what is
justly due to labor, and thereby give the people security, comfort, and
leisure. Then, believe me, they will educate themselves; they will
create a larger, saner, higher civilization than this.
It is also in vain that we might say, with the economists, that an
improvement in the economic situation of the working classes depends
upon the general progress of industry and commerce in each country, and
their complete emancipation from the supervision and protection of the
State. The freedom of industry and of commerce is certainly a great
thing, and one of the essential foundations of the future international
alliance of all the peoples of the world. As we love freedom, all types
of freedom, we should equally love this. On the other hand, however, we
must recognize that so long as the present states exist, and so long as
labor continues to be the slave of property and of capital, this
particular freedom, while it enriches a minimum portion of the
bourgeoisie to the detriment of the immense majority, would produce one
benefit alone; it would further enfeeble and demoralize the small number
of the privileged while increasing the misery, the grievances, and the
just indignation of the working masses, and thereby hasten the hour of
destruction for states.
England, Belgium, France, and Germany are those European countries where
commerce and industry enjoy comparatively the greatest liberty and have
attained the highest degree of development. And it is precisely in these
countries where poverty is felt most cruelly, where the abyss between
the capitalist and the proprietor on the one hand and working classes on
the other seems to have deepened to a degree unknown elsewhere. In
Russia, in the Scandinavian countries, in Italy, in Spain, where
commerce and industry have had but slight development, people seldom die
of hunger, except in cases of extraordinary catastrophe. In England,
death from starvation is a daily occurrence. Nor are those isolated
cases; there are thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands, who
perish. Is it not evident that in the economic conditions now prevailing
in the entire civilized world — the free development of commerce and
industry, the marvelous applications of science to production, even the
machines intended to emancipate the worker by facilitating his toil —
all of these inventions, this progress of which civilized man is justly
proud, far from ameliorating the situation of the working classes, only
worsen it and make it still less endurable?
North America alone is still largely an exception to this rule. Yet far
from disproving the rule, this exception actually serves to confirm it.
If the workers in that country are paid more than those in Europe, and
if no one there dies of hunger, and if, at the same time, the antagonism
between classes hardly exists there; if all its workers are citizens and
if the mass of its citizens truly constitutes one single body politic,
and if a good primary and even secondary education is widespread among
the masses, it should no doubt be largely attributed to that traditional
spirit of freedom which the early colonists brought with them from
England. Heightened, tested, strengthened in the great religious
struggles, the principle of individual independence and of communal and
provincial self-government was still further favored by the rare
circumstance that once it was transplanted into a wilderness, delivered,
so to speak, from the obsessions of the past it could create a new world
— the world of liberty. And liberty is so great a magician, endowed with
so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this
spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to
equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe. But let us not
deceive ourselves: this marvelous progress and this so enviable
prosperity are due in large measure to an important advantage which
America possesses in common with Russia: its immense reaches of fertile
land which even now remain uncultivated for lack of manpower. This great
territorial wealth has been thus far as good as lost for Russia since we
have never had liberty there. It has been otherwise in North America;
offering a freedom which does not exist anywhere else, it attracts every
year hundreds of thousands of energetic, industrious, and intelligent
settlers whom it is in a position to admit because of this wealth. It
thereby keeps poverty away and at the same time staves off the moment
when the social question will arise. A worker who finds no work or is
dissatisfied with the wages which capital offers him can in the last
resort always make his way to the Far West and set about clearing a
patch of land in the wilderness.
Since this possibility is always open as a way out for all the workers
of America, it naturally keeps wages high and affords to each an
independence unknown in Europe. This is an advantage; but there is also
a disadvantage. As the good prices for industrial goods are largely due
to the good wages received by labor, American manufacturers are not in a
position in most cases to compete with the European manufacturers. The
result is that the industry of the Northern states finds it necessary to
impose a protectionist tariff. This, however, first brings about the
creation of a number of artificial industries, and particularly the
oppression and ruination of the nonmanufacturing Southern states, which
drives them to call for secession. Finally, the result is the crowding
together in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and others of
masses of workers who gradually begin to find themselves in a situation
analogous to that of workers in the great manufacturing states of
Europe. And, as a matter of fact, we now see the social question
confronting the Northern states just as it has confronted us a great
deal earlier.
We are thus forced to admit that in our modern world the civilization of
the few is still founded, though not as completely s in the days of
antiquity, upon the forced labor and the comparative barbarism of the
many. It would be unjust to say that: his privileged class is a stranger
to labor. On the contrary, in our time they work hard and the number of
idle people is diminishing appreciably. They are beginning to hold work
in honor; those who are most fortunate realize today that one must work
hard in order to remain at the summit of the present civilization and
even in order to know how to profit by one’s privileges and retain them.
But there is this difference between the work done by the comfortable
classes and that done by the laboring classes: the former is rewarded in
an incomparably greater proportion and affords the privileged the
opportunity for leisure, that ,supreme condition for all human
development, both intellectual and moral — a condition never attained by
the working classes. Also, the work done in the world of the privileged
is almost: exclusively mental work — the work involving imagination,
memory, the thinking process. The work done by millions of proletarians,
on the other hand, is manual work; often, as in all factories, for
instance, it is work that does not even exercise man’s entire muscular
system at one time, but tends to develop one part of the body to the
detriment of all the others, and this labor is generally performed under
conditions harmful to his health and to his harmonious development. The
laborer on the land is in this respect much more fortunate: his nature
is not vitiated by the stifling, often tainted atmosphere of a factory;
it is not deformed by the abnormal development of one of his powers at
the expense of the others; it remains more vigorous, more complete. On
the other hand, his mind is almost always slower, more sluggish, and
much less developed than that of the worker in the factories and in the
cities.
In sum, workers in the crafts, in the factories, and workers on the land
all represent manual labor, as opposed to the privileged representatives
of mental labor. What is the consequence of this division, not a
fictitious but a real one, which lies at the very foundation of the
present political and social situation?
To the privileged representatives of mental work — who, incidentally,
are not called upon in the present organization of society to represent
their class because they may be the most intelligent, but solely because
they were born into the privileged class — to them go all the benefits
as well as all the corruptions of present-day civilization: the wealth,
the luxury, the comfort, the well-being, the sweetness of family life,
the exclusive political liberty with the power to exploit the labor of
millions of workers and to govern them as they please and as profits
them — all the inventions, all the refinements of imagination and
intellect ... and, along with the opportunity for becoming complete men,
all the depravities of a humanity perverted by privilege. As to the
representatives of manual labor, those countless millions of
proletarians or even the small landholders, what is left for them? To
them go misery without end, not even the joys of family life — since the
family soon becomes a burden for the poor man — ignorance, barbarity,
and we might say even an inescapable brutality, with the dubious
consolation that they serve as a pedestal to civilization, to the
liberty and corruption of the few. Despite this, they have preserved a
freshness of the spirit and of the heart. Morally strengthened by labor,
forced though it may be, they have retained a sense of justice of quite
another kind than the justice of lawgivers and codes. Being miserable
themselves, they keenly sympathize with the misery of others; their
common sense has not been corrupted by the sophisms of a doctrinaire
science or by the mendacity of politics — and since they have not yet
abused life, or even used it, they have faith in life.
But what of the objection that this contrast, this gulf between the
small number of the privileged and the vast numbers of the disinherited
has always existed and still exists; just what has changed? It is only
that this gulf used to be filled with the great fog banks of religion,
so that the masses were deceived into thinking there was a common ground
for all. Nowadays, the Great Revolution has begun to sweep the mists
away; the masses, too, are beginning to see the abyss and to ask the
reason why. This is a stupendous realization.
Since the Revolution has confronted the masses with its own gospel, a
revelation not mystical but rational, not of heaven but of earth, not
divine but human — the gospel of the Rights of Man; since it has
proclaimed that all men are equal and equally entitled to liberty and to
a humane life — ever since then, the masses of people in all Europe, in
the entire civilized world, slowly awakening from the slumber in which
Christianity’s incantations had held them enthralled, are beginning to
wonder whether they, too, are not entitled to equality, to liberty, and
to their humanity.
From the moment this question was asked, the people everywhere, led by
their admirable good sense as well as by their instinct, have realized
that the first condition for their real emancipation or, if I may be
permitted to use the term, their humanization, was, above all, a radical
reform of their economic condition. The question of daily bread is for
them the principal question, and rightly so, for, as Aristotle has said:
“Man, in order to think, to feel freely, to become a man, must be free
from worry about his material sustenance.” Furthermore, the bourgeois
who so loudly protest against the materialism of the common people, and
who continually preach to them of abstinence and idealism, know this
very well; they preach by word and not by example.
The second question for the people is that of leisure after labor, a
condition sine qua non for humanity. But bread and leisure can never be
made secure for the masses except through a radical transformation of
society as presently constituted. That is why the Revolution, impelled
by its own logical insistency, has given birth to socialism.
The French Revolution, having proclaimed the right and the duty of each
human individual to become a man, culminated in Babouvism. Babeuf — one
of the last of the high-principled and energetic citizens that the
Revolution created and then assassinated in such great numbers, and who
had the good fortune to have counted men like Buonarotti among his
friends — had brought together, in a singular concept, the political
traditions of France and the very modern ideas of a social revolution.
Disappointed with the failure of the Revolution to bring about a radical
change in society, he sought to save the spirit of this Revolution by
conceiving a political and social system according to which the
republic, the expression of the collective will of the citizens, would
confiscate all individual property and administer it in the interest of
all. Equal portions of such confiscated property would be allotted to
higher education, elementary education, means of subsistence,
entertainment, and each individual, without exception, would be
compelled to perform both muscular and mental labor, each according to
his strength and capacity. Babeuf’s conspiracy failed; he was
guillotined, together with some of his old friends. But his ideal of a
socialist republic did not die with him. It was picked up by his friend
Buonarotti, the arch-conspirator of the century, who transmitted it as a
sacred trust to future generations. And thanks to the secret societies
Buonarotti founded in Belgium and France, communist ideas germinated in
popular imagination. From 1830 to 1848 they found able interpreters in
Cabet and M. Louis Blanc, who established the definitive theory of
revolutionary socialism. Another socialist movement, stemming from the
same revolutionary source, converging upon the same goal though by means
of entirely different methods, a movement which we should like to call
doctrinaire socialism, was created by two eminent men, Saint-Simon and
Fourier. Saint-Simonianism was interpreted, developed, transformed, and
established as a quasi-practical system, as a church, by Le Pere
Enfantin, with many of his friends who have now become financiers and
statesmen, singularly devoted to the Empire. Fourierism found its
commentator in Democratie Pacifique, edited until December by M. Victor
Considerant.
The merit of these two socialist systems, though different in many
respects, lies principally in their profound, scientific, and severe
critique of the present organization of society, whose monstrous
contradictions they have boldly revealed, and also in the very important
fact that they have strongly attacked and subverted Christianity for the
sake of rehabilitating our material existence and human passions, which
were maligned and yet so thoroughly indulged by Christianity’s
priesthood. The Saint Simonists wanted to replace Christianity with a
new religion based upon the mystical cult of the flesh, with a new
hierarchy of priests, new exploiters of the mob by the privilege
inherent in genius, ability, and talent. The Fourierists, who were much
more democratic, and, we may say, more sincerely so, envisioned their
phalansteries as governed and administered by leaders elected by
universal suffrage, where everyone, they thought, would personally find
his own work and his own place in accordance with the nature of his own
feelings.
The defects of Saint-Simonianism are too obvious to need discussion. The
twofold error of the Saint-Simonists consisted, first, in their sincere
belief that though their powers of persuasion and their pacific
propaganda they would succeed in so touching the hearts of the rich that
these would willingly give their surplus wealth to the phalansteries;
and, secondly, in their belief that it was possible, theoretically, a
priori, to construct a social paradise where all future humanity would
come to rest. They had not understood that while we might enunciate the
great principles of humanity’s future development, we should leave it to
the experience of the future to work out the practical realization of
such principles.
In general, regulation was the common passion of all the socialists of
the pre-l848 era, with one exception only. Cabet, Louis Blanc, the
Fourierists, the Saint-Simonists, all were inspired by a passion for
indoctrinating and organizing the future; they all were more or less
authoritarians. The exception is Proudhon.
The son of a peasant, and thus instinctively a hundred times more
revolutionary than all the doctrinaire and bourgeois socialists,
Proudhon armed himself with a critique as profound and penetrating as it
was merciless, in order to destroy their systems. Resisting authority
with liberty, against those state socialists, he boldly proclaimed
himself an anarchist; defying their deism or their pantheism, he had the
courage to call himself simply an atheist or rather, with Auguste Comte,
a positivist.
His own socialism was based upon liberty, both individual and
collective, and on the spontaneous action of free associations obeying
no laws other than the general laws of social economy, already known and
yet to be discovered by social science, free from all governmental
regulation and state protection. This socialism subordinated politics to
the economic, intellectual, and moral interests of society. It
subsequently, by its own logic, culminated in federalism.
Such was the state of social science prior to 1848. The polemics of the
left carried on in the newspapers, circulars, and socialist brochures
brought a mass of new ideas to the working classes. They were saturated
with this material and, when the 1848 revolution broke out, the power of
socialism became manifest.
Socialism, we have said, was the latest offspring of the Great
Revolution; but before producing it, the revolution had already brought
forth a more direct heir, its oldest, the beloved child of Robespierre
and the followers of Saint-Just — pure republicanism, without any
admixture of socialist ideas, resuscitated from antiquity and inspired
by the heroic traditions of the great citizens of Greece and Rome. As it
was far less humanitarian than socialism, it hardly knew man, and
recognized the citizen only. And while socialism seeks to found a
republic of men, all that republicanism wants is a republic of citizens,
even though the citizens — as in the constitutions which necessarily
succeeded the constitution of 1793 in consequence of that first
constitution’s deliberately ignoring the social question — even though
the citizens, I say, by virtue of being active citizens, to borrow an
expression from the Constituent Assembly, were to base their civic
privilege upon the exploitation of the labor of passive citizens.
Besides, the political republican is not at all egotistic in his own
behalf, or at least is not supposed to be so; he must be an egotist in
behalf of his fatherland which he must value above himself, above all
other individuals, all nations, all humanity. Consequently, he will
always ignore international justice; in all debates, whether his country
be right or wrong, he will always give it first place. He will want it
always to dominate and to crush all the foreign nations by its power and
glory. Through natural inclination he will become fond of conquest, in
spite of the fact that the experience of centuries may have proved to
him that military triumphs must inevitably lead to Caesarism.
The socialist republican detests the grandeur, the power, and the
military glory of the State. He sets liberty and the general welfare
above them. A federalist in the internal affairs of the country, he
desires an international confederation, first of all in the spirit of
justice, and second because he is convinced that the economic and social
revolution, transcending all the artificial and pernicious barriers
between states, can only be brought about, in part at least, by the
solidarity in action, if not of all, then at least of the majority of
the nations constituting the civilized world today, so that sooner or
later all the nations must join together.
The strictly political republican is a stoic; he recognizes no rights
for himself but only duties; or, as in Mazzini’s republic, he claims one
right only for himself, that of eternal devotion to his country, of
living only to serve it, and of joyfully sacrificing himself and even
dying for it, as in the song Dumas dedicated to the Girondins: “To die
for one’s country is the finest, the most enviable fate.”
The socialist, on the contrary, insists upon his positive rights to life
and to all of its intellectual, moral, and physical joys. He loves life,
and he wants to enjoy it in all its abundance. Since his convictions are
part of himself, and his duties to society are indissolubly linked with
his rights, he will, in order to remain faithful to both, manage to live
in accordance with justice like Proudhon and, if necessary, die like
Babeuf. But he will never say that the life of humanity should be a
sacrifice or that death is the sweetest fate.
Liberty, to the political republican, is an empty word; it is the
liberty of a willing slave, a devoted victim of the State. Being always
ready to sacrifice his own liberty, he will willingly sacrifice the
liberty of others. Political republicanism, therefore, necessarily leads
to despotism. For the socialist republican, liberty linked with the
general welfare, producing a humanity of all through the humanity of
each, is everything, while the State, in his eyes, is a mere instrument,
a servant of his well-being and of everyone’s liberty. The socialist is
distinguished from the bourgeois by justice, since he demands for
himself nothing but the real fruit of his own labor. He is distinguished
from the strict republican by his frank and human egotism; he lives for
himself, openly and without fine-sounding phrases. He knows that in so
living his life, in accordance with justice, he serves the entire
society, and, in so serving it, he also finds his own welfare. The
republican is rigid; often, in consequence of his patriotism, he is
cruel, as the priest is often made cruel by his religion. The socialist
is natural; he is moderately patriotic, but nevertheless always very
human. In a word, between the political republican and the socialist
republican there is an abyss; the one, as a quasi-religious phenomenon,
belongs to the past; the other, whether positivist or atheist, belongs
to the future.
The natural antagonism of these two kinds of republican came plainly
into view in 1848. From the very first hours of the Revolution, they no
longer understood each other; their ideals, all their instincts, drew
them in diametrically opposite directions. The entire period from
February to June was spent in skirmishes which, carrying the civil war
into the camp of the revolutionaries and paralyzing their forces,
naturally strengthened the already formidable coalition of all kinds of
reactionaries; fear soon welded them into one single party. In June the
republicans, in their turn, formed a coalition with the reaction in
order to crush the socialists. They thought they had won a victory, yet
they pushed their beloved republic down into the abyss. General
Cavaignac, the flagbearer of the reaction, was the precursor of Napoleon
III. Everybody realized this at the time, if not in France then
certainly everywhere else, for this disastrous victory of the
republicans against the workers of Paris was celebrated as a great
triumph in all the courts of Europe, and the officers of the Prussian
Guards, led by their generals, hastened to convey their fraternal
congratulations to General Cavaignac.
Terrified of the red phantom, the bourgeoisie of Europe permitted itself
to fall into absolute serfdom. BY nature critical and liberal, the
middle class is not fond of the military, but, facing the threatening
dangers of a popular emancipation, it chose militarism. Having
sacrificed its dignity and all its glorious conquests of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, it fancied that it had at least the
peace and tranquillity necessary for the success of its commercial and
industrial transactions. “We are sacrificing our liberty to you,” it
seemed to be saying to the military powers who again rose upon the ruins
of this third revolution. “Let us, in return, peacefully exploit the
labor of the masses, and protect us against their demands, which may
appear theoretically legitimate but which are detestable so far as our
interests are concerned.” The military, in turn, promised the
bourgeoisie everything; they even kept their word. Why, then, is the
bourgeoisie, the entire bourgeoisie of Europe, generally discontented
today?
The bourgeoisie had not reckoned with the fact that a military regime is
very costly, that through its internal organization alone it paralyzes,
it upsets, it ruins nations, and moreover, obeying its own intrinsic and
inescapable logic, it has never failed to bring on war; dynastic wars,
wars of honor, wars of conquest or wars of national frontiers, wars of
equilibrium — destruction and unending absorption of states by other
states, rivers of human blood, a fire-ravaged countryside, ruined
cities, the devastation of entire provinces — all this for the sake of
satisfying the ambitions of princes and their favorites, to enrich them
to occupy territories, to discipline populations, and to fill the pages
of history.
Now the bourgeoisie understands these things, and that is why it is
dissatisfied with the military regime it has helped so much to create.
It is indeed weary of these drawbacks, but what is it going to put in
the place of things as they are?
Constitutional monarchy has seen its day, and, anyway, it has never
prospered too well on the European continent. Even in England, that
historic cradle of modern institutionalism, battered by the rising
democracy it is shaken, it totters, and will soon be unable to contain
the gathering surge of popular passions and demands.
A republic? What kind of republic? Is it to be political only, or
democratic and social? Are the people still socialist? Yes, more than
ever.
What succumbed in June 1848 was not socialism in general. It was only
state socialism, authoritarian and regimented socialism, the kind that
had believed and hoped that the State would fully satisfy the needs and
the legitimate aspirations of the working classes, and that the State,
armed with its omnipotence, would and could inaugurate a new social
order. Hence it was not socialism that died in June; it was rather the
State which declared its bankruptcy toward socialism and, proclaiming
itself incapable of paying its debt to socialism, sought the quickest
way out by killing its creditor. It did not succeed in killing socialism
but it did kill the faith that socialism had placed in it. It also, at
the same time, annihilated all the theories of authoritarian or
doctrinaire socialism, some of which, like L’Icarie by Cabet, and like
L’Organisation du Travail by Louis Blanc, had advised the people to rely
in all things upon the State — while others demonstrated their
worthlessness through a series of ridiculous experiments. Even
Proudhon’s bank, which could have prospered in happier circumstances,
was crushed by the strictures and the general hostility of the
bourgeoisie.
Socialism lost this first battle for a very simple reason. Although it
was rich in instincts and in negative theoretical ideas, which gave it
full justification in its fight against privilege, it lacked the
necessary positive and practical ideas for erecting a new system upon
the ruins of the bourgeois order, the system of popular justice. The
workers who fought in June 1848 for the emancipation of the people were
united by instinct, not by ideas — and such confused ideas as they did
possess formed a tower of Babel, a chaos, which could produce nothing.
Such was the main cause of their defeat. Must we, for this reason, hold
in doubt the future itself, and the present strength of socialism?
Christianity, which had set as its goal the creation of the kingdom of
justice in heaven, needed several centuries to triumph in Europe. Is
there any cause for surprise if socialism, which has set itself a more
difficult problem, that of creating the kingdom of justice on earth, has
not triumphed within a few years?
Is it necessary to prove that socialism is not dead? We need only see
what is going on all over Europe today. Behind all the diplomatic
gossip, behind the noises of war which have filled Europe since 1852,
what serious question is facing all the countries if it is not the
social question? It alone is the great unknown; everyone senses its
coming, everyone trembles at the thought, no one dares speak of it — but
it speaks for itself, and in an ever louder voice. The cooperative
associations of the workers, these mutual aid banks and labor credit
banks, these trade unions, and this international league of workers in
all the countries — all this rising movement of workers in England, in
France, in Belgium, in Germany, in Italy, and in Switzerland — does it
not prove that they have not in any way given up their goal, nor lost
faith in their coming emancipation? Does it not prove that they have
also understood that in order to hasten the hour of their deliverance
they should not rely on the States, nor on the more or less hypocritical
assistance of the privileged classes, but rather upon themselves and
their independent, completely spontaneous associations?
In most of the countries of Europe, this movement, which, in appearance
at least, is alien to politics, still preserves an exclusively economic
and, so to say, private character. But in England it has already placed
itself squarely in the stormy domain of politics. Having organized
itself in a formidable association, The Reform League, it has already
won a great victory against the politically organized privilege of the
aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie. The Reform League, with a
characteristically British patience and practical tenacity, has outlined
a plan for its campaign; it is not too straitlaced about anything, it is
not easily frightened, it will not be stopped by any obstacle. “Within
ten years at most,” they say, “and even against the greatest odds, we
shall have universal suffrage, and then ... then we will make the social
revolution!”
In France, as in Germany, as socialism quietly proceeded along the road
of private economic associations, it has already achieved so high a
degree of power among the working classes that Napoleon III on the one
side and Count Bismarck on the other are beginning to seek an alliance
with it. In Italy and in Spain, after the deplorable fiasco of all their
political parties, and in the face of the terrible misery into which
both countries are plunged, all other problems will soon be absorbed in
the economic and social question. As for Russia and Poland, is there
really any other question facing these countries? It is this question
which has just extinguished the last hopes of the old, noble, historic
Poland; it is this question which is threatening and which will destroy
the pestiferous Empire of All the Russias, now tottering to its fall.
Even in America, has not socialism been made manifest in the proposition
by a man of eminence, Mr. Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts, to
distribute lands to the emancipated Negroes of the Southern states?
You can very well see, then, that socialism is everywhere, and that in
spite of its June defeat it has by force of underground work slowly
infiltrated the political life of all countries, and succeeded to the
point of being felt everywhere as the latent force of the century.
Another few years and it will reveal itself as an active, formidable
power.
With very few exceptions, almost all the peoples of Europe, some even
unfamiliar with the term “socialism,” are socialist today. They know no
other banner but that which proclaims their economic emancipation ahead
of all else; they would a thousand times rather renounce any question
but that. Hence it is only through socialism that they can be drawn into
politics, a good politics.
Is it not enough to say, gentlemen, that we may not exclude socialism
from our program, and that we could not leave it out without dooming all
our work to impotence? By our program, by declaring ourselves federalist
republicans, we have shown ourselves to be revolutionary enough to
alienate a good part of the bourgeoisie, all those who speculate upon
the misery and the misfortunes of the masses and who even find something
to gain in the great catastrophes which beset the nations more than ever
today. If we set aside this busy, bustling, intriguing, speculating
section of the bourgeoisie, we shall still keep the majority of decent,
industrious bourgeois, who occasionally do some harm by necessity rather
than willfully or by preference, and who would want nothing better than
to be delivered from this fatal necessity, which places them in a state
of permanent hostility toward the working masses and, at the same time,
ruins them. We might truthfully say that the petty bourgeoisie, small
business, and small industry are now beginning to suffer almost as much
as the working classes, and if things go on at the same rate, this
respectable bourgeois majority could well, through its economic
position, soon merge with the proletariat. It is being destroyed and
pushed downward into the abyss by big commerce, big industry, and
especially by large-scale, unscrupulous speculators. The position of the
petty bourgeoisie, therefore, is growing more and more revolutionary;
its ideas, which for so long a time had been reactionary, have been
clarified through these disastrous experiences and must necessarily take
the opposite course. The more intelligent among them are beginning to
realize that for the decent bourgeoisie the only salvation lies in an
alliance with the people — and that the social question is as important
to them, and in the same way, as to the people.
This progressive change in the thinking of the petty bourgeoisie in
Europe is a fact as cheering as it is incontestable. But we should be
under no illusion; the initiative for the new development will not
belong to the bourgeoisie but to the people — in the West, to the
workers in the factories and the cities; in our country, in Russia, in
Poland, and in most of the Slav countries, to the peasants. The petty
bourgeoisie has grown too fearful, too timid, too skeptical to take any
initiative alone. It will let itself be drawn in, but it will not draw
in anyone, for while it is poor in ideas, it also lacks the faith and
the passion. This passion, which annihilates obstacles and creates new
worlds, is to be found in the people only. Therefore, the initiative for
the new movement will unquestionably belong to the people. And are we
going to repudiate the people? Are we going to stop talking about
socialism, which is the new religion of the people?
But socialism, they tell us, shows an inclination to ally itself with
Caesarism. In the first place, this is a calumny; it is Caesarism, on
the contrary, which, on seeing the menacing power of socialism rising on
the horizon, solicits its favors in order to exploit it in its own way.
But is not this still another reason for us to work for socialism, in
order to prevent this monstrous alliance, which would without doubt be
the greatest misfortune that could threaten the liberty of the world?
We should work for it even apart from all practical considerations,
because socialism is justice. When we speak of justice we do not thereby
mean the justice which is imparted to us in legal codes and by Roman
law, founded for the most part on acts of force and violence consecrated
by time and by the blessings of some church, Christian or pagan and, as
such, accepted as an absolute, the rest being nothing but the logical
consequence of the same. I speak of that justice which is based solely
upon human conscience, the justice which you will rediscover deep in the
conscience of every man, even in the conscience of the child, and which
translates itself into simple equality.
This justice, which is so universal but which nevertheless, owing to the
encroachments of force and to the influence of religion, has never as
yet prevailed in the world of politics, of law, or of economics, should
serve as a basis for the new world. Without it there is no liberty, no
republic, no prosperity, no peace! It should therefore preside at all
our resolutions in order that we may effectively cooperate in
establishing peace.
This justice bids us take into our hands the people’s cause, so
miserably maltreated until now, and to demand in its behalf economic and
social emancipation, together with political liberty.
We do not propose to you, gentlemen, one or another socialist system.
What we ask of you is to proclaim once more that great principle of the
French Revolution: that every man is entitled to the material and moral
means for the development of his complete humanity — a principle which,
we believe, translates itself into the following mandate:
To organize society in such a manner that every individual endowed with
life, man or woman, may and almost equal means for the development of
his various faculties and for their utilization in his labor; to
organize a society which, while it makes it impossible for any
individual whatsoever to exploit the labor of others, will not allow
anyone to share in the enjoyment of social wealth, always produced by
labor only, unless he has himself contributed to its creation with his
own labor.
The complete solution of this problem will no doubt be the work of
centuries. But history has set the problem before us, and we can now no
longer evade it if we are not to resign ourselves to total impotence.
We hasten to add that we energetically reject any attempt at a social
organization devoid of the most complete liberty for individuals as well
as associations, and one that would call for the establishment of a
ruling authority of any nature whatsoever, and that, in the name of this
liberty — which we recognize as the only basis for, and the only
legitimate creator of, any organization, economic or political — we
shall always protest against anything that may in any way resemble
communism or state socialism.
The only thing we believe the State can and should do is to change the
law of inheritance, gradually at first, until it is entirely abolished
as soon as possible. Since the right of inheritance is a purely
arbitrary creation of the State, and one of the essential conditions for
the very existence of the authoritarian and divinely sanctioned State,
it can and must be abolished by liberty — which again means that the
State itself must accomplish its own dissolution in a society freely
organized in accordance with justice. This right must necessarily be
abolished, we believe, for as long as inheritance is in effect, there
will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of
individuals but the artificial inequality of classes — and this will
necessarily always lead to the hereditary inequality of the development
and cultivation of mental faculties, and continue to be the source and
the consecration of all political and social inequalities. Equality from
the moment life begins — insofar as this equality depends on the
economic and political organization of society, and in order that
everyone, in accordance with his own natural capacities, may become the
heir and the product of his own labor — this is the problem which
justice sets before us. We believe that the public funds for the
education and elementary schooling of all children of both sexes, as
well as their maintenance from birth until they come of age, should be
the sole inheritors of all the deceased. As Slavs and Russians, we may
add that for us the social idea, based upon the general and traditional
instinct of our populations, is that the earth, the property of all the
people, should be owned only by those who cultivate it with the labor of
their own hands.
We are convinced that this principle is a just one, that it is an
essential and indispensable condition for any serious social reform, and
hence that Western Europe, too, cannot fail to accept and recognize it,
in spite of all the difficulties its realization may encounter in
certain countries. In France, for instance, the majority of the peasants
already own their land; most of these same peasants, however, will soon
come to own nothing, because of the parceling out which is the
inevitable result of the politico-economic system now prevailing in that
country. We are making no proposal on this point, and indeed we refrain,
in general, from making any proposals, dealing with any particular
problem of social science or politics. We are convinced that all these
questions should be seriously and thoroughly discussed in our journal.
We shall today confine ourselves to proposing that you make the
following declaration:
As we are convinced that the real attainment of liberty, of justice, and
of peace in the world will be impossible so long as the immense majority
of the populations are dispossessed of property, deprived of education
and condemned to political and social nonbeing and a de facto if not a
de jure slavery, through their state of misery as well as their need to
labor without rest or leisure, in producing all the wealth in which the
world is glorying today, and receiving in return but a small portion
hardly sufficient for their daily bread;
As we are convinced that for all these populations, hitherto so terribly
maltreated through the centuries, the question of bread is the question
of intellectual emancipation, of liberty, and of humanity;
As we are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege,
injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality;
Now therefore, the League highly proclaims the need for a radical social
and economic reform, whose aim shall be the deliverance of the people’s
labor from the yoke of capital and property, upon a foundation of the
strictest justice — not juridical, not theological, not metaphysical,
but simply human justice, of positive science and the most absolute
liberty.
The League at the same time decides that its journal will freely open
its columns to all serious discussions of economic and social questions,
provided they are sincerely inspired by a desire for the greatest
popular emancipation, both on the material and the political and
intellectual levels.
... We have said that man is not only the most individualistic being on
earth — he is also the most social. It was a great mistake on the part
of Jean Jacques Rousseau to have thought that primitive society was
established through a free agreement among savages. But Jean Jacques is
not the only one to have said this. The majority of jurists and modern
publicists, either of the school of Kant or any other individualist and
liberal school, those who do not accept the idea of a society founded
upon the divine right of the theologians nor of a society determined by
the Hegelian school as a more or less mystical realization of objective
morality, nor of the naturalists’ concept of a primitive animal society,
all accept, nolens volens, and for lack of any other basis, the tacit
agreement or contract as their starting point.
According to the theory of the social contract primitive men enjoying
absolute liberty only in isolation are antisocial by nature. When forced
to associate they destroy each other’s freedom. If this struggle is
unchecked it can lead to mutual extermination. In order not to destroy
each other completely, they conclude a contract, formal or tacit,
whereby they surrender some of their freedom to assure the rest. This
contract becomes the foundation of society, or rather of the State, for
we must point out that in this theory there is no place for society;
only the State exists, or rather society is completely absorbed by the
State.
Society is the natural mode of existence of the human collectivity,
independent of any contract. It governs itself through the customs or
the traditional habits, but never by laws. It progresses slowly, under
the impulsion it receives from individual initiatives and not through
the thinking or the will of the lawgiver. There are a good many laws
which govern it without its being aware of them, but these are natural
laws, inherent in the body social, just as physical laws are inherent in
material bodies. Most of these laws remain unknown to this day;
nevertheless, they have governed human society ever since its birth,
independent of the thinking and the will of the men composing the
society. Hence they should not be confused with the political and
juridical laws proclaimed by some legislative power, laws that are
supposed to be the logical sequelae of the first contract consciously
formed by men.
The state is in no wise an immediate product of nature. Unlike society,
it does not precede the awakening of reason in men. The liberals say
that the first state was created by the free and rational will of men;
the men of the right consider it the work of God. In either case it
dominates society and tends to absorb it completely.
One might rejoin that the State, representing as it does the public
welfare or the common interest of all, curtails a part of the liberty of
each only for the sake of assuring to him all the remainder. But this
remainder may be a form of security; it is never liberty. Liberty is
indivisible; one cannot curtail a part of it without killing all of it.
This little part you are curtailing is the very essence of my liberty;
it is all of it. Through a natural, necessary, and irresistible
movement, all of my liberty is concentrated precisely in the part, small
as it may be, which you curtail. It is the story of Bluebeard’s wife,
who had an entire palace at her disposal, with full and complete liberty
to enter everywhere, to see and to touch everything, except for one
dreadful little chamber which her terrible husband’s sovereign will had
forbidden her to open on pain of death. Well, she turned away from all
the splendors of the palace, and her entire being concentrated on the
dreadful little chamber. She opened that forbidden door, for good
reason, since her liberty depended on her doing so, while the
prohibition to enter was a flagrant violation of precisely that liberty.
It is also the story of Adam and Eve’s fall. The prohibition to taste
the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for no other
reason than that such was the will of the Lord, was an act of atrocious
despotism on the part of the good Lord. Had our first parents obeyed it,
the entire human race would have remained plunged in the most
humiliating slavery. Their disobedience has emancipated and saved us.
Theirs, in the language of mythology, was the first act of human
liberty.
But, one might say, could the State, the democratic State, based upon
the free suffrage of all its citizens, be the negation of their liberty?
And why not? That would depend entirely on the mission and the power
that the citizens surrendered to the State. A republican State, based
upon universal suffrage, could be very despotic, more despotic even than
the monarchical State, if, under the pretext of representing everybody’s
will, it were to bring down the weight of its collective power upon the
will and the free movement of each of its members.
However, suppose one were to say that the State does not restrain the
liberty of its members except when it tends toward injustice or evil. It
prevents its members from killing each other, plundering each other,
insulting each other, and in general from hurting each other, while it
leaves them full liberty to do good. This brings us back to the story of
Bluebeard’s wife, or the story of the forbidden fruit: what is good?
what is evil?
From the standpoint of the system we have under examination, the
distinction between good and evil did not exist before the conclusion of
the contract, when each individual stayed deep in the isolation of his
liberty or of his absolute rights, having no consideration for his
fellowmen except those dictated by his relative weakness or strength;
that is, his own prudence and self-interest. At that time, still
following the same theory, egotism was the supreme law, the only right.
The good was determined by success, failure was the only evil, and
justice was merely the consecration of the fait accompli, no matter how
horrible, how cruel or infamous, exactly as things are now in the
political morality which prevails in Europe today.
The distinction between good and evil, according to this system,
commences only with the conclusion of the social contract. Thereafter,
what was recognized as constituting the common interest was proclaimed
as good, and all that was contrary to it as evil. The contracting
members, on becoming citizens, and bound by a more or less solemn
undertaking, thereby assumed an obligation: to subordinate their private
interests to the common good, to an interest inseparable from all
others. Their own rights were separated from the public right, the sole
representative of which, the State, was thereby invested with the power
to repress all illegal revolts of the individual, but also with the
obligation to protect each of its members in the exercise of his rights
insofar as these were not contrary to the common right.
We shall now examine what the State, thus constituted, should be in
relation to other states, its peers, as well as in relation to its own
subject populations. This examination appears to us all the more
interesting and useful because the State, as it is here defined, is
precisely the modern State insofar as it has separated itself from the
religious idea — the secular or atheist State proclaimed by modern
publicists. Let us see, then: of what does its morality consist? It is
the modern State, we have said, at the moment when it has freed itself
from the yoke of the Church, and when it has, consequently, shaken off
the yoke of the universal or cosmopolitan morality of the Christian
religion; at the moment when it has not yet been penetrated by the
humanitarian morality or idea, which, by the way, it could never do
without destroying itself; for, in its separate existence and isolated
concentration, it would be too narrow to embrace, to contain the
interests and therefore the morality of all mankind.
Modern states have reached precisely this point. Christianity serves
them only as a pretext or a phrase or as a means of deceiving the idle
mob, for they pursue goals which have nothing to do with religious
sentiments. The great statesmen of our days, the Palmerstons, the
Muravievs, the Cavours, the Bismarcks, the Napoleons, had a good laugh
when people took their religious pronouncements seriously. They laughed
harder when people attributed humanitarian sentiments, considerations,
and intentions to them, but they never made the mistake of treating
these ideas in public as so much nonsense. Just what remains to
constitute their morality? The interest of the State, and nothing else.
From this point of view, which, incidentally, with very few exceptions,
has been that of the statesmen, the strong men of all times and of all
countries — from this point of view, I say, whatever conduces to the
preservation, the grandeur and the power of the State, no matter how
sacrilegious or morally revolting it may seem, that is the good. And
conversely, whatever opposes the State’s interests, no matter how holy
or just otherwise, that is evil. Such is the secular morality and
practice of every State.
It is the same with the State founded upon the theory of the social
contract. According to this principle, the good and the just commence
only with the contract; they are, in fact, nothing but the very contents
and the purpose of the contract; that is, the common interest and the
public right of all the individuals who have formed the contract among
themselves, with the exclusion of all those who remain outside the
contract. It is, consequently, nothing but the greatest satisfaction
given to the collective egotism of a special and restricted association,
which, being founded upon the partial sacrifice of the individual
egotism of each of its members, rejects from its midst, as strangers and
natural enemies, the immense majority of the human species, whether or
not it may be organized into analogous associations.
The existence of one sovereign, exclusionary State necessarily supposes
the existence and, if need be, provokes the formation of other such
States, since it is quite natural that individuals who find themselves
outside it and are threatened by it in their existence and in their
liberty, should, in their turn, associate themselves against it. We thus
have humanity divided into an indefinite number of foreign states, all
hostile and threatened by each other. There is no common right, no
social contract of any kind between them; otherwise they would cease to
be independent states and become the federated members of one great
state. But unless this great state were to embrace all of humanity, it
would be confronted with other great states, each federated within, each
maintaining the same posture of inevitable hostility.
War would still remain the supreme law, an unavoidable condition of
human survival.
Every state, federated or not, would therefore seek to become the most
powerful. It must devour lest it be devoured, conquer lest it be
conquered, enslave lest it be enslaved, since two powers, similar and
yet alien to each other, could not coexist without mutual destruction.
The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the
most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity
of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only
for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.
It protects its own citizens only; it recognizes human rights, humanity,
civilization within its own confines alone. Since it recognizes no
rights outside itself, it logically arrogates to itself the right to
exercise the most ferocious inhumanity toward all foreign populations,
which it can plunder, exterminate, or enslave at will. If it does show
itself generous and humane toward them, it is never through a sense of
duty, for it has no duties except to itself in the first place, and then
to those of its members who have freely formed it, who freely continue
to constitute it or even, as always happens in the long run, those who
have become its subjects. As there is no international law in existence,
and as it could never exist in a meaningful and realistic way without
undermining to its foundations the very principle of the absolute
sovereignty of the State, the State can have no duties toward foreign
populations. Hence, if it treats a conquered people in a humane fashion,
if it plunders or exterminates it halfway only, if it does not reduce it
to the lowest degree of slavery, this may be a political act inspired by
prudence, or even by pure magnanimity, but it is never done from a sense
of duty, for the State has an absolute right to dispose of a conquered
people at will.
This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of
the State is, from the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its
greatest virtue. It bears the name patriotism, and it constitutes the
entire transcendent morality of the State. We call it transcendent
morality because it usually goes beyond the level of human morality and
justice, either of the community or of the private individual, and by
that same token often finds itself in contradiction with these. Thus, to
offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave
one’s fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on
the other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are
done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the
extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue. And
this virtue, this duty, are obligatory for each patriotic citizen;
everyone is supposed to exercise them not against foreigners only but
against one’s own fellow citizens, members or subjects of the State like
himself, whenever the welfare of the State demands it.
This explains why, since the birth of the State, the world of politics
has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality
and brigandage, brigandage and rascality which, by the way, are held in
high esteem, since they are sanctified by patriotism, by the
transcendent morality and the supreme interest of the State. This
explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a
series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present,
of all times and all countries — statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and
warriors — if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human
justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to
hard labor or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege,
or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery,
no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily
being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other
pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible:
“for reasons of state.”
These are truly terrible words, for they have corrupted and dishonored,
within official ranks and in society’s ruling classes, more men than has
even Christianity itself. No sooner are these words uttered than all
grows silent, and everything ceases; honesty, honor, justice, right,
compassion itself ceases, and with it logic and good sense. Black turns
white, and white turns black. The lowest human acts, the basest
felonies, the most atrocious crimes become meritorious acts.
The great Italian political philosopher Machiavelli was the first to use
these words, or at least the first to give them their true meaning and
the immense popularity they still enjoy among our rulers today. A
realistic and positive thinker if there ever was one, he was the first
to understand that the great and powerful states could be founded and
maintained by crime alone — by many great crimes, and by a radical
contempt for all that goes under the name of honesty. He has written,
explained, and proven these facts with terrifying frankness. And, since
the idea of humanity was entirely unknown in his time; since the idea of
fraternity — not human but religious — as preached by the Catholic
Church, was at that time, as it always has been, nothing but a shocking
irony, belied at every step by the Church’s own actions; since in his
time no one even suspected that there was such a thing as popular right,
since the people had always been considered an inert and inept mass, the
flesh of the State to be molded and exploited at will, pledged to
eternal obedience; since there was absolutely nothing in his time, in
Italy or elsewhere, except for the State — Machiavelli concluded from
these facts, with a good deal of logic, that the State was the supreme
goal of all human existence, that it must be served at any cost and
that, since the interest of the State prevailed over everything else, a
good patriot should not recoil from any crime in order to serve it. He
advocates crime, he exhorts to crime, and makes it the sine qua non of
political intelligence as well as of true patriotism. Whether the State
bear the name of a monarchy or of a republic, crime will always be
necessary for its preservation and its triumph. The State will doubtless
change its direction and its object, but its nature will remain the
same: always the energetic, permanent violation of justice, compassion,
and honesty, for the welfare of the State.
Yes, Machiavelli is right. We can no longer doubt it after an experience
of three and a half centuries added to his own experience. Yes, so all
history tells us: while the small states are virtuous only because of
their weakness, the powerful states sustain themselves by crime alone.
But our conclusion will be entirely different from his, for a very
simple reason. We are the children of the Revolution, and from it we
have inherited the religion of humanity, which we must found upon the
ruins of the religion of divinity. We believe in the rights of man, in
the dignity and the necessary emancipation of the human species. We
believe in human liberty and human fraternity founded upon justice. In a
word, we believe in the triumph of humanity upon the earth. But this
triumph, which we summon with all our longing, which we want to hasten
with all our united efforts — since it is by its very nature the
negation of the crime which is intrinsically the negation of humanity —
this triumph cannot be achieved until crime ceases to be what it now is
more or less everywhere today, the real basis of the political existence
of the nations absorbed and dominated by the ideas of the State. And
since it is now proven that no state could exist without committing
crimes, or at least without contemplating and planning them, even when
its impotence should prevent it from perpetrating crimes, we today
conclude in favor of the absolute need of destroying the states. Or, if
it is so decided, their radical and complete transformation so that,
ceasing to be powers centralized and organized from the top down, by
violence or by authority of some principle, they may recognize — with
absolute liberty for all the parties to unite or not to unite, and with
liberty for each of these always to leave a union even when freely
entered into — from the bottom up, according to the real needs and the
natural tendencies of the parties, through the free federation of
individuals, associations, communes, districts, provinces, and nations
within humanity.
Such are the conclusions to which we are inevitably led by an
examination of the external relations which the so-called free states
maintain with other states. Let us now examine the relations maintained
by the State founded upon the free contract arrived at among its own
citizens or subjects.
We have already observed that by excluding the immense majority of the
human species from its midst, by keeping this majority outside the
reciprocal engagements and duties of morality, of justice, and of right,
the State denies humanity and, using that sonorous word patriotism,
imposes injustice and cruelty as a supreme duty upon all its subjects.
It restricts, it mutilates, it kills humanity in them, so that by
ceasing to be men, they may be solely citizens — or rather, and more
specifically, that through the historic connection and succession of
facts, they may never rise above the citizen to the height of being man.
We have also seen that every state, under pain of destruction and
fearing to be devoured by its neighbor states, must reach out toward
omnipotence, and, having become powerful, must conquer. Who speaks of
conquest speaks of peoples conquered, subjugated, reduced to slavery in
whatever form or denomination. Slavery, therefore, is the necessary
consequence of the very existence of the State.
Slavery may change its form or its name — its essence remains the same.
Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be
forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on
someone else’s work. In antiquity, just as in Asia and in Africa today,
as well as even in a part of America, slaves were, in all honesty,
called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of serfs: nowadays
they are called wage earners. The position of this latter group has a
great deal more dignity attached to it, and it is less hard than that of
slaves, but they are nonetheless forced, by hunger as well as by
political and social institutions, to maintain other people in complete
or relative idleness, through their own exceedingly hard labor.
Consequently they are slaves. And in general, no state, ancient or
modern, has ever managed or will ever manage to get along without the
forced labor of the masses, either wage earners or slaves, as a
principal and absolutely necessary foundation for the leisure, the
liberty, and the civilization of the political class: the citizens. On
this point, not even the United States of North America can as yet be an
exception.
Such are the internal conditions that necessarily result for the State
from its objective stance, that is, its natural, permanent, and
inevitable hostility toward all the other states. Let us now see the
conditions resulting directly for the State’s citizens from that free
contract by which they supposedly constituted themselves into a State.
The State not only has the mission of guaranteeing the safety of its
members against any attack coming from without; it must also defend them
within its own borders, some of them against the others, and each of
them against himself. For the State — and this is most deeply
characteristic of it, of every state, as of every theology — presupposes
man to be essentially evil and wicked. In the State we are now
examining, the good, as we have seen, commences only with the conclusion
of the social contract and, consequently, is merely the product and very
content of this contract. The good is not the product of liberty. On the
contrary, so long as men remain isolated in their absolute
individuality, enjoying their full natural liberty to which they
recognize no limits but those of fact, not of law, they follow one law
only, that of their natural egotism. They offend, maltreat, and rob each
other; they obstruct and devour each other, each to the extent of his
intelligence, his cunning, and his material resources, doing just as the
states do to one another. BY this reasoning, human liberty produces not
good but evil; man is by nature evil. How did he become evil? That is
for theology to explain. The fact is that the Church, at its birth,
finds man already evil, and undertakes to make him good, that is, to
transform the natural man into the citizen.
To this one may rejoin that, since the State is the product of a
contract freely concluded by men, and since the good is the product of
the State, it follows that the good is the product of liberty! Such a
conclusion would not be right at all. The State itself, by this
reasoning, is not the product of liberty; it is, on the contrary, the
product of the voluntary sacrifice and negation of liberty. Natural men,
completely free from the sense of right but exposed, in fact, to all the
dangers which threaten their security at every moment, in order to
assure and safeguard this security, sacrifice, or renounce more or less
of their own liberty, and, to the extent that they have sacrificed
liberty for security and have thus become citizens, they become the
slaves of the State. We are therefore right in affirming that, from the
viewpoint of the State, the good is born not of liberty but rather of
the negation of liberty.
Is it not remarkable to find so close a correspondence between theology,
that science of the Church, and politics, that science of the State; to
find this concurrence of two orders of ideas and of realities, outwardly
so opposed, nevertheless holding the same conviction: that human liberty
must be destroyed if men are to be moral, if they are to be transformed
into saints (for the Church) or into virtuous citizens (for the State)?
Yet we are not at all surprised by this peculiar harmony, since we are
convinced, and shall try to prove, that politics and theology are two
sisters issuing from the same source and pursuing the same ends under
different names; and that every state is a terrestrial church, just as
every church, with its own heaven, the dwelling place of the blessed and
of the immortal God, is but a celestial state.
Thus the State, like the Church, starts out with this fundamental
supposition, that men are basically evil, and that, if delivered up to
their natural liberty, they would tear each other apart and offer the
spectacle of the most terrifying anarchy, where the stronger would
exploit and slaughter the weaker — quite the contrary of what goes on in
our model states today, needless to say! The State sets up the principle
that in order to establish public order, there is need of a superior
authority; in order to guide men and repress their evil passions, there
is need of a guide and a curb.
... In order to assure the observance of the principles and the
administration of laws in any human society whatsoever, there has to be
a vigilant, regulating, and, if need be, repressive power at the head of
the State. It remains for us to find out who should and who could
exercise such power.
For the State founded upon divine right and through the intervention of
any God whatever, the answer is simple enough; the men to exercise such
power would be the priests primarily, and secondarily the temporal
authorities consecrated by the priests. For the State founded on the
free social contract, the answer would be far more difficult. In a pure
democracy of equals — all of whom are, however, considered incapable of
self-restraint on behalf of the common welfare, their liberty tending
naturally toward evil — who would be the true guardian and administrator
of the laws, the defender of justice and of public order against
everyone’s evil passions? In a word, who would fulfill the functions of
the State?
The best citizens, would be the answer, the most intelligent and the
most virtuous, those who understand better than the others the common
interests of society and the need, the duty, of everyone to subordinate
his own interests to the common good. It is, in fact, necessary for
these men to be as intelligent as they are virtuous; if they were
intelligent but lacked virtue, they might very well use the public
welfare to serve their private interests, and if they were virtuous but
lacked intelligence, their good faith would not be enough to save the
public interest from their errors. It is therefore necessary, in order
that a republic may not perish, that it have available throughout its
duration a continuous succession of many citizens possessing both virtue
and intelligence.
But this condition cannot be easily or always fulfilled. In the history
of every country, the epochs that boast a sizable group of eminent men
are exceptional, and renowned through the centuries. Ordinarily, within
the precincts of power, it is the insignificant, the mediocre, who
predominate, and often, as we have observed in history, it is vice and
bloody violence that triumph. We may therefore conclude that if it were
true, as the theory of the so-called rational or liberal State clearly
postulates, that the preservation and durability of every political
society depend upon a succession of men as remarkable for their
intelligence as for their virtue, there is not one among the societies
now existing that would not have ceased to exist long ago. If we were to
add to this difficulty, not to say impossibility, those which arise from
the peculiar demoralization attendant upon power, the extraordinary
temptations to which all men who hold power in their hands are exposed,
the ambitions, rivalries, jealousies, the gigantic cupidities by which
particularly those in the highest positions are assailed by day and
night, and against which neither intelligence nor even virtue can
prevail, especially the highly vulnerable virtue of the isolated man, it
is a wonder that so many societies exist at all. But let us pass on.
Let us assume that, in an ideal society, in each period, there were a
sufficient number of men both intelligent and virtuous to discharge the
principal functions of the State worthily. Who would seek them out,
select them, and place the reins of power in their hands? Would they
themselves, aware of their intelligence and their virtue, take
possession of the power? This was done by two sages of ancient Greece,
Cleobulus and Periander; notwithstanding their supposed great wisdom,
the Greeks applied to them the odious name of tyrants. But in what
manner would such men seize power? By persuasion, or perhaps by force?
If they used persuasion, we might remark that he can best persuade who
is himself persuaded, and the best men are precisely those who are least
persuaded of their own worth. Even when they are aware of it, they
usually find it repugnant to press their claim upon others, while wicked
and mediocre men, always satisfied with themselves, feel no repugnance
in glorifying themselves. But let us even suppose that the desire to
serve their country had overcome the natural modesty of truly worthy men
and induced them to offer themselves as candidates for the suffrage of
their fellow citizens. Would the people necessarily accept these in
preference to ambitious, smooth-tongued, clever schemers? If, on the
other hand, they wanted to use force, they would, in the first place,
have to have available a force capable of overcoming the resistance of
an entire party. They would attain their power through civil war which
would end up with a disgruntled opposition party, beaten but still
hostile. To prevail, the victors would have to persist in using force.
Accordingly the free society would have become a despotic state, founded
upon and maintained by violence, in which you might possibly find many
things worthy of approval — but never liberty.
If we are to maintain the fiction of the free state issuing from a
social contract, we must assume that the majority of its citizens must
have had the prudence, the discernment, and the sense of justice
necessary to elect the worthiest and the most capable men and to place
them at the head of their government. But if a people had exhibited
these qualities, not just once and by mere chance but at all times
throughout its existence, in all the elections it had to make, would it
not mean that the people itself, as a mass, had reached so high a degree
of morality and of culture that it no longer had need of either
government or state? Such a people would not drag out a meaningless
existence, giving free rein for all its instincts; out of its life,
justice and public order would rise spontaneously and naturally. The
State, in it, would cease to be the providence, the guardian, the
educator, the regulator of society. As it renounced all its repressive
power and sank to the subordinate position assigned to it by Proudhon,
it would turn into a mere business office, a sort of central accounting
bureau at the service of society.
There is no doubt that such a political organization, or rather such a
reduction of political action in favor of the liberty of social life,
would be a great benefit to society, but it would in no way satisfy the
persistent champions of the State. To them, the State, as providence, as
director of the social life, dispenser of justice, and regulator of
public order, is a necessity. In other words, whether they admit it or
not, whether they call themselves republicans, democrats, or even
socialists, they always must have available a more or less ignorant,
immature, incompetent people, or, bluntly speaking, a kind of canaille
to govern. This would make them, without doing violence to their lofty
altruism and modesty, keep the highest places for themselves, so as
always to devote themselves to the common good, of course. As the
privileged guardians of the human flock, strong in their virtuous
devotion and their superior intelligence, while prodding the people
along and urging it on for its own good and well-being, they would be in
a position to do a little discreet fleecing of that flock for their own
benefit.
Any logical and straightforward theory of the State is essentially
founded upon the principle of authority, that is, the eminently
theological, metaphysical, and political idea that the masses, always
incapable of governing themselves, must at all times submit to the
beneficent yoke of a wisdom and a justice imposed upon them, in some way
or other, from above. Imposed in the name of what, and by whom?
Authority which is recognized and respected as such by the masses can
come from three sources only: force, religion, or the action of a
superior intelligence. As we are discussing the theory of the State
founded upon the free contract, we must postpone discussion of those
states founded on the dual authority of religion and force and, for the
moment, confine our attention to authority based upon a superior
intelligence, which is, as we know, always represented by minorities.
What do we really see in all states past and present, even those endowed
with the most democratic institutions, such as the United States of
North America and Switzerland? Actual self-government of the masses,
despite the pretense that the people hold all the power, remains a
fiction most of the time. It is always, in fact, minorities that do the
governing. In the United States, up to the recent Civil War and partly
even now, and even within the party of the present incumbent, President
Andrew Johnson, those ruling minorities were the so-called Democrats,
who continued to favor slavery and the ferocious oligarchy of the
Southern planters, demagogues without faith or conscience, capable of
sacrificing everything to their greed, to their malignant ambition. They
were those who, through their detestable actions and influence,
exercised practically without opposition for almost fifty successive
years, have greatly contributed to the corruption of political morality
in North America.
Right now, a really intelligent, generous minority — but always a
minority — the Republican party, is successfully challenging their
pernicious policy. Let us hope its triumph may be complete; let us hope
so for all humanity’s sake. But no matter how sincere this party of
liberty may be, no matter how great and generous its principles, we
cannot hope that upon attaining power it will renounce its exclusive
position of ruling minority and mingle with the masses, so that popular
self-government may at last become a fact. This would require a
revolution, one that would be profound in far other ways than all the
revolutions that have thus far overwhelmed the ancient world and the
modern.
In Switzerland, despite all the democratic revolutions that have taken
place there, government is still in the hands of the well-off, the
middle class, those privileged few who are rich, leisured, educated. The
sovereignty of the people — a term, incidentally, which we detest, since
all sovereignty is to us detestable — the government of the masses by
themselves, is here likewise a fiction. The people are sovereign in law,
but not in fact; since they are necessarily occupied with their daily
labor which leaves them no leisure, and since they are, if not totally
ignorant, at least quite inferior in education to the propertied middle
class, they are constrained to leave their alleged sovereignty in the
hands of the middle class. The only advantage they derive from this
situation, in Switzerland as well as in the United States of North
America, is that the ambitious minorities, the seekers of political
power, cannot attain power except by wooing the people, by pandering to
their fleeting passions, which at times can be quite evil, and, in most
cases, by deceiving them.
Let no one think that in criticizing the democratic government we
thereby show our preference for the monarchy. We are firmly convinced
that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the
most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief
periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed;
in the monarchies, oppression is constant. The democratic regime also
lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life —
something the monarchy never does. Nevertheless, while we prefer the
republic, we must recognize and proclaim that whatever the form of
government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into
different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of
occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always
be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the
majorities by the minorities.
The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well
regulated and systematized. We shall try to prove this by examining the
consequences of the government of the masses by a minority, intelligent
and dedicated as you please, in an ideal state founded upon the free
contract.
Once the conditions of the contract have been accepted, it remains only
to put them into effect. Suppose that a people recognized their
incapacity to govern, but still had sufficient judgment to confide the
administration of public affairs to their best citizens. At first these
individuals are esteemed not for their official position but for their
good qualities. They have been elected by the people because they are
the most intelligent, capable, wise, courageous, and dedicated among
them. Coming from the mass of the people, where all are supposedly
equal, they do not yet constitute a separate class, but a group of men
privileged only by nature and for that very reason singled out for
election by the people. Their number is necessarily very limited, for in
all times and in all nations the number of men endowed with qualities so
remarkable that they automatically command the unanimous respect of a
nation is, as experience teaches us, very small. Therefore, on pain of
making a bad choice the people will be forced to choose its rulers from
among them.
Here then is a society already divided into two categories, if not yet
two classes. One is composed of the immense majority of its citizens who
freely submit themselves to a government by those they have elected; the
other is composed of a small number of men endowed with exceptional
attributes, recognized and accepted as exceptional by the people and
entrusted by them with the task of governing. As these men depend on
popular election, they cannot at first be distinguished from the mass of
citizens except by the very qualities which have recommended them for
election, and they are naturally the most useful and the most dedicated
citizens of all. They do not as yet claim any privilege or any special
right except that of carrying out, at the people’s will, the special
functions with which they have been entrusted. Besides, they are not in
any way different from other people in their way of living or earning
their means of living, so that a perfect equality still subsists among
all.
Can this equality be maintained for any length of time? We claim it
cannot, a claim that is easy enough to prove.
Nothing is as dangerous for man’s personal morality as the habit of
commanding. The best of men, the most intelligent, unselfish, generous,
and pure, will always and inevitably be corrupted in this pursuit. Two
feelings inherent in the exercise of power never fail to produce this
demoralization: contempt for the masses, and, for the man in power, an
exaggerated sense of his own worth.
“The masses, on admitting their own incapacity to govern themselves,
have elected me as their head. By doing so, they have clearly proclaimed
their own inferiority and my superiority. In this great crowd of men,
among whom I hardly find any who are my equals, I alone am capable of
administering public affairs. The people need me; they cannot get along
without my services, while I am sufficient unto myself. They must
therefore obey me for their own good, and I, by deigning to command
them, create their happiness and well-being.” There is enough here to
turn anyone’s head and corrupt the heart and make one swell with pride,
isn’t there? That is how power and the habit of commanding become a
source of aberration, both intellectual and moral, even for the most
intelligent and most virtuous of men.
All human morality — and we shall try, further on, to prove the absolute
truth of this principle, the development, explanation, and widest
application of which constitute the real subject of this essay — all
collective and individual morality rests essentially upon respect for
humanity. What do we mean by respect for humanity? We mean the
recognition of human right and human dignity in every man, of whatever
race, color, degree of intellectual development, or even morality. But
if this man is stupid, wicked, or contemptible, can I respect him? Of
course, if he is all that, it is impossible for me to respect his
villainy, his stupidity, and his brutality; they are repugnant to me and
arouse my indignation. I shall, if necessary, take the strongest
measures against them, even going so far as to kill him if I have no
other way of defending against him my life, my right, and whatever I
hold precious and worthy. But even in the midst of the most violent and
bitter, even mortal, combat between us, I must respect his human
character. My own dignity as a man depends on it. Nevertheless, if he
himself fails to recognize this dignity in others, must we recognize it
in him? If he is a sort of ferocious beast or, as sometimes happens,
worse than a beast, would we not, in recognizing his humanity, be
supporting a mere fiction? NO, for whatever his present intellectual and
moral degradation may be, if, organically, he is neither an idiot nor a
madman — in which case he should be treated as a sick man rather than as
a criminal — if he is in full possession of his senses and of such
intelligence as nature has granted him, his humanity, no matter how
monstrous his deviations might be, nonetheless really exists. It exists
as a lifelong potential capacity to rise to the awareness of his
humanity, even if there should be little possibility for a radical
change in the social conditions which have made him what he is.
Take the most intelligent ape, with the finest disposition; though you
place him in the best, most humane environment, you will never make a
man of him. Take the most hardened criminal or the man with the poorest
mind, provided that neither has any organic lesion causing idiocy or
insanity; the criminality of the one, and the failure of the other to
develop an awareness of his humanity and his human duties, is not their
fault, nor is it due to their nature; it is solely the result of the
social environment in which they were born and brought up.