But it would be a complete error to believe that the writers who narrate, explain, or illustrate have themselves invented and given life to this enormous mass of unripe concepts, imaginings, and explanations which, thanks to the force of prejudice, concealed for centuries the real truth. It may happen, and it certainly does happen, that some of these concepts are the fruit and the product of personal views, or of literary currents formed in the narrow professional circle of the universities and academies. The people in this case are absolutely ignorant of them. But the important fact is that history itself has put on these veils; that is to say, that the very actors and workers of the historic events—great masses of people, directing and ordering classes, masters of state, sects or parties, in the narrowest sense of the word, if we make exception for an occasional moment of lucid interval—never had up to the end of the past century a consciousness of their own work, unless it be through some ideological envelope which prevented any sight of the real causes. Already at the distant epoch when barbarism was passing over into civilization, that is to say, when the first discoveries of agriculture, the stable establishment of a population upon a definite territory, the first division of labor in society, the first alliances of different gentes, gave the conditions in which developed property and the state, or at least the city,—even then, at the epoch of all the first social revolutions, men ideally transformed their work, seeing in it the miraculous acts of gods and heroes. So much so that, while acting as they could and as they must, granted the necessity and the fact of their relative economic development, they conceived an explanation of their own work as if it did not belong to them. This ideological envelope of human works has changed since then more than once in form, in appearance, in combinations and in relations in the course of the centuries, from the immediate production of the ingenuous myths up to the complicated theological systems and to The City of God of St. Augustine—from the superstitious credulity in miracles down to the bewildering miracles of the metaphysicians, that is to say, down to the Idea which for the decadents of Hegelianism engenders of itself, in itself, by its own disaggregation the most incongruous variations of social life in the course of history.
Now, precisely because the visual angle of ideological interpretation has not been finally outgrown until very lately, and because it is only in our days that a sum total of the real and really acting relations has been clearly distinguished from the ingenuous reflections of myth and the more artificial reflections of religion and metaphysics, our doctrine states a new problem and carries within itself grave difficulties for whoever wishes to fit it for providing a specific explanation of the history of the past.
The problem consists in this: that our doctrine necessitates a new criticism of the sources of history. And I do not wish to be understood as speaking exclusively of the criticism of documents in the proper and ordinary sense of the word, because as for this we may content ourselves with what is delivered to us ready made by the critics, the scholars, and the professional philologists. But I would speak of that immediate source which is behind the so called documents properly and which, before expressing itself and fixing itself in these, resides in the spirit and in the form of the consciousness in which the actors accounted to themselves for the motives of their own work. This spirit, that is to say, this consciousness, is often inadequate to the causes which we are now in a position to discover, from which it follows that the actors seem to us enveloped, as it were, in a circle of illusions. To strip the historic facts from these envelopes which clothe the very facts while they are developing—this is to make a new criticism of the sources in the realistic sense of the word and not in the formal documentary sense. It is, in short, to make react upon the knowledge of past conditions the consciousness of which we are now capable, and thereby to reconstruct them anew.
But this revision of the most direct sources, if it marks the extreme limit of the historic self-consciousness which may be reached, may be an occasion for falling into a serious error. As we place ourselves at a point of view which is beyond the ideological views to which the actors in history were indebted for a consciousness of their work and in which they often found both the motives and the justification of their action, we may falsely believe that these ideological views were a pure appearance, a simple artifice, a pure illusion in the vulgar sense of the word. Martin Luther, like the other great reformers, his contemporaries, never knew, as we know to-day, that the Reformation was but an episode in the development of the Third Estate, and an economic revolt of the German nation against the exploitation of the Papal court. He was what he was, as an agitator and a politician, because he was wholly taken up with the belief which made him see in the class movement which gave an impulse to the agitation a return to true Christianity and a divine necessity in the vulgar course of events. The study of remote effects, that is to say, the increasing strength of the bourgeoisie of the cities against the feudal lords, the increase of the territorial dominion of the princes at the expense of the inter-territorial and super-territorial power of the emperor and the pope, the violent repression of the movement of the peasants and the more properly proletarian movement of the Anabaptists permit us now to reconstruct the authentic history of the economic causes of the Reformation, particularly in the final proportions which it took, which is the best of proofs. But that does not mean that we are privileged to detach the fact arrived at from the mode of its realization and to analyze the circumstantial integrality by a posthumous analysis altogether subjective and simplified. The inner causes, or, as would be said now, the profane and prosaic motives of the Reformation, appear to us clearly in France, where it was not victorious; clearly again in the Low Countries, where, apart from the differences of nationality, the contrasts of economic interests are shown strikingly in the struggle against Spain; very clearly again in England, where the religious renovation realized, thanks to political violence, placed in full light the passage to those conditions which are for our modern bourgeoisie the forerunners of capitalism. Post factum, and after the tardy realization of unforeseen consequences, the history of the real movements which were the inner causes of the Reformation, in great part unknown to the actors themselves, will appear in full light. But that the fact came about precisely as it did come about, that it took on certain determined forms, that it clothed itself in certain vestments, that it painted itself in certain colors, that it put in movement certain passions, that it displayed a special degree of fanaticism,—in these consist its specific character, which no analytic ability can make otherwise than as it was. Only the love of paradox inseparable from the zeal of the passionate popularizers of a new doctrine can have brought some to believe that to write history it was sufficient to put on record merely the economic moment (often still unknown and often unknowable), and thereupon to cast to the earth all the rest as a useless burden with which men had capriciously loaded themselves, as a superfluity, a mere trifle, or even, as it were, something not existent.
From the fact that history must be taken in its entirety and that in it the kernel and the husk are but one, as Goethe said of all things, three consequences follow:—
First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism, the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. But beneath the motives and the wish there is the genesis of both, and to reconstruct this genesis we must leave the closed field of consciousness to arrive at the analysis of the simple necessities, which, on the one side, are derived from social conditions, and on the other side are lost in the obscure background of organic dispositions, in ancestry and in atavism. It is not otherwise with historical determinism, where, in the same way, we begin with motives religious, political, æsthetic, passionate, etc., but where we must subsequently discover the causes of these motives in the material conditions underlying them. Now the study of these conditions should be so specified that we may perceive indubitably not only what are the causes, but again by what mediations they arrive at that form which reveals them to the consciousness as motives whose origin is often obliterated.
And thence follows indubitably this second consequence that in our doctrine we have not to re-translate into economic categories all the complex manifestations of history, but only to explain in the last analysis (Engels) all the historic facts by means of the underlying economic structure (Marx), which necessitates analysis and reduction and then interlinking and construction.
It results from this, in the third place, that, passing from the underlying economic structure to the picturesque whole of a given history, we need the aid of that complexus of notions and knowledge which may be called, for lack of a better term, social psychology. I do not mean by that to allude to the fantastic existence of a social psyche nor to the concept of an assumed collective spirit which by its own laws, independent of the consciousness of individuals and of their material and definable relations, realizes itself and shows itself in social life. That is pure mysticism. Neither do I wish to allude to those attempts at generalization which fill up treatises on social psychology and the general idea of which is to transport and apply to a subject which is called social consciousness the known categories and forms of individual psychology. Nor again do I wish to allude to that mass of semi-organic and semi-psychological denominations by the aid of which some attribute to the social being, as Schäffle does, a brain, a spinal column, sensibility, sentiment, conscience, will, etc. But I wish to speak of more modest and more prosaic things, that is to say, of those concrete and precise states of mind which make us know as they really were the plebeians of Rome at a certain epoch, the artisans of Florence at the moment when the movement of the Ciompi burst forth, or those peasants of France within whom was engendered, to follow Taine’s expression, the “spontaneous anarchy” of 1789, those peasants who finally became free laborers and small proprietors, or, aspiring to property, transformed themselves rapidly from victors over the foreigner into automatic instruments of reaction. This social psychology, which no one can reduce to abstract canons because, in most cases, it is merely descriptive, this is what the chroniclers, the orators, the artists, the romancers and the ideologists of every sort have seen and up to now have conceived as the exclusive object of their studies. In this, psychology, which is the specific consciousness of men in given social conditions, the agitators, orators and propagandists trust to-day, and to it they appeal. We know that it is the fruit, the outcome, the effect of certain social conditions actually determined;—this class, in this situation, determined by the functions which it fulfills, by the subjection in which it is held, by the dominion which it exercises;—and finally, these classes, these functions, this subjection and this dominion involve such and such a determined form of production and distribution of the immediate means of life, that is to say, a determined economic structure. This social psychology, by its nature always circumstantial, is not the expression of the abstract and generic process of the self-styled human intellect. It is always a specified formation from specified conditions. We hold this principle to be indisputable, that it is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).
But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history. This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.