Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

by Antonio Labriola

The great progress of modern technique, which really constitutes the intellectual substance of the bourgeois epoch, has worked, among other miracles, this one also, of revealing to us for the first time the practical origin of the scientific attitude. (We can never forget the Florentine Academy, which produced this phrase, when Italy was in the twilight of its past grandeur and when modern society was in the dawn of the great industry.) Henceforth we are in a position to take up the guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called the scientific spirit; and no one is any longer astonished at finding that everything in scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians arose from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual inundations of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations suggested, in Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of the astronomical movements.

It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science, and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, toward scientific activity. What need had the feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which the Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free agriculturists, industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had succeeded in increasing it a little. What is the Renaissance, if not the joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refined by experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence arises the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion; thence arise naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation of the domain of reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in full play. (Vico.) It is worth remembering that this government of the Directory, which was the prototype and the compendium of all liberal corruption, was the first to introduce in the University and at the Academy in a formal and solemn fashion the science of free inquiry with Lamark! This science, which the bourgeois epoch has, through its inherent conditions, stimulated and made to grow like a giant, is the only heritage of past centuries which communism accepts and adopts without reserve.

It would not be useful to stop here for the discussion of the so-called antithesis between science and philosophy. If we accept those fashions of philosophizing which are confounded with mysticism and theology, philosophy never means a science or doctrine separate from its appropriate and particular things, but it is simply a degree, a form, a stage of thought with relation to the things which enter into the domain of experience. Philosophy is, then, either a generic anticipation of the problems which science has still to elaborate specifically, or a summary and a conceptual elaboration of the results at which the sciences have already arrived. As for those who, that they may not appear behind the times, talk now of scientific philosophy, if we do not wish to stop over the humorous element that there is in that expression, it will suffice to say that they are simply fools.

I said some pages back, in my statement of formulas, that the economic structure determines in the second place the direction, and in great part and indirectly, the objects of imagination and of thought in the production of art, of religion and of science. To express this otherwise, or to go further, would be to put one’s self voluntarily on the road toward the absurd.

Before all else, in this formula, we are opposing the fantastic opinion, that art, religion and science are subjective developments and historical developments of a pretended artistic, religious or scientific spirit, which would go on manifesting itself successively through its own rhythm of evolution, favored or retarded on this side or that by material conditions. By this formula, it is desired to assert, moreover, the necessary connection, through which every fact of art and of religion is the exponent, sentimental, fantastic and thus derived, of definite social conditions. If I say in the second place, it is to distinguish these products from the facts of legal-political order which are a true and proper projection of economic conditions. And if I say in great part and indirectly the objects of these activities, it is to indicate two things: that in artistic or religious production the mediation from the conditions to the products is very complicated, and again that men, while living in society, do not thereby cease to live alone by themselves in nature, and to receive from it occasion and material for curiosity and for imagination.

After all, this is all reduced to a more general formula; man does not make several histories at the same time, but all these alleged different histories (art, religion, etc.) make up one alone. And it is not possible to take account of that clearly except at the characteristic and significant moment of the production of new things, that is to say in the periods which I will call revolutionary. Later, the acceptance of the things that have been produced, and the traditional repetition of a definite type, obliterated the sense of the origins of things.

Try, if you will, to detach the ideology of the fables which are at the foundation of the Homeric poems, from that moment of historic evolution where we find the dawn of Aryan civilization in the basin of the Mediterranean, that is to say, from that phase of the higher barbarism in which arises, in Greece and elsewhere, the epic. Or try to imagine the birth and the development of Christianity elsewhere than in Roman cosmopolitanism, and otherwise than by the work of those proletarians, those slaves, those unfortunates, those desperate ones, who had need of the redemption of the Apocalypse and of the promise of the Kingdom of God. Find, if you will, the ground for supposing that in the beautiful environment of the Renaissance the romanticism should begin to appear, which scarcely appeared in the decadent Torquato Tasso; or that one might attribute to Richardson or to Diderot the novels of Balzac, in whom appears, as a contemporary of the first generation of socialism and sociology, the psychology of classes. Far back, farther, farther, at the first origins of the mythical conceptions, it is evident that Zeus did not assume the characters of father of gods and men until the power of the patria potestas was already established, and that series of processus began which culminated in the State. Zeus thus ceases to be what was at first the simple divus (brilliant) or the Thunderer. And it is to be observed that at an opposite point of historic evolution, a great number of thinkers of the past century reduced to a single abstract God, who is a simple regent of the world, all that variegated image of the unknown and transcendental type, developed in so great a wealth of mythological, Christian or pagan creations. Man felt himself more at home in nature, thanks to experience, but felt himself better able to penetrate the gearing of society, the knowledge of which he possessed in part. The miraculous dissolved in his mind, to the point where materialism and criticism could afterwards eliminate that poor remnant of transcendentalism, without taking up war against the gods.

There is certainly a history of ideas; but this does not consist in the vicious circle of ideas that explain themselves. It lies in rising from things to the idea. There is a problem; still more, there is a multitude of problems, so varied, multiple, multiform and mingled are the projections which men have made of themselves and of their economic-social conditions, and thus of their hopes and their fears, of their desires and their deceptions, in their artistic and religious concepts. The method is found, but the particular execution is not easy. We must above all guard against the scholastic temptation of arriving by deduction at the products of historic activity which are displayed in art and in religion. We must hope that philosophers like Krug, who explained the pen with which he wrote by a process of dialectic deduction, have remained forever buried in the notes of Hegel’s logic.

Here I must state certain difficulties.

Before attempting to reduce secondary products (for example, art and religion) to the social conditions which they idealize, one must first acquire a long experience of specified social psychology, in which the transformation is realized. Therein consists the justification of that sum of relations, which is designated in another form of language, under the name of Egyptian world, Greek consciousness, spirit of the Renaissance, dominant ideas, psychology of nations, of society or of classes. When these relations are established, and men have become accustomed to certain conceptions and certain modes of belief or of imagination, the ideas transmitted by tradition tend to become crystallized. Thus they appear as a force which resists new formations; and as this resistance shows itself through the spoken word, through writing, through intolerance, through polemics, through persecution, so the struggle between the new and the old social conditions takes on the form of a struggle between ideas.