But aside from this language, so strange from the pen of M. Garofalo, it is impossible not to perceive the strange contrast between his critical talent and the numerous statements in this book which are, to say the least, characterized by a naiveté one would never have suspected in him.
It is true that, on page 74, like an individualist of the good old days, and with an absolutism which we may henceforth call pre-historic, he deplores the enactment of even those civil laws which have limited the jus utendi et abutendi (freely, the right of doing what one will with one's own—Tr.), and which have "seriously maimed the institution of private property," since, he says, "the lower classes suffer cruelly, not from the existence of great fortunes, but rather from the economic embarrassment of the upper classes" (page 77). What boldness of critical thought and profundity in economic science!
And, in regard to my statement that contemporary science is altogether dominated by the idea and the fact of the social aggregate—and, therefore, of socialism—in contrast to the glorification of the individual, and, therefore, of individualism, which obtained in the Eighteenth Century, M. Garofalo replies to me that "the story of Robinson Crusoe was borrowed from a very trustworthy history," and adds that it would be possible to cite many cases of anchorites and hermits "who had no need of the company of their fellows" (page 82).
He believes that he has thus demonstrated that I was mistaken when I declared that the species is the sole eternal reality of life and that the individual—himself a biological aggregation—does not live alone and by himself alone, but only by virtue of the fact that he forms a part of a collectivity, to which he owes all the creative conditions of his material, moral and intellectual existence.
In truth, if M. Garofalo had employed such arguments to expose the absurdities of metaphysical penology, and to defend the heresies of the positive school, the latter would certainly not number him among its most eloquent and suggestive founders and champions.
And yet, M. Garofalo, instead of repeating these soporific banalities, ought to have been able to discuss seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, through the social ownership of the land and the means of production, tends to assure to every individual the conditions of an existence more worthily human, and of a full and perfectly free development of his physical and moral personality. For then only, when the daily bread of the body and mind is guaranteed, will every man be able, as Goethe said, "to become that which he is," instead of wasting and wearing himself out in the spasmodic and exhausting struggle for daily bread, obtained too often at the expense of personal dignity or the sacrifice of intellectual aptitudes, while human energies are obviously squandered to the great disadvantage of the entire society, and all this with the appearance of personal liberty, but, in fact, with the vast majority of mankind reduced to dependence upon the class in possession of economic monopoly.
But M. Garofalo has altogether refrained from these discussions, which admit of scientific arguments on either hand. He has confined himself, on the contrary, even when he has attempted to discuss seriously, to the repetition of the most superficial commonplaces.