The full Lafargue in this section of the serial ‘The Historical Method of Karl Marx’ first published by Stuttgart’s Neue Zeit in 1903 and 1904. Here translated into English by Richard Perin for New Review.

‘Idealistic Philosophies of History’ (1903) by Paul Lafargue from New Review. Vol. 1 No. 14. April 5, 1913.

Concerning Historical Materialism.

II. IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY.

History is such a chaos of facts, which are beyond human control, which advance and retreat without visible cause, act and counteract upon one another, appear and disappear, that we might almost believe it impossible to classify them and to group them into series the evolutionary and revolutionary causes of which could be discovered. The failure of the attempts to systematize history has created a doubt in many thoughtful men, such as Helmholtz, “whether it is possible to formulate a law of history that would be confirmed by reality.” This doubt is so general that the intellectuals of to-day no longer expose themselves, like the philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, to the danger of constructing great and comprehensive systems of history; but it is also the echo of the economists’ disbelief in the possibility of controlling the forces of production But should the difficulty of the historical problem and the failures of those who sought to solve it, lead us to the conclusion that its solution lies entirely beyond the range of the human mind? If so, the social phenomena would form an exception and would be the only ones whose determining causes we are unable to arrange in a logical series.

Sound common sense has never admitted such an impossibility; on the contrary, men of all times have believed that all their joyful and sad experiences are part of a plan devised by some higher being. Man proposes, God disposes–this is an historical axiom of popular wisdom, and it contains as much truth as the axioms of geometry; everything depends, however, upon how we interpret the word “God.”

Each of the cities of antiquity possessed a city divinity, as the Greeks called it, which watched over its fate and dwelled in the temple dedicated to it. The Jehovah of the Old Testament was a divinity of this sort; the Israelites installed him in a wooden chest, which they called the Ark of the Covenant and in which they transported him when the tribe changed its abode. When two cities declared war upon each other, the divinities took part in the battle. The Bible relates with pleasure of the exploits of Jehovah, who took the quarrels of his people so to heart that he exterminated the men, women, children and cattle of their enemies. The Romans, as superstitious as they were crafty politicians, took the divinity of the conquered city and brought its statue to the Capitol, so that it should cease to protect the people among whom it no longer dwelt.

The Christians acted upon these heathen beliefs when they destroyed temples to drive out heathen gods, and when they prayed to their God to lead them to victory over the divinities of the heathen, the demons who provoked to heresy, and Allah who opposed the Crescent to the Cross.¹

The civilized Christian nations still retain the heathen tradition, for although they all pray to the same God, each begs him to destroy its enemies; they ascribe victory to him and give him thanks by singing a Te Deum; the President of the United States recommends public prayers. The belief in the divine interposition in human quarrels is not simulated by statesmen to satisfy the crude superstitions of the ignorant masses; no, they share it; the intimate letters which Bismarck wrote to his wife during the war of 1870-71 show that he believed that God spent his time in the affairs of Bismarck, his son, and the Prussian army.

It was upon this belief that Bossuet constructed the plan of his Universal History: The heathen peoples slaughter each other to prepare for the coming of Jesus, and the Christian nations kill each other to assure the greatness of France and the fame of Louis XIV. The historical movement, as God directed it, leads up to the roi Soleil (sunlike monarch). When he expired darkness covered the world, and revolution, the work of Satan, as Joseph de Maistre called it, broke out.

Satan triumphed over God, the city divinity of the Bourbons and the aristocracy. The bourgeoisie, the class that took little account of God, possessed itself of power and guillotined the King by the grace of God; the natural sciences accursed by him triumphed, and produced for the bourgeoisie more wealth than the King and the nobles had been able to give their favorites. Reason, which he had muzzled, dragged him before its judgment seat. Satan’s rule began. Romantic poets sang of him; he was the great martyr, the comforter of the oppressed; he symbolized the bourgeoisie in its revolt from the aristocracy and its God. But the victors dared not make him their city divinity; they patched up the old God, damaged by reason, and restored him to his dignity. Since, however, they had lost faith in his omnipotence, they surrounded him with a staff of semi-divinities: Progress, Justice, Civilization, Humanity, Liberty Patriotism, etc., the office of which was to watch over the fate of the nations that have been freed of the rule of the aristocracy. These new gods are Ideas, powerful conceptions, imponderable forces; Hegel sought to trace back this polytheism of ideas to the monotheism of the Idea, which, like the God of the Christians, is a copy of the Nous (mind, thought) of Anaxagoras and created the world and history for its diversion.

Bossuet and the deists, who conferred upon God the dignity of a conscious agent of history, after all only adapted the role of the divinity to public opinion, while the free thinkers, who substituted for him forceful Ideas, utilized historically the current opinion of the bourgeoisie. Every member of the bourgeoisie pretends that his private and public acts are dictated by Progress, Justice, Humanity, Patriotism, etc. To be convinced of this, one has only to read the advertisements of the manufacturers and merchants, the prospectuses of financiers, the speeches of politicians.

The ideas of progress and evolution are of modern origin; they are a transcription of the idea of human perfectibility in history, which was fashionable in the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie of necessity regarded its conquest of power as a social advance, while the aristocracy saw in it retrogression. Since the French Revolution took place more than a century later than the English, under matured conditions, it placed the bourgeoisie so abruptly and so completely in the position formerly occupied by the aristocracy that ever since the idea of progress has become firmly implanted in the public opinion of the nations ruled by the bourgeoisie. The European bourgeois consider themselves the authorized representatives of progress. Their habits and customs, private and public morals, family and social organization, industry and commerce were declared by them to be in advance of everything that had gone before. The past was merely ignorance, barbarism, injustice, stupidity; finally, and for the first time, exclaims Hegel, the Idea begins to rule the world!

But one historical fact, even when it is so full of significance as the accession to power of the bourgeoisie, does not of itself suffice for the construction of a theory of progress. Bossuet made God the only motive force in history; the historians and free thinkers among the philosophers discovered that in the past, also, Progress had not been a slothful God. During the Middle Ages he had been preparing the triumph of the bourgeois by organizing them, enriching them and giving them intellectual culture, while the offensive and defensive powers of the aristocracy were wasting away, and stone after stone in the stronghold of Catholicism was crumbling. After the idea of Progress, that of Evolution necessarily entered into the conception of history.

To the bourgeoisie, however, evolution only progressed as far as it contributed to their victory. And as the historians can trace their organic development only about a thousand years back, they lose hold of their Ariadne’s thread so soon as they venture forth in the labyrinth of earlier history; they then content themselves with relating isolated facts and make no attempt at all to group them in progressive series. Since the goal of progressive evolution is to invest the bourgeoisie with power, therefore progress ceases to progress when this goal is reached. Indeed it is believed by the bourgeoisie, who regard their conquest of power as an advance unique in history, that it would signify social retrogression, a return to barbarism, were they to be displaced by the proletariat. The conquered aristocracy had exactly the same idea. The instinctive and unconscious belief in the cessation of progress held by the bourgeois masses is consciously and deliberately reflected in the works of the bourgeois philosophers. Hegel and Comte, to name only two of the most famous, declared that their philosophic systems closed the series and were the crown and end of the progressive evolution of thought. Thus political and social institutions and philosophies progress only in order to attain to their bourgeois form; having accomplished that, progress comes to a dead standstill.

The bourgeoisie and its most intelligent intellectuals indulge themselves still further, they erect insuperable barriers against advancing progress and suppress social organisms of essential importance to the activity of progress. In order to prove that the individual form of property and the patriarchal form of the family cannot be changed, the economists and ethical philosophers declare that they have existed for all time. They make these absurd assertions in spite of the fact that researches conducted during half a century have brought to light the primitive forms of the family and of property. They are either ignorant or they affect ignorance.

During the early years of the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie was still intoxicated with its political victory and the remarkable development of its economic riches, the ideas of progress and evolution were in extraordinarily high favor; philosophers, historians, novelists and poets dipped their writings in the sauce of advancing progress, which Fourier alone, or almost alone, derided. But toward the middle of the century they were obliged to curb their enthusiasm; the appearance of the proletariat upon the political stage in England and France aroused in the bourgeoisie uneasiness over the eternal duration of its rule; progress lost its charm. Finally the ideas of progress and evolution would have ceased to be current in the phraseology of the intellectuals, had not the scientists adopted them. At the end of the eighteenth century they had seized upon the evolutionary idea disseminated in bourgeois circles, and now they utilized it to explain the origin of the worlds and the organization of plants and animals. They gave it such scientific validity and such popularity, that it became impossible to conjure it away.

But to establish the progressive evolution of the bourgeoisie for a certain number of centuries no more offers an explanation of this historic movement, than, by observing the curve which a stone thrown into the air describes in falling, we can learn the causes of its fall. The philosophic historians assert that the causes of this evolution are found in the ceaseless operation of forceful ideas, especially Justice, the strongest of all, which, according to an official academic philosopher, “is unchangeable and omnipresent, although its realization takes place only gradually in the human mind and in social acts.” Thus bourgeois society and bourgeois thought are the last and highest expressions of justice, and in order to raise herself to this pinnacle this lady has been at work in the underground passages of history.

But let us inspect the said lady’s credentials in order to inform ourselves as to her character and morals.

A ruling class declares that to be just which serves its economic and political interests, and that to be unjust which is opposed to them Justice, as conceived by it, has been done when its class interests are served. Hence the interests of the bourgeoisie serve as the guide to justice; with unconscious irony it represents justice with a bandage over her eyes, doubtless in order to prevent her from seeing what miserable, base interests she is covering with her shield.

Hence, the feudal and guild organization was unjust, because it barred to the bourgeoisie the road to political power and hampered its economic development. It was destroyed by the immanent justice of history, for–say the moralists–she could not witness with folded arms the robberies of the feudal barons, who knew only this means of rounding off their estates and filling their money bags. Nevertheless this honorable and immanent justice favors with mailed fist the thefts which the peaceful bourgeois cause to be perpetrated in the barbaric countries of Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, without risking their own skins or risking their own persons. Not as if this kind of theft were pleasing to the virtuous lady; by right she only approves the economic theft, which alone she invests with all legal privileges, that theft which the bourgeoisie daily commits upon the wage workers without any use of force. The economic theft is so agreeable to the temperament and character of justice that she constitutes herself the watch-dog of capitalistic wealth, which indeed represents an accumulation of thefts that are as legal as they are just. The bourgeoisie, which arranges everything to suit itself, attaches to its social order the ornamental designation of Civilization, and to its method of treating human beings that of Humanity. It undertakes colonial expeditions for the purpose of carrying civilization to the barbaric peoples and of improving their miserable living conditions. To be sure, its civilization and humanity manifest themselves as alcohol poisoning, compulsory labor, plundering of the natives and exterminating them. But it must not be believed that it is partial to the barbarians and that it does not pour out the benefits of its civilization and humanity upon the working classes of the nations under its rule. Its civilization and humanity must be measured by the multitude of men, women and children who, destitute of all property, are condemned to compulsory labor day and night, except when they are locked out, and who fall victims to alcoholism, tuberculosis and rickets. They must be measured by the increase in misdemeanors and crimes, the multiplication of insane asylums, and the development and perfection of the penal system.

Never before has a ruling class claimed for itself so many ideals, because never before has a ruling class been obliged to clothe its transactions in so much idealistic twaddle. This ideological charlatanism is its surest and most effective means of political and economic dupery. This annoying contradiction between words and deeds, which only a blind man could deny, has not prevented the historians and philosophers from holding ideas and principles to be the sole motive forces of the history of bourgeois nations. Their monumental error, which is really an honest one although it exceeds the measure of the intellectually permissible, is itself an undeniable proof of the influence exerted by ideas and principles and of the rascality of the bourgeoisie, which has known how to cultivate and exploit them, so that they bring her a high rate of interest.

The financiers fill their prospectuses with patriotic principles, with civilizing ideas, humanitarian feelings and with investments at from six to ten per cent. for the fathers of families. That is an infallible bait with which to hook the money of the gullible. Lesseps was able to realize that imposing Panama scheme of the nineteenth century and to appropriate to himself the savings of more than 800,000 humble people, only because that “great Frenchman” promised to add a new leaf to France’s wreath of glory, to extend the civilization of humanity, to enrich his contemporaries, etc. Ideas and principles are such infallible decoys that there is no political program, no financial, industrial or commercial advertisement, no announcement of a new alcoholic drink or of a drug, but is made attractive by them. Political treachery and economic deceit fly the flags of ideas and principles.²

The historical philosophy of bourgeois thinkers was condemned to remain a tasteless and indigestible word-jugglery, since they could not see through the charlatanism of bourgeois ideology and did not become aware of the fact that it used principles merely as a signboard, behind which it could hide the changing secrets of its deeds. Their lamentable failures do not, however, prove that it is impossible to discover the determining causes of the organization and evolution of human society, particularly now that the chemists have discovered the manner in which atoms arrange themselves in compound bodies.

“The social world,” says Vico, the father of historical philosophy, “is without doubt the work of man, from which it follows that we can, indeed must, find the underlying principles in When we the modifications of human intelligence itself…reflect over it, is it not surprising that the philosophers have sought earnestly to understand the natural world, which was created by God and the knowledge of which he has reserved to himself, and that, on the other hand, they have neglected to reflect upon the social world, the knowledge of which is possible to men since they themselves have made it.”

The failures of the historians and philosophers teach us that, in order to further the knowledge of the social world, we must use methods other than those employed by them.

Notes

1. The first Christians believed as firmly in the heathen gods and their miracles as in Jesus and his miracles. Tertullian in his “Apologetics” and St. Augustine in the “City of God” report as undeniable facts that Aesculapius raised the dead, whose names he actually gave, that one vestal virgin had carried water from the Tiber in a sieve, that another had towed a ship with her girdle, etc.

2. Rappaport, Vandervelde and other comrades are annoyed by my irreverent and “extreme” manner of exposing the eternal ideas and principles. What profanation it is, cries Péguy, to call justice, liberty, patriotism, etc., metaphysical and ethical harlots, which lend themselves to the support of academic discussions, political programs and the rights of man! If these comrades had lived in the time of the Encyclopaedists they would have directed their blazing indignation against Diderot and Voltaire, for they took the ideology of the aristocracy by the throat and dragged it before the judgment seat of their reason, they scoffed at the truths of Christianity, the Maid of Orleans, the blue blood and the honor of the nobility, the authorities, divine right, and many other things. And these comrades would condemn “Don Quixote,” this incomparable masterpiece of romantic literature, to the stake, because it pitilessly exposes the knightly virtues to ridicule, those virtues that are sung in all romances and poems intended for aristocrats.

The New Review: A Critical Survey of International Socialism was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. Bases in New York it declared in its aim the first issue: “The intellectual achievements of Marx and his successors have become the guiding star of the awakened, self-conscious proletariat on the toilsome road that leads to its emancipation. And it will be one of the principal tasks of The NEW REVIEW to make known these achievements,to the Socialists of America, so that we may attain to that fundamental unity of thought without which unity of action is impossible.” In the world of the East Coast Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Robert Rives La Monte, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Arturo Giovannitti, Harry W. Laidler, Austin Lewis, and Isaac Hourwich as editors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 and lead the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. International writers in New Review included Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly, Karl Kautsky, Anton Pannekoek, Lajpat Rai, Alexandra Kollontai, Tom Quelch, S.J. Rutgers, Edward Bernstein, and H.M. Hyndman, The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable and invaluable archive of Marxist and Socialist discussion of the time.

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