a societe
capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that
"property is theft," his gospel of "anarchy," and the defiant,
precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an impression
that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary. But when his ideas
are studied in their context and translated into sober language, they
are not so unreasonable. Notwithstanding his communistic theory of
property and his ideal of equality, he was a strong individualist.
He held that the future of civilisation depends on the energy of
individuals, that liberty is a condition of its advance, and that the
end to be kept in view is the establishment of justice, which means
equality. He saw the difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete
equality, but hoped that the incompatibility would be overcome by a
gradual reduction of the natural differences in men's capacities. He
said, "I am an anarchist," but his anarchy only meant that the time
would come when government would be superfluous, when every human
being could be trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining
authority or external sanctions. Nor was he a Utopian. He comprehended
that such a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and
he condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that a
millennium might be realised immediately by a change of organisation.

He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities are
penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the railway
of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social theories,
whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not take Progress
seriously though they invoked it.

"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and end,
their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my originality
as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress resolutely,
irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All that I have
ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have written, denied or
affirmed in the name of one unique idea, Progress. My adversaries, on
the other hand, are all partisans of the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU,
ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du
progres, Premiere lettre (1851).]

4.

A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the
revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was
definitely enthroned a