out
of the door, she flies in at the window! Despite the great services
rendered to social science by the German Idealists, the great problem of
that science, its essential problem, was no more solved in the time of
the German Idealists than in the time of the French Materialists. What
is this hidden force that causes the historic movement of humanity? No
one knew anything about it. In this field there was nothing to go upon
save a few isolated observations, more or less accurate, more or less
ingenious--sometimes indeed, very accurate and ingenious--but always
disjointed and always incomplete.

That social science at last emerged from this No Thoroughfare, it owes
to Karl Marx.

According to Marx, "legal relations, like forms of State, can neither be
understood in themselves nor from the so-called general development of
the human mind, but are rather rooted in those material conditions of
life, whose totality Hegel, following the English and the French of the
18th century, summed up under the name of 'bourgeois society.'" This is
almost the same as Guizot meant when he said that political
constitutions had their roots in "the condition of property." But while
for Guizot "the condition of property" remained a mystery which he
vainly sought to elucidate with the help of reflections upon human
nature, for Marx this "condition" had nothing mysterious; it is
determined by the condition of the productive forces at the disposal of
a given society. "The anatomy of bourgeois society is to be sought in
political economy." But Marx himself shall formulate his own conception
of history.

"In the social production of their lives, men enter upon certain
definite, necessary relations, relations independent of their will,
relations of production that correspond with definite degrees of
development of their material productive forces. The totality of these
relations of production constitute the economic structure of society,
the true basis from which arises a juridical and political
superstructure to which definite social forms of consciousness
correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the
social, political and intellectual processes of life. It is not the
consciousness of mankind that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. In a
certain stage of their development, the material forces of production of
society come into contradiction with the existing