The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on the Materialistic Conception of
History, by Antonio Labriola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History

Author: Antonio Labriola

Translator: Charles H. Kerr

Release Date: June 1, 2010 [EBook #32644]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONCEPTION OF HISTORY ***

Produced by Brian Foley, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

ESSAYS on the Materialistic Conception of History

by

ANTONIO LABRIOLA
_Professor in the University of Rome_

translated by CHARLES H. KERR

Chicago
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
CO-OPERATIVE

COPYRIGHT 1908
BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
CHICAGO

JOHN F. HIGGINS
PRINTER AND BINDER

[Illustration: Logo]

376-382 MONROE STREET
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

On the tenth of March, 1896, the same year that the last despairing
revolt of the small producer against capitalism in America was to end in
the overwhelming defeat of Bryan, an Italian scholar published in the
city of Rome the remarkable work which is now for the first time offered
to American readers.

To publish this book in America at that time would have been an
impossibility. The American socialist movement was then hardly more than
an association of immigrants who had brought their socialism with them
from Europe. Today it numbers at least half a million adherents, and its
platform is an embodiment of the ideas first adequately stated in the
Communist Manifesto of 1848, and now first adequately explained and
elaborated in this remarkable work of Labriola.

The central and fundamental proposition of socialism is not any scheme
for reconstructing society, on a cut-and-dried programme, nor again is
it any particular mathematical formula showing to what extent the
laborer is robbed by the present system of the fruits of his labor; it
is precisely this Historical Materialism, which Labriola has so
admirably explained in the present work.

Some idea of the p