less clearness and consciousness their actual
and suggested expression in the programmes of the political parties:
free exchange or tariffs on grain in England, and so on. The conception
of history changed to the observer in France, on the right wing as on
the left wing of the literary parties, from Guizot to Louis Blanc and to
the modest Cabet. Sociology was the need of the time and if it sought in
vain its theoretic expression in Auguste Comte, a belated scholastic, it
found its artist in Balzac who was the actual inventor of class
psychology. To put into the classes and into their frictions the real
subject of history and the movement of this in their movement,--this is
what was then on the point of being studied and discovered, and it was
necessary to fix a theory of this in precise terms.

Man has made his history not by a metaphorical evolution nor with a view
of walking on a line of preconceived progress. He has made it by
creating his own conditions, that is to say, by creating through his
labor an artificial environment, by developing successively his
technical aptitudes and by accumulating and transforming the products of
his activity in this new environment. We have but one single history and
we cannot compare real history, which is actually made, with another
which is simply possible. Where shall we find the laws of this formation
and of this development? The very ancient formations are not evident at
first sight. But bourgeois society because it is born recently and has
not yet reached its full development, even in all parts of Europe, bears
within itself the embryonic traces of its origin and its _processus_,
and it puts them in full evidence in countries where it is in process
of birth before our eyes, as for example, in Japan. In so far as it is
society which transforms all the products of human labor into
commodities by means of capital, society which assumes the proletariat
or creates it and which bears within itself the anxiety, the trouble and
the uncertainty of continuous innovations, it is born in determined
times according to clear methods which can be indicated although they
may be varied. In fact in different countries it has different modes of
development. In Italy, for example, it begins before all the others and
then stops. In England it is the product of three centuries of economic
expropriation of the old forms of production, or of the old
proprietorship, to speak the language of the jurist