of 93, was nothing else than a duplicate and the
ideological complement of economics, to the extent that often the thing
and its complement are confounded in one in the mind and in the
postulates of writers; of this we have a typical example in the
Physiocrats.

In so far as it was a doctrine it separated, distinguished and analyzed
the elements and the forms of the _processus_ of production, of
circulation and of distribution and reduced them all into categories:
money, money capital, interest, profit, land rent, wages, etc. It
marched, sure of itself, accumulating its analyses from Petty to
Ricardo. The sole mistress of the field, it met only rare objections. It
started from two hypotheses which it did not take the trouble to justify
since they appeared so evident; namely, that the social order which it
illustrated was the natural order, and that private property in the
means of production was one and the same thing with human liberty; all
of which made wage labor and the inferiority of the wage laborers into
necessary conditions. In other terms, it did not recognize the historic
character of the forms which it studied. The antitheses which it met on
its way in its attempt at systematization, after several vain attempts
it tried to eliminate logically as was the case with Ricardo in his
struggle against the income from land rents.

The beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by violent crises and
by those first labor movements which have their immediate origin in the
distress attending lockouts. The ideal of the "natural order" is
overthrown. Wealth has engendered poverty. The great industry in
changing all social relations has increased vices, maladies and
subjection. It has, in a word, caused degeneration. Progress has
engendered retrogression. What must be done that progress may engender
nothing else but progress, that is to say, prosperity, health, security,
education and intellectual development equal for all? With this question
Owen is wholly concerned and he shares with Fourier and Saint Simon this
characteristic that he no longer appeals to self-sacrifice and to
religion, and that he wishes to resolve and surmount the social
antitheses without diminishing the technical and industrial energy of
man, but rather to increase this. It is by this road that Owen became a
communist and he is the first who became so in the environment created
by modern industry. The antithesis rests entirely on the contradiction