as seen to appear both
in the origins of the bourgeoisie (whose intrinsic _processus_ was
already illustrated by the science of economics), and in this new
appearance of the proletariat. The relativity of economic laws was
discovered, but at the same time their relative necessity was
understood. Herein lies the whole method and justification of the new
materialistic conception of history. Those deceive themselves who,
calling it the economic interpretation of history, think they understand
it completely. That designation is better suited, and is only suited, to
certain analytic attempts,[25] which, taking separately and in a
distinct fashion on the one side the economic forms and categories, and
on the other, for example, law, legislation, politics, customs,--proceed
to study the reciprocal influences of the different sides of life
considered in an abstract fashion. Quite different is our position. Ours
is the organic conception of history. The totality of the unity of
social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is economics
itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to reappear in as
many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as a substructure
for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend the so-called
economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all the rest, as
our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else, to form an
historic conception of economics and to explain the other changes by
means of its changes. Therein lies our answer to all the criticisms
which come to us from all the domains of learned ignorance, not
excepting the socialists who are insufficiently grounded and who are
sentimental or hysterical. And we explain our position thus as Marx has
done in his Capital, not the first book of critical communism, but the
last great book of bourgeois economics.

At the moment when the Manifesto was written the historic horizon did
not go beyond the classic world, the scarcely studied German antiquities
and the Biblical tradition which had only lately been reduced to the
prosaic conditions of all profane history. Our historic horizon is now
quite another thing, since it extends to the Aryan antiquities and to
the ancient deposits of Egypt and Mesopotamia which precede all the
Semitic traditions. And it extends still further back into prehistory,
that is to say, into, unwritten history. Morgan has given us a knowledge
of ancient society, that is to