cepted opinions of cultured people,
or of those who pass for such, they make up an immense mass of
prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance opposes to
the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn
up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional
politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and
offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.

To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions,
these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this
conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively
acting--that is to say, men in their various and diversified social
relations,--this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim
of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes
the explanation of the historical _processus_.

A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of
individuals, but a _plexus_ of men organized in such and such a fashion
by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an
artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason
of permanent proximity;--this nation, on a certain circumscribed and
limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such
and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous
labor;--this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus
divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor
which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already
developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which has
already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes;--this
nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to
the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle,
which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products,
conformably to its way of producing;--this nation, which by all these
relations constitutes a society in which either by habits of mutual
accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence
suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of
giving birth to legal-political relations which result in the formation
of the state;--this nation, which by the organization of the state,
which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating
inequalities, by