elief that the obstacles to the
uniformity of human development rest exclusively upon natural and
immediate causes. These natural obstacles are either sufficiently
problematical, as is the case with races, no one of which shows the
privilege of birth in its history, or they are, as is the case in
geographical differences, insufficient to explain the development of the
completely different historico-social conditions on one and the same
geographical field. And as the historic movement dates precisely from
the time when the natural obstacles have already been in great part
either vanquished or notably circumscribed, thanks to the creation of
an artificial field upon which it has been given to men to develop
themselves further, it is evident that the successive obstacles to the
uniformity of progress must be sought in the proper and intrinsic
conditions of the social structure itself.

This structure has thus far started in forms of political organization,
the object of which is to try to hold in equilibrium the economic
inequalities; consequently this organization, as I have said more than
once, is constantly unstable. From the point where there is a known
history; it is the history of society tending to form the state, or
having already constructed it completely. And the state is this
struggle, within and without, because it is, above all, the organ and
the instrument of a larger or smaller part of society against all the
rest of society itself, in so far as the latter rests upon the economic
domination of man over man in a more or less direct and explicit
fashion, according as the different degree of the development of
production, of its natural means and its artificial instruments,
requires either chattel slavery, or the serfdom of the soil, or the
"free" wage system. This society of antitheses, which forms a state, is
always, although in different forms and various modes, the opposition of
the city to the country, of the artisan to the peasant, of the
proletarian to the employer, of the capitalist to the laborer, and so on
_ad infinitum_, and it always ends, with various complications and
various methods, in an hierarchy, whether it be in a fixed scaffolding
of privilege, as in the Middle Ages, or whether, under the disguised
forms of supposed equal rights for all, it be produced by the automatic
action of economic competition, as in our time.

To this economic hierarchy corresponds, according to various modes, in
d