ch were realized the great
politico-economic revolutions, that is to say, in that epoch which,
considered in its political forms, is called liberal, but which,
considered in its basis, by reason of the domination of capital over the
proletarian mass, is the epoch of anarchical production. The change in
ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected
little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions
of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the
mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired
the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct
conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes
upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and
metaphysical hypotheses to take refuge finally in this prosaic
assertion: in the interpretation of history we must limit ourselves to
the objective co-ordination of the determining conditions and of the
determined effects. The materialistic conception marks the culminating
point of this new tendency in the investigation of the historic-social
laws, in so far as it is not a particular case of a generic sociology,
or of a generic philosophy of the State, of law, and of history, but the
solution of all doubts and all uncertainties which accompany the other
forms of philosophizing upon human affairs, and the beginning of their
integral interpretation.

It is thus an easy thing, especially in the way it has been done by
certain shallow critics, to find precursors for Marx and Engels, who
first defined this doctrine in its fundamental points. And when did it
ever occur to any of their disciples, even of the strictest school, to
represent these two thinkers as miracle-workers? What is more, if we
wish to go on a search after the premises of the logical creation of
Marx and Engels, it will not suffice to stop at those who are called the
precursors of socialism, Saint-Simon for example, and his predecessors,
or the philosophers, particularly Hegel, or the economists who had laid
bare the anatomy of the society which produces commodities; we must go
back to the very formation of modern society, and then at last declare
triumphantly that the theory is a plagiarism from the things that it
explains.

The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts
of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of
itself sin