e
doctrines, whatever may have been the subjective intention and spirit of
the authors--as in the contrasting cases of the conservative Hobbes and
the proletarian Rousseau--were all revolutionary in their substance and
their effects. Under all of them is always found, as a stimulus and
motive, the material and moral needs of a new age, which, by reason of
historic conditions, were those of the bourgeoisie. Thus it was
necessary to wage war in the name of liberty upon tradition, the Church,
privileges, fixed classes, that is to say, the orders and conditions,
and consequently upon the State which was or appeared to be their
author, and then upon the special privileges of commerce, the arts,
labor and science. And man was studied in an abstract fashion, that is
to say, individuals taken separately, emancipated and delivered by a
logical abstraction from their historic connection and from every social
necessity: in the mind of many the concept of society was reduced to
atoms, and it even seemed natural to the greatest number to believe that
society is only the sum of the individuals composing it. The abstract
categories of individual psychology sufficed for the explanation of all
human facts; and this is how in all these systems, nothing is spoken of
but fear, self-love, egoism, voluntary obedience, tendency toward
happiness, the original goodness of man, the freedom of contract and of
the moral consciousness, and of the moral instinct or sense, and also
many other similar abstract and generic things, as if they were
sufficient to explain history, and to create a new history out of its
fragments.

By the fact that all society was entering upon an acute crisis, its
horror at the antique, at what was superannuated, at what was
traditional and had been organized for centuries, and the presentiment
of a renovation of all human life, finally produced a total eclipse of
the ideas of historic necessity and social necessity, that is to say, of
those ideas which, barely indicated by the ancient philosophers, and so
developed in our century, had at this period of revolutionary
rationalism only rare representatives, like Vico, Montesquieu, and, in
part, Quesnay. In this historic situation, which gave birth to a
literature that was nimble, destructive and very popular, is found the
reason for what Louis Blanc with a certain emphasis has called
individualism. Later some have thought they saw in this word the
expression of a permanent