simism, more or less romantic, of the _laudatores
temporis acti_ from De Maistre to Carlyle. The satire of liberalism
invaded minds and literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Then begins that criticism of society, which is the first step in all
sociology. It was necessary before all else to overthrow the ideology,
which had accumulated and expressed itself in so many doctrines of the
Natural Right or the Social Contract. It was necessary to get into
contact with the facts which the rapid events of so intensive a
_processus_ imposed upon the attention in forms so new and startling.

Here appears Owen, incomparable at all points of view, but especially
for the clearness which he displayed in the determination of the causes
of the new poverty, even though he was but a child in his quest of the
means for overcoming it. It was necessary to arrive at the objective
criticism of economics, which appeared for the first time, in one-sided
and reactionary forms, in Sismondi. In this period where the conditions
of a new historic science were ripening, arose so many different forms
of socialism, utopian, one-sided or completely extravagant, which never
reached the proletarians, either because these had no political
consciousness, or if they had any, it manifested itself in sudden
starts, as in the French conspiracies and riots from 1830 to 1848, or
they kept on the political ground of immediate reforms, as is the case
with the Chartists. And nevertheless all this socialism, however
Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate
and often salutary criticism of economics--a one-sided criticism,
indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical
conception.

All these forms of criticism, partial, one-sided and incomplete had
their culmination in scientific socialism. This is no longer subjective
criticism applied to things but the discovery of the self-criticism
which is in the things themselves. The real criticism of society is
society, itself, which, by the antithetic conditions of the contrasts
upon which it rests, engenders from itself, within itself, the
contradiction, and finally triumphs over this by its passage into a new
form. The solution of the existing antitheses is the proletariat, which
the proletarians themselves know or do not know. Even as their misery
has become the condition of present society, so in their misery is the
justification of the new proletarian r