is
to say, that they are the irrational element in the pretended domain of
reason.

History then has not been a _processus_ for arriving at the empire of
reason in law; it has thus far been nothing else than a series of
changes in the form of subjection and servitude. History then consists
entirely in the struggle of interests, and law is but the authoritative
expression of the interests which have triumphed.

These formulae indeed do not permit us to explain, by the immediate
examination of the various interests which are at its base, every
particular law which has appeared in history. The facts of history are
very complicated; but these general formulae suffice to indicate the
style and the method of research which has been substituted for legal
ideology.

IX.

Here I must give certain formulae.

Granted the conditions of the development of labor and the instruments
appropriated to it, the economic structure of society, that is to say,
the form of production of the immediate means of life, determines, on an
artificial field, _in the first place and directly_, all the rest of the
practical activity of those associated, and the variation of this
activity in the _processus_ which we call history, that is to say:--the
formation, the frictions, the struggles and the erosions of the
classes;--the corresponding regulations relative to law and
morality;--and the reasons and modes of subordination and subjection of
men toward men and the corresponding exercise of dominion and authority,
in fine, that which gives birth to the State and that which constitutes
it. It determines, _in the second place_, the tendency and in great
part, _in an indirect fashion_, the objects of imagination and of
thought in the production of art, religion and science.

The products of the _first_ and of the _second stage_, in consequence of
the interests which they create, the habits which they engender, the
persons whom they group and whose spirit and inclinations they specify,
tend to fix themselves and isolate themselves as independent entities;
and thence comes that empirical view, according to which different
independent factors, having an efficacy and a rhythmic movement of their
own, contribute to form the historic _processus_ and the social
configurations which successively result from it. It is the social
classes, in so far as they consist in differentiations of interests,
which unfold in definite ways and in forms of opposition (--