ct, if we assume that the critical communist, the
sociologist of economic materialism, or as he is commonly called, the
Marxist, has the necessary critical preparation, the habit of historical
study, and also the gift required for an orderly and vivacious
narration, there is no reason for affirming that he cannot write
history, as heretofore the partisans of all other political schools have
written it.

We have the example of Marx, and there is an argument from fact which
admits of no reply. But he was the first and the principal author of the
decisive concepts of this doctrine, reducing it at once into an
instrument of political orientation, in his character of an incomparable
publicist, during the revolutionary period of 1848 to 1850. And then he
applied it with the greatest precision in that essay entitled Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of which it may be said today, at a great
distance, and after so many publications, if we except certain
infinitesimal details and certain false forecasts, that it would be
possible to make neither corrections nor important complements. I will
not repeat, since I am not writing a bibliography, the list of the
different writings of Marx or Engels--of which we have so many attempts
from the Peasants' War (1850) down to his posthumous writings on The
Present Unity of Germany--which are an application of the doctrine, nor
those of their successors and of the popularizers of scientific
socialism. Even in the socialist press we may read, from time to time,
valuable attempts at explanation of certain political events, in which
is found, precisely by reason of historic materialism, a clearness of
vision which would be sought in vain among the writers and the
disputants who have not yet torn away the fantastic veils and
ideological envelopes of history.

Here is not the place to take up the defense of an abstract thesis, as
an advocate would do. It is evident, nevertheless, in all the histories
which have been written up to the present time, that there is always at
bottom, if not in the explicit intentions of the writers, certainly in
their spirit, a tendency, a principle, a general view of life; and so
this doctrine, which has enabled us to study the social structure in an
objective manner, must finally direct with precision the researches of
history, and must end in a narrative complete, transparent and integral.

Helps are not lacking.

_Economics_, which, as everyone sees it