of the bourgeoisie, at the moment of the decline of the
Middle Ages, is equally clear, and it would not be difficult to find,
for example, in the development of the city of Florence, an attested
series of developments, in which the economic and statistical movement
finds a perfect correspondence in the political relations and a
sufficient illustration in the contemporary development of intelligence
already reduced into prose and stripped, in great part, of ideological
illusions. Nor would it be impossible to reduce, now, under the definite
visual angle of materialism, the whole of ancient Roman history. But for
that, and particularly, for the primitive period, there are no direct
sources; they are, on the contrary, abundant in Greece, from popular
tradition, the epic, and the authentic juridical inscriptions, down to
the pragmatic studies of the historical social relations. At Rome, on
the other hand, the struggles for political rights carry with them
almost always the economic reasons upon which they rest. Thus, the
decline of definite classes, the formation of new classes, the movement
of conquest, the change of the laws and of the forms of political array,
appear to us with perfect clearness. This Roman history is hard and
prosaic; it was never clad with these ideological complements which
were suited to Greek life. The rigid prose of conquest, of planned
colonization, of institutions and of the forms of law, conquered and
devised for solving the problems arising from definite frictions and
contrasts, makes all Roman history a chain of events which follow each
other in a sequence which is grossly evident.

The true problem consists, indeed, not in substituting sociology for
history, as if the latter had been an appearance which conceals behind
it a secret reality, but in understanding history as a whole, in all its
intuitive manifestations, and in understanding it through the aid of
economic sociology. It is not a question of separating the accident from
the substance, the appearance from the reality, the phenomenon from the
intrinsic kernel, or applying any other formula used by the partisans of
any species of scholasticism, but of explaining the connection and the
_complexus_ precisely in so far as it is a connection and a _complexus_.
It is not merely a question of discovering and determining the social
groundwork, and then of making men appear upon it like so many
marionettes, whose threads are held and moved,