so many books of the philosophy of history and of
_Kulturgeschichte_. The unity of social form, that is to say, the unity
of the capitalistic form of production, to which the bourgeoisie has
tended for centuries, is reflected in the conception of the unity of
history in more suggestive forms than the mind could ever have received
from the narrow cosmopolitanism of the Roman empire or the one-sided
cosmopolitanism of the Catholic Church.

But this unification of the social life, by the working of the
capitalist form of production, developed itself from the beginning, and
continues to develop itself, not according to preconceived rules, plans
and designs, but, on the contrary, by reason of frictions and struggles,
which in their sum form a colossal complication of antitheses. War
without and war within. Struggle incessant among the nations, and
struggles incessant between the members of each nation. And the
interlacings of the deeds and the action of so many emulators,
competitors and adversaries is so complicated, that the co-ordination of
events very often escapes the attention, and it is a very difficult
thing to discover their intimate connection. The struggle which actually
exists among men, the struggles which now, with various methods, are
unfolding among nations and within nations, have come to make us
understand better in the midst of what difficulties the history of the
past has unfolded. If the bourgeois ideology, reflecting the tendency to
capitalist unification, has proclaimed the progress of the human race,
historical materialism, on the contrary, and without proclamation, has
discovered that these are the antitheses which have thus far been the
cause and the motive of all historical events.

Thus the movement of history, taken in general, appears to us as it were
oscillating;--or rather, to use a more appropriate image, it seems that
it is unfolding on a line often interrupted, and at certain moments it
seems to return upon itself, sometimes it stretches out, removing itself
far from the point of departure:--in an actual zigzag.

Granted the internal complication of every society, and granted the
meeting of several societies on the field of competition (from the
ingenuous forms of robbery, rapine and piracy to the refined methods of
the elegant sport of the stock exchange) it is natural that every
historical result, when it is measured in the one measure of individual
expectation, appears very often li