A sad change in
opinions
here below!
Proudhon - What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government
The depth
and variety of the questions which it embraces are infinite. We hardly
know the A B C of this science, as is proved by the fact that we have
not yet emerged from the period of systems, and have not ceased to
put the authority of the majority in the place of facts. A certain
philological society decided linguistic questions by a plurality
of votes. Our parliamentary debates--were their results less
pernicious--would be even more ridiculous. The task of the true
publicist, in the age in which we live, is to close the mouths of
quacks and charlatans, and to teach the public to demand demonstrations,
instead of being contented with symbols and programmes. Before talking
of the science itself, it is necessary to ascertain its object, and
discover its method and principle. The ground must be cleared of the
prejudices which encumber it. Such is the mission of the nineteenth
century.
For my part, I have sworn fidelity to my work of demolition, and I will
not cease to pursue the truth through the ruins and rubbish. I hate to
see a thing half done; and it will be believed without any assurance of
mine, that, having dared to raise my hand against the Holy Ark, I shall
not rest contented with the removal of the cover. The mysteries of the
sanctuary of iniquity must be unveiled, the tables of the old alliance
broken, and all the objects of the ancient faith thrown in a heap to the
swine. A charter has been given to us,--a resume of political science,
the monument of twenty legislatures. A code has been written,--the pride
of a conqueror, and the summary of ancient wisdom. Well! of this charter
and this code not one article shall be left standing upon another!
The time has come for the wise to choose their course, and prepare for
reconstruction.
But, since a destroyed error necessarily implies a counter-truth, I will
not finish this treatise without solving the first problem of political
science,--that which receives the attention of all minds.
WHEN PROPERTY IS ABOLISHED, WHAT WILL BE THE FORM OF SOCIETY! WILL IT BE
COMMUNISM?
PART SECOND.
% 1. --Of the Causes of our Mistakes. The Origin of Property.
The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following
question has been solved:--
Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold?
Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred
in the case of man? Why is man, who was born for society, not yet
associated?
I have said that human society is COMPLEX in its nature. Though this
expression is inaccurate, the fact to which it refers is none the less
true; namely, the classification of talents and capacities. But who
does not see that these talents and capacities, owing to their infinite
variety, give rise to an infinite variety of wills, and that the
character, the inclinations, and--if I may venture to use the
expression--the form of the ego, are necessarily changed; so that in
the order of liberty, as in the order of intelligence, there are as
many types as individuals, as many characters as heads, whose tastes,
fancies, and propensities, being modified by dissimilar ideas,
must necessarily conflict? Man, by his nature and his instinct, is
predestined to society; but his personality, ever varying, is adverse to
it.
In societies of animals, all the members do exactly the same things.
The same genius directs them; the same will animates them. A society of
beasts is a collection of atoms, round, hooked, cubical, or triangular,
but always perfectly identical. These personalities do not vary, and we
might say that a single ego governs them all. The labors which animals
perform, whether alone or in society, are exact reproductions of their
character. Just as the swarm of bees is composed of individual bees,
alike in nature and equal in value, so the honeycomb is formed of
individual cells, constantly and invariably repeated.
But man's intelligence, fitted for his social destiny and his personal
needs, is of a very different composition, and therefore gives rise to
a wonderful variety of human wills. In the bee, the will is constant
and uniform, because the instinct which guides it is invariable, and
constitutes the animal's whole life and nature. In man, talent varies,
and the mind wavers; consequently, his will is multiform and vague. He
seeks society, but dislikes constraint and monotony; he is an imitator,
but fond of his own ideas, and passionately in love with his works.
If, like the bees, every man were born possessed of talent, perfect
knowledge of certain kinds, and, in a word, an innate acquaintance
with the functions he has to perform, but destitute of reflective and
reasoning faculties, society would organize itself. We should see one
man plowing a field, another building houses; this one forging metals,
that one cutting clothes; and still others storing the products, and
superintending their distribution. Each one, without inquiring as to the
object of his labor, and without troubling himself about the extent of
his task, would obey orders, bring his product, receive his salary, and
would then rest for a time; keeping meanwhile no accounts, envious of
nobody, and satisfied with the distributor, who never would be unjust to
any one. Kings would govern, but would not reign; for to reign is to be
a _proprietor a l'engrais_, as Bonaparte said: and having no commands
to give, since all would be at their posts, they would serve rather as
rallying centres than as authorities or counsellors. It would be a state
of ordered communism, but not a society entered into deliberately and
freely.
But man acquires skill only by observation and experiment. He reflects,
then, since to observe and experiment is to reflect; he reasons,
since he cannot help reasoning. In reflecting, he becomes deluded; in
reasoning, he makes mistakes, and, thinking himself right, persists in
them. He is wedded to his opinions; he esteems himself, and despises
others. Consequently, he isolates himself; for he could not submit
to the majority without renouncing his will and his reason,--that is,
without disowning himself, which is impossible. And this isolation, this
intellectual egotism, this individuality of opinion, lasts until the
truth is demonstrated to him by observation and experience. A final
illustration will make these facts still clearer.
If to the blind but convergent and harmonious instincts of a swarm
of bees should be suddenly added reflection and judgment, the little
society could not long exist. In the first place, the bees would not
fail to try some new industrial process; for instance, that of making
their cells round or square. All sorts of systems and inventions would
be tried, until long experience, aided by geometry, should show them
that the hexagonal shape is the best. Then insurrections would occur.
The drones would be told to provide for themselves, and the queens to
labor; jealousy would spread among the laborers; discords would burst
forth; soon each one would want to produce on his own account; and
finally the hive would be abandoned, and the bees would perish. Evil
would be introduced into the honey-producing republic by the power of
reflection,--the very faculty which ought to constitute its glory.
Thus, moral evil, or, in this case, disorder in society, is naturally
explained by our power of reflection. The mother of poverty, crime,
insurrection, and war was inequality of conditions; which was the
daughter of property, which was born of selfishness, which was
engendered by private opinion, which descended in a direct line from
the autocracy of reason. Man, in his infancy, is neither criminal
nor barbarous, but ignorant and inexperienced. Endowed with imperious
instincts which are under the control of his reasoning faculty, at first
he reflects but little, and reasons inaccurately; then, benefiting by
his mistakes, he rectifies his ideas, and perfects his reason. In the
first place, it is the savage sacrificing all his possessions for
a trinket, and then repenting and weeping; it is Esau selling his
birthright for a mess of pottage, and afterwards wishing to cancel
the bargain; it is the civilized workman laboring in insecurity, and
continually demanding that his wages be increased, neither he nor his
employer understanding that, in the absence of equality, any salary,
however large, is always insufficient. Then it is Naboth dying to defend
his inheritance; Cato tearing out his entrails that he might not be
enslaved; Socrates drinking the fatal cup in defence of liberty of
thought; it is the third estate of '89 reclaiming its liberty: soon it
will be the people demanding equality of wages and an equal division of
the means of production.
Man is born a social being,--that is, he seeks equality and justice in
all his relations, but he loves independence and praise. The difficulty
of satisfying these various desires at the same time is the primary
cause of the despotism of the will, and the appropriation which results
from it. On the other hand, man always needs a market for his products;
unable to compare values of different kinds, he is satisfied to judge
approximately, according to his passion and caprice; and he engages in
dishonest commerce, which always results in wealth and poverty. Thus,
the greatest evils which man suffers arise from the misuse of his social
nature, of this same justice of which he is so proud, and which he
applies with such deplorable ignorance.
The practice of justice is a science which, when once discovered
and diffused, will sooner or later put an end to social disorder, by
teaching us our rights and duties.
This progressive and painful education of our instinct, this slow
and imperceptible transformation of our spontaneous perceptions into
deliberate knowledge, does not take place among the animals, whose
instincts remain fixed, and never become enlightened.
"According to Frederic Cuvier, who has so clearly distinguished between
instinct and intelligence in animals, 'instinct is a natural and
inherent faculty, like feeling, irritability, or intelligence. The wolf
and the fox who recognize the traps in which they have been caught, and
who avoid them; the dog and the horse, who understand the meaning of
several of our words, and who obey us,--thereby show _intelligence_.
The dog who hides the remains of his dinner, the bee who constructs his
cell, the bird who builds his nest, act only from _instinct_. Even man
has instincts: it is a special instinct which leads the new-born
child to suck. But, in man, almost every thing is accomplished by
intelligence; and intelligence supplements instinct. The opposite is
true of animals: their instinct is given them as a supplement to their
intelligence. '"--Flourens: Analytical Summary of the Observations of F.
Cuvier.
"We can form a clear idea of instinct only by admitting that animals
have in their _sensorium_, images or innate and constant sensations,
which influence their actions in the same manner that ordinary and
accidental sensations commonly do. It is a sort of dream, or vision,
which always follows them and in all which relates to instinct they may
be regarded as somnambulists. "--F. Cuvier: Introduction to the Animal
Kingdom.
Intelligence and instinct being common, then, though in different
degrees, to animals and man, what is the distinguishing characteristic
of the latter? According to F. Cuvier, it is REFLECTION OR THE POWER
OF INTELLECTUALLY CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS BY A SURVEY OF
OURSELVES. This lacks clearness, and requires an explanation.
If we grant intelligence to animals, we must also grant them, in some
degree, reflection; for, the first cannot exist without the second, as
F. Cuvier himself has proved by numerous examples. But notice that the
learned observer defines the kind of reflection which distinguishes us
from the animals as the POWER OF CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS. This
I shall endeavour to interpret, by developing to the best of my ability
the laconism of the philosophical naturalist.
The intelligence acquired by animals never modifies the operations which
they perform by instinct: it is given them only as a provision against
unexpected accidents which might disturb these operations. In man, on
the contrary, instinctive action is constantly changing into deliberate
action. Thus, man is social by instinct, and is every day becoming
social by reflection and choice. At first, he formed his words by
instinct;[1] he was a poet by inspiration: to-day, he makes grammar a
science, and poetry an art. His conception of God and a future life is
spontaneous and instinctive, and his expressions of this conception
have been, by turns, monstrous, eccentric, beautiful, comforting, and
terrible. All these different creeds, at which the frivolous irreligion
of the eighteenth century mocked, are modes of expression of the
religious sentiment. Some day, man will explain to himself the character
of the God whom he believes in, and the nature of that other world to
which his soul aspires.
[1] "The problem of the origin of language is solved by the distinction
made by Frederic Cuvier between instinct and intelligence. Language
is not a premeditated, arbitrary, or conventional device; nor is it
communicated or revealed to us by God. Language is an instinctive and
unpremeditated creation of man, as the hive is of the bee. In this
sense, it may be said that language is not the work of man, since it is
not the work of his mind. Further, the mechanism of language seems
more wonderful and ingenious when it is not regarded as the result of
reflection. This fact is one of the most curious and indisputable which
philology has observed. See, among other works, a Latin essay by F. G.
Bergmann (Strasbourg, 1839), in which the learned author explains how
the phonetic germ is born of sensation; how language passes through
three successive stages of development; why man, endowed at birth with
the instinctive faculty of creating a language, loses this faculty
as fast as his mind develops; and that the study of languages is real
natural history,--in fact, a science. France possesses to-day several
philologists of the first rank, endowed with rare talents and deep
philosophic insight,--modest savants developing a science almost without
the knowledge of the public; devoting themselves to studies which are
scornfully looked down upon, and seeming to shun applause as much as
others seek it. "
All that he does from instinct man despises; or, if he admires it, it
is as Nature's work, not as his own. This explains the obscurity
which surrounds the names of early inventors; it explains also our
indifference to religious matters, and the ridicule heaped upon
religious customs. Man esteems only the products of reflection and of
reason. The most wonderful works of instinct are, in his eyes, only
lucky GOD-SENDS; he reserves the name DISCOVERY--I had almost said
creation--for the works of intelligence. Instinct is the source of
passion and enthusiasm; it is intelligence which causes crime and
virtue.
In developing his intelligence, man makes use of not only his own
observations, but also those of others. He keeps an account of his
experience, and preserves the record; so that the race, as well as
the individual, becomes more and more intelligent. The animals do not
transmit their knowledge; that which each individual accumulates dies
with him.
It is not enough, then, to say that we are distinguished from the
animals by reflection, unless we mean thereby the CONSTANT TENDENCY OF
OUR INSTINCT TO BECOME INTELLIGENCE. While man is governed by instinct,
he is unconscious of his acts. He never would deceive himself, and never
would be troubled by errors, evils, and disorder, if, like the animals,
instinct were his only guide. But the Creator has endowed us with
reflection, to the end that our instinct might become intelligence;
and since this reflection and resulting knowledge pass through various
stages, it happens that in the beginning our instinct is opposed, rather
than guided, by reflection; consequently, that our power of thought
leads us to act in opposition to our nature and our end; that, deceiving
ourselves, we do and suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards
good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by
the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one
and avoid the other.
Thus, evil--or error and its consequences--is the firstborn son of
the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good,
or truth, must inevitably be the second child. Or, to again employ the
figure, evil is the product of incest between adverse powers; good will
sooner or later be the legitimate child of their holy and mysterious
union.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind
comparisons. But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to
spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so
property is subsequent to communism. Communism--or association in a
simple form--is the necessary object and original aspiration of the
social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and
establishes itself. It is the first phase of human civilization. In this
state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM--man
draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the
milk and flesh of animals. Little by little this communism--negative
as long as man does not produce--tends to become positive and organic
through the development of labor and industry. But it is then that the
sovereignty of thought, and the terrible faculty of reasoning logically
or illogically, teach man that, if equality is the sine qua non of
society, communism is the first species of slavery. To express this idea
by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term
of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism,
is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS. When we have discovered the third
term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution. Now, this
synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the
antithesis. Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their
characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to
sociability. The union of the two remainders will give us the true form
of human association.
% 2. --Characteristics of Communism and of Property.
I. I ought not to conceal the fact that property and communism have been
considered always the only possible forms of society. This deplorable
error has been the life of property. The disadvantages of communism are
so obvious that its critics never have needed to employ much eloquence
to thoroughly disgust men with it. The irreparability of the injustice
which it causes, the violence which it does to attractions and
repulsions, the yoke of iron which it fastens upon the will, the moral
torture to which it subjects the conscience, the debilitating effect
which it has upon society; and, to sum it all up, the pious and
stupid uniformity which it enforces upon the free, active, reasoning,
unsubmissive personality of man, have shocked common sense, and
condemned communism by an irrevocable decree.
The authorities and examples cited in its favor disprove it. The
communistic republic of Plato involved slavery; that of Lycurgus
employed Helots, whose duty it was to produce for their masters, thus
enabling the latter to devote themselves exclusively to athletic sports
and to war. Even J. J. Rousseau--confounding communism and equality--has
said somewhere that, without slavery, he did not think equality of
conditions possible. The communities of the early Church did not last
the first century out, and soon degenerated into monasteries. In those
of the Jesuits of Paraguay, the condition of the blacks is said by all
travellers to be as miserable as that of slaves; and it is a fact that
the good Fathers were obliged to surround themselves with ditches and
walls to prevent their new converts from escaping. The followers
of Baboeuf--guided by a lofty horror of property rather than by any
definite belief--were ruined by exaggeration of their principles; the
St. Simonians, lumping communism and inequality, passed away like a
masquerade. The greatest danger to which society is exposed to-day is
that of another shipwreck on this rock.
Singularly enough, systematic communism--the deliberate negation of
property--is conceived under the direct influence of the proprietary
prejudice; and property is the basis of all communistic theories.
The members of a community, it is true, have no private property; but
the community is proprietor, and proprietor not only of the goods, but
of the persons and wills. In consequence of this principle of absolute
property, labor, which should be only a condition imposed upon man by
Nature, becomes in all communities a human commandment, and therefore
odious. Passive obedience, irreconcilable with a reflecting will, is
strictly enforced. Fidelity to regulations, which are always defective,
however wise they may be thought, allows of no complaint. Life, talent,
and all the human faculties are the property of the State, which has
the right to use them as it pleases for the common good. Private
associations are sternly prohibited, in spite of the likes and dislikes
of different natures, because to tolerate them would be to introduce
small communities within the large one, and consequently private
property; the strong work for the weak, although this ought to be left
to benevolence, and not enforced, advised, or enjoined; the industrious
work for the lazy, although this is unjust; the clever work for the
foolish, although this is absurd; and, finally, man--casting aside his
personality, his spontaneity, his genius, and his affections--humbly
annihilates himself at the feet of the majestic and inflexible Commune!
Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the
exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation
of the strong by the weak. In property, inequality of conditions is
the result of force, under whatever name it be disguised: physical and
mental force; force of events, chance, FORTUNE; force of accumulated
property, &c. In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity
on a level with excellence. This damaging equation is repellent to the
conscience, and causes merit to complain; for, although it may be
the duty of the strong to aid the weak, they prefer to do it out of
generosity,--they never will endure a comparison. Give them equal
opportunities of labor, and equal wages, but never allow their jealousy
to be awakened by mutual suspicion of unfaithfulness in the performance
of the common task.
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the
law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to
labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He
wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to
choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from
judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not
through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the
free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest
feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the
demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the
thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we
shall avoid disputes about words.
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and
equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart,
and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and
laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality
in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account
of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the
desire to shirk.
II. Property, in its turn, violates equality by the rights of exclusion
and increase, and freedom by despotism. The former effect of property
having been sufficiently developed in the last three chapters, I will
content myself here with establishing by a final comparison, its perfect
identity with robbery.
The Latin words for robber are _fur_ and _latro;_ the former taken from
the Greek {GREEK m }, from {GREEK m }, Latin _fero_, I carry away; the
latter from {GREEK 'i }, I play the part of a brigand, which is derived
from {GREEK i }, Latin _lateo_, I conceal myself. The Greeks have also
{GREEK ncg }, from {GREEK ncg }, I filch, whose radical consonants are
the same as those of {GREEK ' cg }, I cover, I conceal. Thus, in these
languages, the idea of a robber is that of a man who conceals, carries
away, or diverts, in any manner whatever, a thing which does not belong
to him.
The Hebrews expressed the same idea by the word _gannab_,--robber,--from
the verb _ganab_, which means to put away, to turn aside: _lo thi-gnob
(Decalogue: Eighth Commandment_), thou shalt not steal,--that is, thou
shalt not hold back, thou shalt not put away any thing for thyself. That
is the act of a man who, on entering into a society into which he
agrees to bring all that he has, secretly reserves a portion, as did the
celebrated disciple Ananias.
The etymology of the French verb _voler_ is still more significant.
_Voler_, or _faire la vole_ (from the Latin _vola_, palm of the hand),
means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre; so that _le voleur_,
the robber, is the capitalist who takes all, who gets the lion's share.
Probably this verb _voler_ had its origin in the professional slang of
thieves, whence it has passed into common use, and, consequently into
the phraseology of the law.
Robbery is committed in a variety of ways, which have been very
cleverly distinguished and classified by legislators according to their
heinousness or merit, to the end that some robbers may be honored, while
others are punished.
We rob,--1. By murder on the highway; 2. Alone, or in a band; 3. By
breaking into buildings, or scaling walls; 4. By abstraction; 5. By
fraudulent bankruptcy; 6. By forgery of the handwriting of public
officials or private individuals; 7. By manufacture of counterfeit
money.
This species includes all robbers who practise their profession with no
other aid than force and open fraud. Bandits, brigands, pirates, rovers
by land and sea,--these names were gloried in by the ancient heroes, who
thought their profession as noble as it was lucrative. Nimrod, Theseus,
Jason and his Argonauts; Jephthah, David, Cacus, Romulus, Clovis and
all his Merovingian descendants; Robert Guiscard, Tancred de Hauteville,
Bohemond, and most of the Norman heroes,--were brigands and robbers. The
heroic character of the robber is expressed in this line from Horace, in
reference to Achilles,--
_"Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis_," [27]
and by this sentence from the dying words of Jacob (Gen. xlviii. ), which
the Jews apply to David, and the Christians to their Christ: _Manus ejus
contra omnes_. In our day, the robber--the warrior of the ancients--is
pursued with the utmost vigor. His profession, in the language of the
code, entails ignominious and corporal penalties, from imprisonment to
the scaffold.
A sad change in opinions here below!
We rob,--8. By cheating; 9. By swindling; 10. By abuse of trust; 11. By
games and lotteries.
This second species was encouraged by the laws of Lycurgus, in order
to sharpen the wits of the young. It is the kind practised by Ulysses,
Solon, and Sinon; by the ancient and modern Jews, from Jacob down to
Deutz; and by the Bohemians, the Arabs, and all savage tribes. Under
Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. , it was not considered dishonorable to cheat
at play. To do so was a part of the game; and many worthy people did not
scruple to correct the caprice of Fortune by dexterous jugglery.
To-day even, and in all countries, it is thought a mark of merit
among peasants, merchants, and shopkeepers to KNOW HOW TO MAKE A
BARGAIN,--that is, to deceive one's man. This is so universally
accepted, that the cheated party takes no offence. It is known with what
reluctance our government resolved upon the abolition of lotteries. It
felt that it was dealing a stab thereby at property. The pickpocket,
the blackleg, and the charlatan make especial use of their dexterity of
hand, their subtlety of mind, the magic power of their eloquence,
and their great fertility of invention. Sometimes they offer bait to
cupidity. Therefore the penal code--which much prefers intelligence
to muscular vigor--has made, of the four varieties mentioned above,
a second category, liable only to correctional, not to Ignominious,
punishments.
Let them now accuse the law of being materialistic and atheistic.
We rob,--12. By usury.
This species of robbery, so odious and so severely punished since the
publication of the Gospel, is the connecting link between forbidden and
authorized robbery. Owing to its ambiguous nature, it has given rise to
a multitude of contradictions in the laws and in morals,--contradictions
which have been very cleverly turned to account by lawyers, financiers,
and merchants. Thus the usurer, who lends on mortgage at ten, twelve,
and fifteen per cent. , is heavily fined when detected; while the banker,
who receives the same interest (not, it is true, upon a loan, but in the
way of exchange or discount,--that is, of sale), is protected by royal
privilege. But the distinction between the banker and the usurer is
a purely nominal one. Like the usurer, who lends on property, real or
personal, the banker lends on business paper; like the usurer, he
takes his interest in advance; like the usurer, he can recover from
the borrower if the property is destroyed (that is, if the note is
not redeemed),--a circumstance which makes him a money-lender, not a
money-seller. But the banker lends for a short time only, while
the usurer's loan may be for one, two, three, or more years. Now, a
difference in the duration of the loan, or the form of the act, does not
alter the nature of the transaction. As for the capitalists who invest
their money, either with the State or in commercial operations, at
three, four, and five per cent. ,--that is, who lend on usury at a
little lower rate than the bankers and usurers,--they are the flower of
society, the cream of honesty! Moderation in robbery is the height of
virtue! [28]
But what, then, is usury? Nothing is more amusing than to see these
INSTRUCTORS OF NATIONS hesitate between the authority of the Gospel,
which, they say, NEVER CAN HAVE SPOKEN IN VAIN, and the authority of
economical demonstrations. Nothing, to my mind, is more creditable
to the Gospel than this old infidelity of its pretended teachers.
Salmasius, having assimilated interest to rent, was REFUTED by Grotius,
Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Wolf, and Heineccius; and, what is more curious
still, Salmasius ADMITTED HIS ERROR. Instead of inferring from this
doctrine of Salmasius that all increase is illegitimate, and proceeding
straight on to the demonstration of Gospel equality, they arrived at
just the opposite conclusion; namely, that since everybody acknowledges
that rent is permissible, if we allow that interest does not differ
from rent, there is nothing left which can be called usury, and,
consequently, that the commandment of Jesus Christ is an ILLUSION, and
amounts to NOTHING, which is an impious conclusion.
If this memoir had appeared in the time of Bossuet, that great
theologian would have PROVED by scripture, the fathers, traditions,
councils, and popes, that property exists by Divine right, while usury
is an invention of the devil; and the heretical work would have been
burned, and the author imprisoned.
We rob,--13. By farm-rent, house-rent, and leases of all kinds.
The author of the "Provincial Letters" entertained the honest Christians
of the seventeenth century at the expense of Escobar, the Jesuit,
and the contract Mohatra. "The contract Mohatra," said Escobar, "is a
contract by which goods are bought, at a high price and on credit, to
be again sold at the same moment to the same person, cash down, and at a
lower price. " Escobar found a way to justify this kind of usury. Pascal
and all the Jansenists laughed at him. But what would the satirical
Pascal, the learned Nicole, and the invincible Arnaud have said, if
Father Antoine Escobar de Valladolid had answered them thus: "A lease
is a contract by which real estate is bought, at a high price and on
credit, to be again sold, at the expiration of a certain time, to the
same person, at a lower price; only, to simplify the transaction, the
buyer is content to pay the difference between the first sale and the
second. Either deny the identity of the lease and the contract Mohatra,
and then I will annihilate you in a moment; or, if you admit the
similarity, admit also the soundness of my doctrine: otherwise you
proscribe both interest and rent at one blow"?
In reply to this overwhelming argument of the Jesuit, the sire of
Montalte would have sounded the tocsin, and would have shouted
that society was in peril,--that the Jesuits were sapping its very
foundations.
We rob,--14. By commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his
legitimate salary.
Everybody knows the definition of commerce--THE ART OF BUYING FOR THREE
FRANCS THAT WHICH IS WORTH SIX, AND OF SELLING FOR SIX THAT WHICH IS
WORTH THREE. Between commerce thus defined and _vol a l'americaine_,
the only difference is in the relative proportion of the values
exchanged,--in short, in the amount of the profit.
We rob,--15. By making profit on our product, by accepting sinecures,
and by exacting exorbitant wages.
The farmer, who sells a certain amount of corn to the consumer, and who
during the measurement thrusts his hand into the bushel and takes out a
handful of grains, robs; the professor, whose lectures are paid for by
the State, and who through the intervention of a bookseller sells them
to the public a second time, robs; the sinecurist, who receives an
enormous product in exchange for his vanity, robs; the functionary, the
laborer, whatever he may be, who produces only one and gets paid four,
one hundred, or one thousand, robs; the publisher of this book, and I,
its author,--we rob, by charging for it twice as much as it is worth.
In recapitulation:--
Justice, after passing through the state of negative communism, called
by the ancient poets the AGE OF GOLD, commences as the right of the
strongest. In a society which is trying to organize itself, inequality
of faculties calls up the idea of merit; equite suggests the plan of
proportioning not only esteem, but also material comforts, to personal
merit; and since the highest and almost the only merit then recognized
is physical strength, the strongest, {GREEK ' eg }, and consequently
the best, {GREEK ' eg }, is entitled to the largest share; and if it
is refused him, he very naturally takes it by force. From this to the
assumption of the right of property in all things, it is but one step.
Such was justice in the heroic age, preserved, at least by tradition,
among the Greeks and Romans down to the last days of their republics.
Plato, in the "Gorgias," introduces a character named Callicles, who
spiritedly defends the right of the strongest, which Socrates, the
advocate of equality, {GREEK g e }, seriously refutes. It is related
of the great Pompey, that he blushed easily, and, nevertheless, these
words once escaped his lips: "Why should I respect the laws, when I have
arms in my hand? " This shows him to have been a man in whom the moral
sense and ambition were struggling for the mastery, and who sought to
justify his violence by the motto of the hero and the brigand.
From the right of the strongest springs the exploitation of man by
man, or bondage; usury, or the tribute levied upon the conquered by the
conqueror; and the whole numerous family of taxes, duties, monarchical
prerogatives, house-rents, farm-rents, &c. ; in one word,--property.
Force was followed by artifice, the second manifestation of justice,
which was detested by the ancient heroes, who, not excelling in that
direction, were heavy losers by it. Force was still employed, but mental
force instead of physical. Skill in deceiving an enemy by treacherous
propositions seemed deserving of reward; nevertheless, the strong always
prided themselves upon their honesty. In those days, oaths were observed
and promises kept according to the letter rather than the spirit: _Uti
lingua nuncupassit, ita jus esto_,--"As the tongue has spoken, so must
the right be," says the law of the Twelve Tables. Artifice, or rather
perfidy, was the main element in the politics of ancient Rome. Among
other examples, Vico cites the following, also quoted by Montesquieu:
The Romans had guaranteed to the Carthaginians the preservation of their
goods and their CITY,--intentionally using the word civitas, that is,
the society, the State; the Carthaginians, on the contrary, understood
them to mean the material city, urbs, and accordingly began to rebuild
their walls. They were immediately attacked on account of their
violation of the treaty, by the Romans, who, acting upon the old
heroic idea of right, did not imagine that, in taking advantage of an
equivocation to surprise their enemies, they were waging unjust war.
From artifice sprang the profits of manufactures, commerce, and banking,
mercantile frauds, and pretensions which are honored with the beautiful
names of TALENT and GENIUS, but which ought to be regarded as the last
degree of knavery and deception; and, finally, all sorts of social
inequalities.
In those forms of robbery which are prohibited by law, force and
artifice are employed alone and undisguised; in the authorized forms,
they conceal themselves within a useful product, which they use as a
tool to plunder their victim.
The direct use of violence and stratagem was early and universally
condemned; but no nation has yet got rid of that kind of robbery which
acts through talent, labor, and possession, and which is the source
of all the dilemmas of casuistry and the innumerable contradictions of
jurisprudence.
The right of force and the right of artifice--glorified by the
rhapsodists in the poems of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"--inspired the
legislation of the Greeks and Romans, from which they passed into our
morals and codes. Christianity has not changed at all. The Gospel should
not be blamed, because the priests, as stupid as the legists, have been
unable either to expound or to understand it. The ignorance of councils
and popes upon all questions of morality is equal to that of the
market-place and the money-changers; and it is this utter ignorance
of right, justice, and society, which is killing the Church, and
discrediting its teachings for ever. The infidelity of the Roman church
and other Christian churches is flagrant; all have disregarded the
precept of Jesus; all have erred in moral and doctrinal points; all
are guilty of teaching false and absurd dogmas, which lead straight to
wickedness and murder. Let it ask pardon of God and men,--this church
which called itself infallible, and which has grown so corrupt in
morals; let its reformed sisters humble themselves,. . . and the people,
undeceived, but still religious and merciful, will begin to think. [29]
One of the main causes of Ireland's poverty to-day is the immense
revenues of the English clergy. So heretics and orthodox--Protestants
and Papists--cannot reproach each other. All have strayed from the path
of justice; all have disobeyed the eighth commandment of the Decalogue:
"Thou shalt not steal. "
The development of right has followed the same order, in its various
expressions, that property has in its forms. Every where we see justice
driving robbery before it and confining it within narrower and narrower
limits. Hitherto the victories of justice over injustice, and of
equality over inequality, have been won by instinct and the simple force
of things; but the final triumph of our social nature will be due to
our reason, or else we shall fall back into feudal chaos. Either this
glorious height is reserved for our intelligence, or this miserable
depth for our baseness.
The second effect of property is despotism. Now, since despotism
is inseparably connected with the idea of legitimate authority, in
explaining the natural causes of the first, the principle of the second
will appear.
What is to be the form of government in the future? hear some of my
younger readers reply: "Why, how can you ask such a question?
"You are a republican. " "A republican! Yes; but that word specifies
nothing. _Res publica;_ that is, the public thing. Now, whoever
is interested in public affairs--no matter under what form
of government--may call himself a republican. Even kings are
republicans. "--
"Well! you are a democrat? "--"No. "--"What! you would have a
monarchy. "--"No. "--"A constitutionalist? "--"God forbid! "--"You are then
an aristocrat? "--"Not at all. "--"You want a mixed government? "--"Still
less. "--"What are you, then? "--"I am an anarchist. "
"Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the
government. "--"By no means. I have just given you my serious and
well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I
am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me. "
In all species of sociable animals, "the weakness of the young is the
principle of their obedience to the old," who are strong; and from habit,
which is a kind of conscience with them, the power remains with the
oldest, although he finally becomes the weakest.
Whenever the society is under the control of a chief, this chief is
almost always the oldest of the troop. I say almost always, because
the established order may be disturbed by violent outbreaks. Then the
authority passes to another; and, having been re-established by force,
it is again maintained by habit. Wild horses go in herds: they have a
chief who marches at their head, whom they confidently follow, and who
gives the signal for flight or battle.
"The sheep which we have raised follows us, but it follows in company
with the flock in the midst of which it was born. It regards man AS THE
CHIEF OF ITS FLOCK. . . . Man is regarded by domestic animals as a member
of their society. All that he has to do is to get himself accepted by
them as an associate: he soon becomes their chief, in consequence of his
superior intelligence. He does not, then, change the NATURAL CONDITION
of these animals, as Buffon has said. On the contrary, he uses this
natural condition to his own advantage; in other words, he finds
SOCIABLE animals, and renders them DOMESTIC by becoming their associate
and chief. Thus, the DOMESTICITY of animals is only a special condition,
a simple modification, a definitive consequence of their SOCIABILITY.
All domestic animals are by nature sociable animals. ". . . --Flourens:
Summary of the Observations of F. Cuvier.
Sociable animals follow their chief by INSTINCT; but take notice of the
fact (which F. Cuvier omitted to state), that the function of the chief
is altogether one of INTELLIGENCE. The chief does not teach the others
to associate, to unite under his lead, to reproduce their kind, to
take to flight, or to defend themselves. Concerning each of these
particulars, his subordinates are as well informed as he. But it is the
chief who, by his accumulated experience, provides against accidents; he
it is whose private intelligence supplements, in difficult situations,
the general instinct; he it is who deliberates, decides, and leads; he
it is, in short, whose enlightened prudence regulates the public routine
for the greatest good of all.
Man (naturally a sociable being) naturally follows a chief. Originally,
the chief is the father, the patriarch, the elder; in other words, the
good and wise man, whose functions, consequently, are exclusively of a
reflective and intellectual nature. The human race--like all other
races of sociable animals--has its instincts, its innate faculties, its
general ideas, and its categories of sentiment and reason. Its chiefs,
legislators, or kings have devised nothing, supposed nothing, imagined
nothing. They have only guided society by their accumulated experience,
always however in conformity with opinions and beliefs.
Those philosophers who (carrying into morals and into history their
gloomy and factious whims) affirm that the human race had originally
neither chiefs nor kings, know nothing of the nature of man. Royalty,
and absolute royalty, is--as truly and more truly than democracy--a
primitive form of government. Perceiving that, in the remotest ages,
crowns and kingships were worn by heroes, brigands, and knight-errants,
they confound the two things,--royalty and despotism. But royalty dates
from the creation of man; it existed in the age of negative communism.
Ancient heroism (and the despotism which it engendered) commenced only
with the first manifestation of the idea of justice; that is, with the
reign of force. As soon as the strongest, in the comparison of merits,
was decided to be the best, the oldest had to abandon his position, and
royalty became despotic.
The spontaneous, instinctive, and--so to speak--physiological origin of
royalty gives it, in the beginning, a superhuman character. The
nations connected it with the gods, from whom they said the first kings
descended. This notion was the origin of the divine genealogies of royal
families, the incarnations of gods, and the messianic fables. From it
sprang the doctrine of divine right, which is still championed by a few
singular characters.
Royalty was at first elective, because--at a time when man produced but
little and possessed nothing--property was too weak to establish the
principle of heredity, and secure to the son the throne of his father;
but as soon as fields were cleared, and cities built, each function
was, like every thing else, appropriated, and hereditary kingships and
priesthoods were the result. The principle of heredity was carried into
even the most ordinary professions,--a circumstance which led to class
distinctions, pride of station, and abjection of the common people, and
which confirms my assertion, concerning the principle of patrimonial
succession, that it is a method suggested by Nature of filling vacancies
in business, and completing unfinished tasks.
From time to time, ambition caused usurpers, or SUPPLANTERS of kings,
to start up; and, in consequence, some were called kings by right, or
legitimate kings, and others TYRANTS. But we must not let these names
deceive us. There have been execrable kings, and very tolerable tyrants.
Royalty may always be good, when it is the only possible form of
government; legitimate it is never. Neither heredity, nor election,
nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the
consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate.
Whatever form it takes,--monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic,--royalty,
or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd.
Man, in order to procure as speedily as possible the most thorough
satisfaction of his wants, seeks RULE. In the beginning, this rule is
to him living, visible, and tangible. It is his father, his master, his
king. The more ignorant man is, the more obedient he is, and the more
absolute is his confidence in his guide. But, it being a law of man's
nature to conform to rule,--that is, to discover it by his powers of
reflection and reason,--man reasons upon the commands of his chiefs.
Now, such reasoning as that is a protest against authority,--a beginning
of disobedience. At the moment that man inquires into the motives which
govern the will of his sovereign,--at that moment man revolts. If
he obeys no longer because the king commands, but because the king
demonstrates the wisdom of his commands, it may be said that henceforth
he will recognize no authority, and that he has become his own king.
Unhappy he who shall dare to command him, and shall offer, as his
authority, only the vote of the majority; for, sooner or later, the
minority will become the majority, and this imprudent despot will be
overthrown, and all his laws annihilated.
In proportion as society becomes enlightened, royal authority
diminishes. That is a fact to which all history bears witness. At the
birth of nations, men reflect and reason in vain. Without methods,
without principles, not knowing how to use their reason, they cannot
judge of the justice of their conclusions. Then the authority of kings
is immense, no knowledge having been acquired with which to contradict
it. But, little by little, experience produces habits, which develop
into customs; then the customs are formulated in maxims, laid down as
principles,--in short, transformed into laws, to which the king, the
living law, has to bow. There comes a time when customs and laws are so
numerous that the will of the prince is, so to speak, entwined by the
public will; and that, on taking the crown, he is obliged to swear that
he will govern in conformity with established customs and usages; and
that he is but the executive power of a society whose laws are made
independently of him.
Up to this point, all is done instinctively, and, as it were,
unconsciously; but see where this movement must end.
By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas, man finally
acquires the idea of SCIENCE,--that is, of a system of knowledge in
harmony with the reality of things, and inferred from observation.
He searches for the science, or the system, of inanimate bodies,--the
system of organic bodies, the system of the human mind, and the system
of the universe: why should he not also search for the system of
society? But, having reached this height, he comprehends that political
truth, or the science of politics, exists quite independently of
the will of sovereigns, the opinion of majorities, and popular
beliefs,--that kings, ministers, magistrates, and nations, as wills,
have no connection with the science, and are worthy of no consideration.
He comprehends, at the same time, that, if man is born a sociable being,
the authority of his father over him ceases on the day when, his mind
being formed and his education finished, he becomes the associate of his
father; that his true chief and his king is the demonstrated truth; that
politics is a science, not a stratagem; and that the function of the
legislator is reduced, in the last analysis, to the methodical search
for truth.
Thus, in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely
proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that
society has reached; and the probable duration of that authority can
be calculated from the more or less general desire for a true
government,--that is, for a scientific government. And just as the right
of force and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance
of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the
sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and
must at last be lost in scientific socialism. Property and royalty
have been crumbling to pieces ever since the world began. As man seeks
justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.
ANARCHY,--the absence of a master, of a sovereign, [30]--such is the
form of government to which we are every day approximating, and which
our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule, and his will for law,
leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of
chaos. The story is told, that a citizen of Paris in the seventeenth
century having heard it said that in Venice there was no king, the
good man could not recover from his astonishment, and nearly died from
laughter at the mere mention of so ridiculous a thing. So strong is our
prejudice. As long as we live, we want a chief or chiefs; and at this
very moment I hold in my hand a brochure, whose author--a zealous
communist--dreams, like a second Marat, of the dictatorship. The most
advanced among us are those who wish the greatest possible number of
sovereigns,--their most ardent wish is for the royalty of the National
Guard. Soon, undoubtedly, some one, jealous of the citizen militia, will
say, "Everybody is king.
and variety of the questions which it embraces are infinite. We hardly
know the A B C of this science, as is proved by the fact that we have
not yet emerged from the period of systems, and have not ceased to
put the authority of the majority in the place of facts. A certain
philological society decided linguistic questions by a plurality
of votes. Our parliamentary debates--were their results less
pernicious--would be even more ridiculous. The task of the true
publicist, in the age in which we live, is to close the mouths of
quacks and charlatans, and to teach the public to demand demonstrations,
instead of being contented with symbols and programmes. Before talking
of the science itself, it is necessary to ascertain its object, and
discover its method and principle. The ground must be cleared of the
prejudices which encumber it. Such is the mission of the nineteenth
century.
For my part, I have sworn fidelity to my work of demolition, and I will
not cease to pursue the truth through the ruins and rubbish. I hate to
see a thing half done; and it will be believed without any assurance of
mine, that, having dared to raise my hand against the Holy Ark, I shall
not rest contented with the removal of the cover. The mysteries of the
sanctuary of iniquity must be unveiled, the tables of the old alliance
broken, and all the objects of the ancient faith thrown in a heap to the
swine. A charter has been given to us,--a resume of political science,
the monument of twenty legislatures. A code has been written,--the pride
of a conqueror, and the summary of ancient wisdom. Well! of this charter
and this code not one article shall be left standing upon another!
The time has come for the wise to choose their course, and prepare for
reconstruction.
But, since a destroyed error necessarily implies a counter-truth, I will
not finish this treatise without solving the first problem of political
science,--that which receives the attention of all minds.
WHEN PROPERTY IS ABOLISHED, WHAT WILL BE THE FORM OF SOCIETY! WILL IT BE
COMMUNISM?
PART SECOND.
% 1. --Of the Causes of our Mistakes. The Origin of Property.
The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following
question has been solved:--
Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold?
Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred
in the case of man? Why is man, who was born for society, not yet
associated?
I have said that human society is COMPLEX in its nature. Though this
expression is inaccurate, the fact to which it refers is none the less
true; namely, the classification of talents and capacities. But who
does not see that these talents and capacities, owing to their infinite
variety, give rise to an infinite variety of wills, and that the
character, the inclinations, and--if I may venture to use the
expression--the form of the ego, are necessarily changed; so that in
the order of liberty, as in the order of intelligence, there are as
many types as individuals, as many characters as heads, whose tastes,
fancies, and propensities, being modified by dissimilar ideas,
must necessarily conflict? Man, by his nature and his instinct, is
predestined to society; but his personality, ever varying, is adverse to
it.
In societies of animals, all the members do exactly the same things.
The same genius directs them; the same will animates them. A society of
beasts is a collection of atoms, round, hooked, cubical, or triangular,
but always perfectly identical. These personalities do not vary, and we
might say that a single ego governs them all. The labors which animals
perform, whether alone or in society, are exact reproductions of their
character. Just as the swarm of bees is composed of individual bees,
alike in nature and equal in value, so the honeycomb is formed of
individual cells, constantly and invariably repeated.
But man's intelligence, fitted for his social destiny and his personal
needs, is of a very different composition, and therefore gives rise to
a wonderful variety of human wills. In the bee, the will is constant
and uniform, because the instinct which guides it is invariable, and
constitutes the animal's whole life and nature. In man, talent varies,
and the mind wavers; consequently, his will is multiform and vague. He
seeks society, but dislikes constraint and monotony; he is an imitator,
but fond of his own ideas, and passionately in love with his works.
If, like the bees, every man were born possessed of talent, perfect
knowledge of certain kinds, and, in a word, an innate acquaintance
with the functions he has to perform, but destitute of reflective and
reasoning faculties, society would organize itself. We should see one
man plowing a field, another building houses; this one forging metals,
that one cutting clothes; and still others storing the products, and
superintending their distribution. Each one, without inquiring as to the
object of his labor, and without troubling himself about the extent of
his task, would obey orders, bring his product, receive his salary, and
would then rest for a time; keeping meanwhile no accounts, envious of
nobody, and satisfied with the distributor, who never would be unjust to
any one. Kings would govern, but would not reign; for to reign is to be
a _proprietor a l'engrais_, as Bonaparte said: and having no commands
to give, since all would be at their posts, they would serve rather as
rallying centres than as authorities or counsellors. It would be a state
of ordered communism, but not a society entered into deliberately and
freely.
But man acquires skill only by observation and experiment. He reflects,
then, since to observe and experiment is to reflect; he reasons,
since he cannot help reasoning. In reflecting, he becomes deluded; in
reasoning, he makes mistakes, and, thinking himself right, persists in
them. He is wedded to his opinions; he esteems himself, and despises
others. Consequently, he isolates himself; for he could not submit
to the majority without renouncing his will and his reason,--that is,
without disowning himself, which is impossible. And this isolation, this
intellectual egotism, this individuality of opinion, lasts until the
truth is demonstrated to him by observation and experience. A final
illustration will make these facts still clearer.
If to the blind but convergent and harmonious instincts of a swarm
of bees should be suddenly added reflection and judgment, the little
society could not long exist. In the first place, the bees would not
fail to try some new industrial process; for instance, that of making
their cells round or square. All sorts of systems and inventions would
be tried, until long experience, aided by geometry, should show them
that the hexagonal shape is the best. Then insurrections would occur.
The drones would be told to provide for themselves, and the queens to
labor; jealousy would spread among the laborers; discords would burst
forth; soon each one would want to produce on his own account; and
finally the hive would be abandoned, and the bees would perish. Evil
would be introduced into the honey-producing republic by the power of
reflection,--the very faculty which ought to constitute its glory.
Thus, moral evil, or, in this case, disorder in society, is naturally
explained by our power of reflection. The mother of poverty, crime,
insurrection, and war was inequality of conditions; which was the
daughter of property, which was born of selfishness, which was
engendered by private opinion, which descended in a direct line from
the autocracy of reason. Man, in his infancy, is neither criminal
nor barbarous, but ignorant and inexperienced. Endowed with imperious
instincts which are under the control of his reasoning faculty, at first
he reflects but little, and reasons inaccurately; then, benefiting by
his mistakes, he rectifies his ideas, and perfects his reason. In the
first place, it is the savage sacrificing all his possessions for
a trinket, and then repenting and weeping; it is Esau selling his
birthright for a mess of pottage, and afterwards wishing to cancel
the bargain; it is the civilized workman laboring in insecurity, and
continually demanding that his wages be increased, neither he nor his
employer understanding that, in the absence of equality, any salary,
however large, is always insufficient. Then it is Naboth dying to defend
his inheritance; Cato tearing out his entrails that he might not be
enslaved; Socrates drinking the fatal cup in defence of liberty of
thought; it is the third estate of '89 reclaiming its liberty: soon it
will be the people demanding equality of wages and an equal division of
the means of production.
Man is born a social being,--that is, he seeks equality and justice in
all his relations, but he loves independence and praise. The difficulty
of satisfying these various desires at the same time is the primary
cause of the despotism of the will, and the appropriation which results
from it. On the other hand, man always needs a market for his products;
unable to compare values of different kinds, he is satisfied to judge
approximately, according to his passion and caprice; and he engages in
dishonest commerce, which always results in wealth and poverty. Thus,
the greatest evils which man suffers arise from the misuse of his social
nature, of this same justice of which he is so proud, and which he
applies with such deplorable ignorance.
The practice of justice is a science which, when once discovered
and diffused, will sooner or later put an end to social disorder, by
teaching us our rights and duties.
This progressive and painful education of our instinct, this slow
and imperceptible transformation of our spontaneous perceptions into
deliberate knowledge, does not take place among the animals, whose
instincts remain fixed, and never become enlightened.
"According to Frederic Cuvier, who has so clearly distinguished between
instinct and intelligence in animals, 'instinct is a natural and
inherent faculty, like feeling, irritability, or intelligence. The wolf
and the fox who recognize the traps in which they have been caught, and
who avoid them; the dog and the horse, who understand the meaning of
several of our words, and who obey us,--thereby show _intelligence_.
The dog who hides the remains of his dinner, the bee who constructs his
cell, the bird who builds his nest, act only from _instinct_. Even man
has instincts: it is a special instinct which leads the new-born
child to suck. But, in man, almost every thing is accomplished by
intelligence; and intelligence supplements instinct. The opposite is
true of animals: their instinct is given them as a supplement to their
intelligence. '"--Flourens: Analytical Summary of the Observations of F.
Cuvier.
"We can form a clear idea of instinct only by admitting that animals
have in their _sensorium_, images or innate and constant sensations,
which influence their actions in the same manner that ordinary and
accidental sensations commonly do. It is a sort of dream, or vision,
which always follows them and in all which relates to instinct they may
be regarded as somnambulists. "--F. Cuvier: Introduction to the Animal
Kingdom.
Intelligence and instinct being common, then, though in different
degrees, to animals and man, what is the distinguishing characteristic
of the latter? According to F. Cuvier, it is REFLECTION OR THE POWER
OF INTELLECTUALLY CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS BY A SURVEY OF
OURSELVES. This lacks clearness, and requires an explanation.
If we grant intelligence to animals, we must also grant them, in some
degree, reflection; for, the first cannot exist without the second, as
F. Cuvier himself has proved by numerous examples. But notice that the
learned observer defines the kind of reflection which distinguishes us
from the animals as the POWER OF CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS. This
I shall endeavour to interpret, by developing to the best of my ability
the laconism of the philosophical naturalist.
The intelligence acquired by animals never modifies the operations which
they perform by instinct: it is given them only as a provision against
unexpected accidents which might disturb these operations. In man, on
the contrary, instinctive action is constantly changing into deliberate
action. Thus, man is social by instinct, and is every day becoming
social by reflection and choice. At first, he formed his words by
instinct;[1] he was a poet by inspiration: to-day, he makes grammar a
science, and poetry an art. His conception of God and a future life is
spontaneous and instinctive, and his expressions of this conception
have been, by turns, monstrous, eccentric, beautiful, comforting, and
terrible. All these different creeds, at which the frivolous irreligion
of the eighteenth century mocked, are modes of expression of the
religious sentiment. Some day, man will explain to himself the character
of the God whom he believes in, and the nature of that other world to
which his soul aspires.
[1] "The problem of the origin of language is solved by the distinction
made by Frederic Cuvier between instinct and intelligence. Language
is not a premeditated, arbitrary, or conventional device; nor is it
communicated or revealed to us by God. Language is an instinctive and
unpremeditated creation of man, as the hive is of the bee. In this
sense, it may be said that language is not the work of man, since it is
not the work of his mind. Further, the mechanism of language seems
more wonderful and ingenious when it is not regarded as the result of
reflection. This fact is one of the most curious and indisputable which
philology has observed. See, among other works, a Latin essay by F. G.
Bergmann (Strasbourg, 1839), in which the learned author explains how
the phonetic germ is born of sensation; how language passes through
three successive stages of development; why man, endowed at birth with
the instinctive faculty of creating a language, loses this faculty
as fast as his mind develops; and that the study of languages is real
natural history,--in fact, a science. France possesses to-day several
philologists of the first rank, endowed with rare talents and deep
philosophic insight,--modest savants developing a science almost without
the knowledge of the public; devoting themselves to studies which are
scornfully looked down upon, and seeming to shun applause as much as
others seek it. "
All that he does from instinct man despises; or, if he admires it, it
is as Nature's work, not as his own. This explains the obscurity
which surrounds the names of early inventors; it explains also our
indifference to religious matters, and the ridicule heaped upon
religious customs. Man esteems only the products of reflection and of
reason. The most wonderful works of instinct are, in his eyes, only
lucky GOD-SENDS; he reserves the name DISCOVERY--I had almost said
creation--for the works of intelligence. Instinct is the source of
passion and enthusiasm; it is intelligence which causes crime and
virtue.
In developing his intelligence, man makes use of not only his own
observations, but also those of others. He keeps an account of his
experience, and preserves the record; so that the race, as well as
the individual, becomes more and more intelligent. The animals do not
transmit their knowledge; that which each individual accumulates dies
with him.
It is not enough, then, to say that we are distinguished from the
animals by reflection, unless we mean thereby the CONSTANT TENDENCY OF
OUR INSTINCT TO BECOME INTELLIGENCE. While man is governed by instinct,
he is unconscious of his acts. He never would deceive himself, and never
would be troubled by errors, evils, and disorder, if, like the animals,
instinct were his only guide. But the Creator has endowed us with
reflection, to the end that our instinct might become intelligence;
and since this reflection and resulting knowledge pass through various
stages, it happens that in the beginning our instinct is opposed, rather
than guided, by reflection; consequently, that our power of thought
leads us to act in opposition to our nature and our end; that, deceiving
ourselves, we do and suffer evil, until instinct which points us towards
good, and reflection which makes us stumble into evil, are replaced by
the science of good and evil, which invariably causes us to seek the one
and avoid the other.
Thus, evil--or error and its consequences--is the firstborn son of
the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good,
or truth, must inevitably be the second child. Or, to again employ the
figure, evil is the product of incest between adverse powers; good will
sooner or later be the legitimate child of their holy and mysterious
union.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind
comparisons. But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to
spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so
property is subsequent to communism. Communism--or association in a
simple form--is the necessary object and original aspiration of the
social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and
establishes itself. It is the first phase of human civilization. In this
state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM--man
draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the
milk and flesh of animals. Little by little this communism--negative
as long as man does not produce--tends to become positive and organic
through the development of labor and industry. But it is then that the
sovereignty of thought, and the terrible faculty of reasoning logically
or illogically, teach man that, if equality is the sine qua non of
society, communism is the first species of slavery. To express this idea
by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term
of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism,
is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS. When we have discovered the third
term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution. Now, this
synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the
antithesis. Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their
characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to
sociability. The union of the two remainders will give us the true form
of human association.
% 2. --Characteristics of Communism and of Property.
I. I ought not to conceal the fact that property and communism have been
considered always the only possible forms of society. This deplorable
error has been the life of property. The disadvantages of communism are
so obvious that its critics never have needed to employ much eloquence
to thoroughly disgust men with it. The irreparability of the injustice
which it causes, the violence which it does to attractions and
repulsions, the yoke of iron which it fastens upon the will, the moral
torture to which it subjects the conscience, the debilitating effect
which it has upon society; and, to sum it all up, the pious and
stupid uniformity which it enforces upon the free, active, reasoning,
unsubmissive personality of man, have shocked common sense, and
condemned communism by an irrevocable decree.
The authorities and examples cited in its favor disprove it. The
communistic republic of Plato involved slavery; that of Lycurgus
employed Helots, whose duty it was to produce for their masters, thus
enabling the latter to devote themselves exclusively to athletic sports
and to war. Even J. J. Rousseau--confounding communism and equality--has
said somewhere that, without slavery, he did not think equality of
conditions possible. The communities of the early Church did not last
the first century out, and soon degenerated into monasteries. In those
of the Jesuits of Paraguay, the condition of the blacks is said by all
travellers to be as miserable as that of slaves; and it is a fact that
the good Fathers were obliged to surround themselves with ditches and
walls to prevent their new converts from escaping. The followers
of Baboeuf--guided by a lofty horror of property rather than by any
definite belief--were ruined by exaggeration of their principles; the
St. Simonians, lumping communism and inequality, passed away like a
masquerade. The greatest danger to which society is exposed to-day is
that of another shipwreck on this rock.
Singularly enough, systematic communism--the deliberate negation of
property--is conceived under the direct influence of the proprietary
prejudice; and property is the basis of all communistic theories.
The members of a community, it is true, have no private property; but
the community is proprietor, and proprietor not only of the goods, but
of the persons and wills. In consequence of this principle of absolute
property, labor, which should be only a condition imposed upon man by
Nature, becomes in all communities a human commandment, and therefore
odious. Passive obedience, irreconcilable with a reflecting will, is
strictly enforced. Fidelity to regulations, which are always defective,
however wise they may be thought, allows of no complaint. Life, talent,
and all the human faculties are the property of the State, which has
the right to use them as it pleases for the common good. Private
associations are sternly prohibited, in spite of the likes and dislikes
of different natures, because to tolerate them would be to introduce
small communities within the large one, and consequently private
property; the strong work for the weak, although this ought to be left
to benevolence, and not enforced, advised, or enjoined; the industrious
work for the lazy, although this is unjust; the clever work for the
foolish, although this is absurd; and, finally, man--casting aside his
personality, his spontaneity, his genius, and his affections--humbly
annihilates himself at the feet of the majestic and inflexible Commune!
Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the
exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation
of the strong by the weak. In property, inequality of conditions is
the result of force, under whatever name it be disguised: physical and
mental force; force of events, chance, FORTUNE; force of accumulated
property, &c. In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity
on a level with excellence. This damaging equation is repellent to the
conscience, and causes merit to complain; for, although it may be
the duty of the strong to aid the weak, they prefer to do it out of
generosity,--they never will endure a comparison. Give them equal
opportunities of labor, and equal wages, but never allow their jealousy
to be awakened by mutual suspicion of unfaithfulness in the performance
of the common task.
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the
law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to
labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He
wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to
choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from
judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not
through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the
free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest
feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the
demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the
thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we
shall avoid disputes about words.
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and
equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart,
and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and
laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality
in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account
of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the
desire to shirk.
II. Property, in its turn, violates equality by the rights of exclusion
and increase, and freedom by despotism. The former effect of property
having been sufficiently developed in the last three chapters, I will
content myself here with establishing by a final comparison, its perfect
identity with robbery.
The Latin words for robber are _fur_ and _latro;_ the former taken from
the Greek {GREEK m }, from {GREEK m }, Latin _fero_, I carry away; the
latter from {GREEK 'i }, I play the part of a brigand, which is derived
from {GREEK i }, Latin _lateo_, I conceal myself. The Greeks have also
{GREEK ncg }, from {GREEK ncg }, I filch, whose radical consonants are
the same as those of {GREEK ' cg }, I cover, I conceal. Thus, in these
languages, the idea of a robber is that of a man who conceals, carries
away, or diverts, in any manner whatever, a thing which does not belong
to him.
The Hebrews expressed the same idea by the word _gannab_,--robber,--from
the verb _ganab_, which means to put away, to turn aside: _lo thi-gnob
(Decalogue: Eighth Commandment_), thou shalt not steal,--that is, thou
shalt not hold back, thou shalt not put away any thing for thyself. That
is the act of a man who, on entering into a society into which he
agrees to bring all that he has, secretly reserves a portion, as did the
celebrated disciple Ananias.
The etymology of the French verb _voler_ is still more significant.
_Voler_, or _faire la vole_ (from the Latin _vola_, palm of the hand),
means to take all the tricks in a game of ombre; so that _le voleur_,
the robber, is the capitalist who takes all, who gets the lion's share.
Probably this verb _voler_ had its origin in the professional slang of
thieves, whence it has passed into common use, and, consequently into
the phraseology of the law.
Robbery is committed in a variety of ways, which have been very
cleverly distinguished and classified by legislators according to their
heinousness or merit, to the end that some robbers may be honored, while
others are punished.
We rob,--1. By murder on the highway; 2. Alone, or in a band; 3. By
breaking into buildings, or scaling walls; 4. By abstraction; 5. By
fraudulent bankruptcy; 6. By forgery of the handwriting of public
officials or private individuals; 7. By manufacture of counterfeit
money.
This species includes all robbers who practise their profession with no
other aid than force and open fraud. Bandits, brigands, pirates, rovers
by land and sea,--these names were gloried in by the ancient heroes, who
thought their profession as noble as it was lucrative. Nimrod, Theseus,
Jason and his Argonauts; Jephthah, David, Cacus, Romulus, Clovis and
all his Merovingian descendants; Robert Guiscard, Tancred de Hauteville,
Bohemond, and most of the Norman heroes,--were brigands and robbers. The
heroic character of the robber is expressed in this line from Horace, in
reference to Achilles,--
_"Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis_," [27]
and by this sentence from the dying words of Jacob (Gen. xlviii. ), which
the Jews apply to David, and the Christians to their Christ: _Manus ejus
contra omnes_. In our day, the robber--the warrior of the ancients--is
pursued with the utmost vigor. His profession, in the language of the
code, entails ignominious and corporal penalties, from imprisonment to
the scaffold.
A sad change in opinions here below!
We rob,--8. By cheating; 9. By swindling; 10. By abuse of trust; 11. By
games and lotteries.
This second species was encouraged by the laws of Lycurgus, in order
to sharpen the wits of the young. It is the kind practised by Ulysses,
Solon, and Sinon; by the ancient and modern Jews, from Jacob down to
Deutz; and by the Bohemians, the Arabs, and all savage tribes. Under
Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. , it was not considered dishonorable to cheat
at play. To do so was a part of the game; and many worthy people did not
scruple to correct the caprice of Fortune by dexterous jugglery.
To-day even, and in all countries, it is thought a mark of merit
among peasants, merchants, and shopkeepers to KNOW HOW TO MAKE A
BARGAIN,--that is, to deceive one's man. This is so universally
accepted, that the cheated party takes no offence. It is known with what
reluctance our government resolved upon the abolition of lotteries. It
felt that it was dealing a stab thereby at property. The pickpocket,
the blackleg, and the charlatan make especial use of their dexterity of
hand, their subtlety of mind, the magic power of their eloquence,
and their great fertility of invention. Sometimes they offer bait to
cupidity. Therefore the penal code--which much prefers intelligence
to muscular vigor--has made, of the four varieties mentioned above,
a second category, liable only to correctional, not to Ignominious,
punishments.
Let them now accuse the law of being materialistic and atheistic.
We rob,--12. By usury.
This species of robbery, so odious and so severely punished since the
publication of the Gospel, is the connecting link between forbidden and
authorized robbery. Owing to its ambiguous nature, it has given rise to
a multitude of contradictions in the laws and in morals,--contradictions
which have been very cleverly turned to account by lawyers, financiers,
and merchants. Thus the usurer, who lends on mortgage at ten, twelve,
and fifteen per cent. , is heavily fined when detected; while the banker,
who receives the same interest (not, it is true, upon a loan, but in the
way of exchange or discount,--that is, of sale), is protected by royal
privilege. But the distinction between the banker and the usurer is
a purely nominal one. Like the usurer, who lends on property, real or
personal, the banker lends on business paper; like the usurer, he
takes his interest in advance; like the usurer, he can recover from
the borrower if the property is destroyed (that is, if the note is
not redeemed),--a circumstance which makes him a money-lender, not a
money-seller. But the banker lends for a short time only, while
the usurer's loan may be for one, two, three, or more years. Now, a
difference in the duration of the loan, or the form of the act, does not
alter the nature of the transaction. As for the capitalists who invest
their money, either with the State or in commercial operations, at
three, four, and five per cent. ,--that is, who lend on usury at a
little lower rate than the bankers and usurers,--they are the flower of
society, the cream of honesty! Moderation in robbery is the height of
virtue! [28]
But what, then, is usury? Nothing is more amusing than to see these
INSTRUCTORS OF NATIONS hesitate between the authority of the Gospel,
which, they say, NEVER CAN HAVE SPOKEN IN VAIN, and the authority of
economical demonstrations. Nothing, to my mind, is more creditable
to the Gospel than this old infidelity of its pretended teachers.
Salmasius, having assimilated interest to rent, was REFUTED by Grotius,
Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Wolf, and Heineccius; and, what is more curious
still, Salmasius ADMITTED HIS ERROR. Instead of inferring from this
doctrine of Salmasius that all increase is illegitimate, and proceeding
straight on to the demonstration of Gospel equality, they arrived at
just the opposite conclusion; namely, that since everybody acknowledges
that rent is permissible, if we allow that interest does not differ
from rent, there is nothing left which can be called usury, and,
consequently, that the commandment of Jesus Christ is an ILLUSION, and
amounts to NOTHING, which is an impious conclusion.
If this memoir had appeared in the time of Bossuet, that great
theologian would have PROVED by scripture, the fathers, traditions,
councils, and popes, that property exists by Divine right, while usury
is an invention of the devil; and the heretical work would have been
burned, and the author imprisoned.
We rob,--13. By farm-rent, house-rent, and leases of all kinds.
The author of the "Provincial Letters" entertained the honest Christians
of the seventeenth century at the expense of Escobar, the Jesuit,
and the contract Mohatra. "The contract Mohatra," said Escobar, "is a
contract by which goods are bought, at a high price and on credit, to
be again sold at the same moment to the same person, cash down, and at a
lower price. " Escobar found a way to justify this kind of usury. Pascal
and all the Jansenists laughed at him. But what would the satirical
Pascal, the learned Nicole, and the invincible Arnaud have said, if
Father Antoine Escobar de Valladolid had answered them thus: "A lease
is a contract by which real estate is bought, at a high price and on
credit, to be again sold, at the expiration of a certain time, to the
same person, at a lower price; only, to simplify the transaction, the
buyer is content to pay the difference between the first sale and the
second. Either deny the identity of the lease and the contract Mohatra,
and then I will annihilate you in a moment; or, if you admit the
similarity, admit also the soundness of my doctrine: otherwise you
proscribe both interest and rent at one blow"?
In reply to this overwhelming argument of the Jesuit, the sire of
Montalte would have sounded the tocsin, and would have shouted
that society was in peril,--that the Jesuits were sapping its very
foundations.
We rob,--14. By commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his
legitimate salary.
Everybody knows the definition of commerce--THE ART OF BUYING FOR THREE
FRANCS THAT WHICH IS WORTH SIX, AND OF SELLING FOR SIX THAT WHICH IS
WORTH THREE. Between commerce thus defined and _vol a l'americaine_,
the only difference is in the relative proportion of the values
exchanged,--in short, in the amount of the profit.
We rob,--15. By making profit on our product, by accepting sinecures,
and by exacting exorbitant wages.
The farmer, who sells a certain amount of corn to the consumer, and who
during the measurement thrusts his hand into the bushel and takes out a
handful of grains, robs; the professor, whose lectures are paid for by
the State, and who through the intervention of a bookseller sells them
to the public a second time, robs; the sinecurist, who receives an
enormous product in exchange for his vanity, robs; the functionary, the
laborer, whatever he may be, who produces only one and gets paid four,
one hundred, or one thousand, robs; the publisher of this book, and I,
its author,--we rob, by charging for it twice as much as it is worth.
In recapitulation:--
Justice, after passing through the state of negative communism, called
by the ancient poets the AGE OF GOLD, commences as the right of the
strongest. In a society which is trying to organize itself, inequality
of faculties calls up the idea of merit; equite suggests the plan of
proportioning not only esteem, but also material comforts, to personal
merit; and since the highest and almost the only merit then recognized
is physical strength, the strongest, {GREEK ' eg }, and consequently
the best, {GREEK ' eg }, is entitled to the largest share; and if it
is refused him, he very naturally takes it by force. From this to the
assumption of the right of property in all things, it is but one step.
Such was justice in the heroic age, preserved, at least by tradition,
among the Greeks and Romans down to the last days of their republics.
Plato, in the "Gorgias," introduces a character named Callicles, who
spiritedly defends the right of the strongest, which Socrates, the
advocate of equality, {GREEK g e }, seriously refutes. It is related
of the great Pompey, that he blushed easily, and, nevertheless, these
words once escaped his lips: "Why should I respect the laws, when I have
arms in my hand? " This shows him to have been a man in whom the moral
sense and ambition were struggling for the mastery, and who sought to
justify his violence by the motto of the hero and the brigand.
From the right of the strongest springs the exploitation of man by
man, or bondage; usury, or the tribute levied upon the conquered by the
conqueror; and the whole numerous family of taxes, duties, monarchical
prerogatives, house-rents, farm-rents, &c. ; in one word,--property.
Force was followed by artifice, the second manifestation of justice,
which was detested by the ancient heroes, who, not excelling in that
direction, were heavy losers by it. Force was still employed, but mental
force instead of physical. Skill in deceiving an enemy by treacherous
propositions seemed deserving of reward; nevertheless, the strong always
prided themselves upon their honesty. In those days, oaths were observed
and promises kept according to the letter rather than the spirit: _Uti
lingua nuncupassit, ita jus esto_,--"As the tongue has spoken, so must
the right be," says the law of the Twelve Tables. Artifice, or rather
perfidy, was the main element in the politics of ancient Rome. Among
other examples, Vico cites the following, also quoted by Montesquieu:
The Romans had guaranteed to the Carthaginians the preservation of their
goods and their CITY,--intentionally using the word civitas, that is,
the society, the State; the Carthaginians, on the contrary, understood
them to mean the material city, urbs, and accordingly began to rebuild
their walls. They were immediately attacked on account of their
violation of the treaty, by the Romans, who, acting upon the old
heroic idea of right, did not imagine that, in taking advantage of an
equivocation to surprise their enemies, they were waging unjust war.
From artifice sprang the profits of manufactures, commerce, and banking,
mercantile frauds, and pretensions which are honored with the beautiful
names of TALENT and GENIUS, but which ought to be regarded as the last
degree of knavery and deception; and, finally, all sorts of social
inequalities.
In those forms of robbery which are prohibited by law, force and
artifice are employed alone and undisguised; in the authorized forms,
they conceal themselves within a useful product, which they use as a
tool to plunder their victim.
The direct use of violence and stratagem was early and universally
condemned; but no nation has yet got rid of that kind of robbery which
acts through talent, labor, and possession, and which is the source
of all the dilemmas of casuistry and the innumerable contradictions of
jurisprudence.
The right of force and the right of artifice--glorified by the
rhapsodists in the poems of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"--inspired the
legislation of the Greeks and Romans, from which they passed into our
morals and codes. Christianity has not changed at all. The Gospel should
not be blamed, because the priests, as stupid as the legists, have been
unable either to expound or to understand it. The ignorance of councils
and popes upon all questions of morality is equal to that of the
market-place and the money-changers; and it is this utter ignorance
of right, justice, and society, which is killing the Church, and
discrediting its teachings for ever. The infidelity of the Roman church
and other Christian churches is flagrant; all have disregarded the
precept of Jesus; all have erred in moral and doctrinal points; all
are guilty of teaching false and absurd dogmas, which lead straight to
wickedness and murder. Let it ask pardon of God and men,--this church
which called itself infallible, and which has grown so corrupt in
morals; let its reformed sisters humble themselves,. . . and the people,
undeceived, but still religious and merciful, will begin to think. [29]
One of the main causes of Ireland's poverty to-day is the immense
revenues of the English clergy. So heretics and orthodox--Protestants
and Papists--cannot reproach each other. All have strayed from the path
of justice; all have disobeyed the eighth commandment of the Decalogue:
"Thou shalt not steal. "
The development of right has followed the same order, in its various
expressions, that property has in its forms. Every where we see justice
driving robbery before it and confining it within narrower and narrower
limits. Hitherto the victories of justice over injustice, and of
equality over inequality, have been won by instinct and the simple force
of things; but the final triumph of our social nature will be due to
our reason, or else we shall fall back into feudal chaos. Either this
glorious height is reserved for our intelligence, or this miserable
depth for our baseness.
The second effect of property is despotism. Now, since despotism
is inseparably connected with the idea of legitimate authority, in
explaining the natural causes of the first, the principle of the second
will appear.
What is to be the form of government in the future? hear some of my
younger readers reply: "Why, how can you ask such a question?
"You are a republican. " "A republican! Yes; but that word specifies
nothing. _Res publica;_ that is, the public thing. Now, whoever
is interested in public affairs--no matter under what form
of government--may call himself a republican. Even kings are
republicans. "--
"Well! you are a democrat? "--"No. "--"What! you would have a
monarchy. "--"No. "--"A constitutionalist? "--"God forbid! "--"You are then
an aristocrat? "--"Not at all. "--"You want a mixed government? "--"Still
less. "--"What are you, then? "--"I am an anarchist. "
"Oh! I understand you; you speak satirically. This is a hit at the
government. "--"By no means. I have just given you my serious and
well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I
am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me. "
In all species of sociable animals, "the weakness of the young is the
principle of their obedience to the old," who are strong; and from habit,
which is a kind of conscience with them, the power remains with the
oldest, although he finally becomes the weakest.
Whenever the society is under the control of a chief, this chief is
almost always the oldest of the troop. I say almost always, because
the established order may be disturbed by violent outbreaks. Then the
authority passes to another; and, having been re-established by force,
it is again maintained by habit. Wild horses go in herds: they have a
chief who marches at their head, whom they confidently follow, and who
gives the signal for flight or battle.
"The sheep which we have raised follows us, but it follows in company
with the flock in the midst of which it was born. It regards man AS THE
CHIEF OF ITS FLOCK. . . . Man is regarded by domestic animals as a member
of their society. All that he has to do is to get himself accepted by
them as an associate: he soon becomes their chief, in consequence of his
superior intelligence. He does not, then, change the NATURAL CONDITION
of these animals, as Buffon has said. On the contrary, he uses this
natural condition to his own advantage; in other words, he finds
SOCIABLE animals, and renders them DOMESTIC by becoming their associate
and chief. Thus, the DOMESTICITY of animals is only a special condition,
a simple modification, a definitive consequence of their SOCIABILITY.
All domestic animals are by nature sociable animals. ". . . --Flourens:
Summary of the Observations of F. Cuvier.
Sociable animals follow their chief by INSTINCT; but take notice of the
fact (which F. Cuvier omitted to state), that the function of the chief
is altogether one of INTELLIGENCE. The chief does not teach the others
to associate, to unite under his lead, to reproduce their kind, to
take to flight, or to defend themselves. Concerning each of these
particulars, his subordinates are as well informed as he. But it is the
chief who, by his accumulated experience, provides against accidents; he
it is whose private intelligence supplements, in difficult situations,
the general instinct; he it is who deliberates, decides, and leads; he
it is, in short, whose enlightened prudence regulates the public routine
for the greatest good of all.
Man (naturally a sociable being) naturally follows a chief. Originally,
the chief is the father, the patriarch, the elder; in other words, the
good and wise man, whose functions, consequently, are exclusively of a
reflective and intellectual nature. The human race--like all other
races of sociable animals--has its instincts, its innate faculties, its
general ideas, and its categories of sentiment and reason. Its chiefs,
legislators, or kings have devised nothing, supposed nothing, imagined
nothing. They have only guided society by their accumulated experience,
always however in conformity with opinions and beliefs.
Those philosophers who (carrying into morals and into history their
gloomy and factious whims) affirm that the human race had originally
neither chiefs nor kings, know nothing of the nature of man. Royalty,
and absolute royalty, is--as truly and more truly than democracy--a
primitive form of government. Perceiving that, in the remotest ages,
crowns and kingships were worn by heroes, brigands, and knight-errants,
they confound the two things,--royalty and despotism. But royalty dates
from the creation of man; it existed in the age of negative communism.
Ancient heroism (and the despotism which it engendered) commenced only
with the first manifestation of the idea of justice; that is, with the
reign of force. As soon as the strongest, in the comparison of merits,
was decided to be the best, the oldest had to abandon his position, and
royalty became despotic.
The spontaneous, instinctive, and--so to speak--physiological origin of
royalty gives it, in the beginning, a superhuman character. The
nations connected it with the gods, from whom they said the first kings
descended. This notion was the origin of the divine genealogies of royal
families, the incarnations of gods, and the messianic fables. From it
sprang the doctrine of divine right, which is still championed by a few
singular characters.
Royalty was at first elective, because--at a time when man produced but
little and possessed nothing--property was too weak to establish the
principle of heredity, and secure to the son the throne of his father;
but as soon as fields were cleared, and cities built, each function
was, like every thing else, appropriated, and hereditary kingships and
priesthoods were the result. The principle of heredity was carried into
even the most ordinary professions,--a circumstance which led to class
distinctions, pride of station, and abjection of the common people, and
which confirms my assertion, concerning the principle of patrimonial
succession, that it is a method suggested by Nature of filling vacancies
in business, and completing unfinished tasks.
From time to time, ambition caused usurpers, or SUPPLANTERS of kings,
to start up; and, in consequence, some were called kings by right, or
legitimate kings, and others TYRANTS. But we must not let these names
deceive us. There have been execrable kings, and very tolerable tyrants.
Royalty may always be good, when it is the only possible form of
government; legitimate it is never. Neither heredity, nor election,
nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the
consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate.
Whatever form it takes,--monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic,--royalty,
or the government of man by man, is illegitimate and absurd.
Man, in order to procure as speedily as possible the most thorough
satisfaction of his wants, seeks RULE. In the beginning, this rule is
to him living, visible, and tangible. It is his father, his master, his
king. The more ignorant man is, the more obedient he is, and the more
absolute is his confidence in his guide. But, it being a law of man's
nature to conform to rule,--that is, to discover it by his powers of
reflection and reason,--man reasons upon the commands of his chiefs.
Now, such reasoning as that is a protest against authority,--a beginning
of disobedience. At the moment that man inquires into the motives which
govern the will of his sovereign,--at that moment man revolts. If
he obeys no longer because the king commands, but because the king
demonstrates the wisdom of his commands, it may be said that henceforth
he will recognize no authority, and that he has become his own king.
Unhappy he who shall dare to command him, and shall offer, as his
authority, only the vote of the majority; for, sooner or later, the
minority will become the majority, and this imprudent despot will be
overthrown, and all his laws annihilated.
In proportion as society becomes enlightened, royal authority
diminishes. That is a fact to which all history bears witness. At the
birth of nations, men reflect and reason in vain. Without methods,
without principles, not knowing how to use their reason, they cannot
judge of the justice of their conclusions. Then the authority of kings
is immense, no knowledge having been acquired with which to contradict
it. But, little by little, experience produces habits, which develop
into customs; then the customs are formulated in maxims, laid down as
principles,--in short, transformed into laws, to which the king, the
living law, has to bow. There comes a time when customs and laws are so
numerous that the will of the prince is, so to speak, entwined by the
public will; and that, on taking the crown, he is obliged to swear that
he will govern in conformity with established customs and usages; and
that he is but the executive power of a society whose laws are made
independently of him.
Up to this point, all is done instinctively, and, as it were,
unconsciously; but see where this movement must end.
By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas, man finally
acquires the idea of SCIENCE,--that is, of a system of knowledge in
harmony with the reality of things, and inferred from observation.
He searches for the science, or the system, of inanimate bodies,--the
system of organic bodies, the system of the human mind, and the system
of the universe: why should he not also search for the system of
society? But, having reached this height, he comprehends that political
truth, or the science of politics, exists quite independently of
the will of sovereigns, the opinion of majorities, and popular
beliefs,--that kings, ministers, magistrates, and nations, as wills,
have no connection with the science, and are worthy of no consideration.
He comprehends, at the same time, that, if man is born a sociable being,
the authority of his father over him ceases on the day when, his mind
being formed and his education finished, he becomes the associate of his
father; that his true chief and his king is the demonstrated truth; that
politics is a science, not a stratagem; and that the function of the
legislator is reduced, in the last analysis, to the methodical search
for truth.
Thus, in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely
proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that
society has reached; and the probable duration of that authority can
be calculated from the more or less general desire for a true
government,--that is, for a scientific government. And just as the right
of force and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance
of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the
sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and
must at last be lost in scientific socialism. Property and royalty
have been crumbling to pieces ever since the world began. As man seeks
justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.
ANARCHY,--the absence of a master, of a sovereign, [30]--such is the
form of government to which we are every day approximating, and which
our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule, and his will for law,
leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of
chaos. The story is told, that a citizen of Paris in the seventeenth
century having heard it said that in Venice there was no king, the
good man could not recover from his astonishment, and nearly died from
laughter at the mere mention of so ridiculous a thing. So strong is our
prejudice. As long as we live, we want a chief or chiefs; and at this
very moment I hold in my hand a brochure, whose author--a zealous
communist--dreams, like a second Marat, of the dictatorship. The most
advanced among us are those who wish the greatest possible number of
sovereigns,--their most ardent wish is for the royalty of the National
Guard. Soon, undoubtedly, some one, jealous of the citizen militia, will
say, "Everybody is king.
