FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104  
105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   >>   >|  
the exact character of all the particular details of its personality, which will be developed naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live. This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist. This is the position taken by Bebel in the German _Reichstag_[63] in his reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in their details. It would have been just the same thing if, before the French Revolution,--which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world, prepared and matured during the previous evolution,--the nobility and the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate--bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieyes--"But what sort of a world will this new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan, and after that we will decide!" The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the human society of the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal evolution. This is now the position of socialism with relation to the bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal (aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated space, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel. The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of the laws established and proved by modern social science. It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have given birth to the idea--correct so far as they are concerned--that _socialism_ is synonymous with _tyranny_
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104  
105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

bourgeois

 

century

 

evolution

 

socialism

 

details

 
artificial
 

Estate

 

nineteenth

 

bourgeoisie

 
socialist

conditions

 
position
 

inevitable

 

eternal

 

science

 

social

 

constructions

 

sentimental

 

natural

 

relation


synonymous

 

society

 

concerned

 

foresee

 

tyranny

 

impossible

 

prevent

 

correct

 

represented

 

taking


revolution

 
shorter
 

annihilated

 

civilized

 

velocity

 
accelerated
 

continuously

 

travel

 

Middle

 

humanity


traverses

 

rapidity

 

feudal

 

aristocratico

 

clerical

 

simply

 
historical
 

modern

 

marvelous

 

established