s. In one country it
elaborates itself little by little combining itself with pre-existing
forces, as was the case in Germany, and it undergoes their influences
through adaptation; in another country it breaks its envelope and
crushes out resistance violently, as happened in France, where the great
revolution gives us the most intense and the most bewildering example of
historic action that is known, and thus forms the greatest school of
sociology.

As I have already indicated this formation of modern or bourgeois
history has been summed up in rapid and masterly strokes in the
Manifesto, which has given its general anatomical profile with its
successive aspects, the trade guild, commerce, manufacture and the great
industry and has also indicated some of the organs and appliances of a
derived and complex character, law, political forms, etc. The elements
of the theory which was to explain history by the principle of the class
struggle were already implicitly contained in it.

This same bourgeois society which revolutionized the earlier forms of
production had thrown light upon itself and its _processus_ in creating
the doctrine of its structure, economics. In fact it has not developed
in the unconsciousness which characterized primitive societies but in
the full light of the modern world beginning with the Renaissance.

Economics, as is known, was born by fragments, and its origin was
associated with that of the first bourgeoisie, which was that of
commerce and the great geographical discoveries, that is to say, it was
contemporary with the first and second phases of mercantilism. And it
was born to answer special questions: for example, is interest
legitimate? Is it advantageous for states and for nations to accumulate
money? It continued to grow, it occupied itself with the most complex
sides of the problem of wealth; it developed in the passage from
mercantilism to manufacture and then more rapidly and more resolutely in
the passage from the latter to the great industry. It was the
intellectual soul of the bourgeoisie which was conquering society. It
had already as discipline almost defined its general lines on the eve of
the French Revolution; it was the sign of the rebellion against the old
forms of feudalism, the guild, privilege, limitations of labor, that is
to say it was the sign of liberty. The theory of "natural right" which
developed from the precursors of Grotius to Rousseau, Kant, and the
Constitution