direction of public affairs, the high civic, military and
religious functions, from the hands of the privileged persons who
possessed the monopoly of these functions. Wealthy and enlightened,
able to govern themselves, they desired to escape from the _regime du
bon plaisir_."

How incapable political understanding is of discovering the source of
social distress we have already demonstrated to "Prussian." Another
word about this opinion of his. The more cultivated and general the
political understanding of a people is, all the more does the
proletariat--at least at the beginning of the movement--dissipate its
energies in irrational, useless, and brutally suppressed revolts.
Because it thinks along political lines, it perceives the cause of
all evils in the wills of men, and all remedies to lie in force and
the overthrow of a particular form of the State. In proof whereof we
cite the first outbreak of the French proletariat. The workers in
Lyons believed they were only pursuing political aims and were only
soldiers of the Republic, whereas they were in truth soldiers of
socialism. Thus their political understanding hid from them the roots
of social distress; it distorted their insight into their real aims;
their political understanding deceived their social instinct.

"Prussian" prophesies the suppression of revolts which break out owing
to the "isolation of men from the community and the separation of
their thoughts from social principles."

We have shown that the Silesian revolt was by no means characterized
by the separation of ideas from social principles. It remains to deal
with the "isolation of men from the community." By community is to be
understood in this connection the political community, the State
institution. It is the old story of unpolitical Germany.

But do not all revolts without exception break out from the isolation
of men from the community? Does not every revolt necessarily
presuppose this isolation? Would the Revolution of 1789 have taken
place without the isolation of the French citizens from the community?
Its aim, in fact, was to end this isolation.

But the community from which the worker is isolated is a community of
quite a different nature from and of quite other dimensions than the
political community. This community, from which his own labour
separates him, is life itself, physical and intellectual life, human
morality, human activity, human enjoyment, the human community.

Human l