Part 14 (1/2)

[74] A. ROSSI, _l'Agitazione in Sicilia_, Milan, 1894. COLAJANNI, _In Sicilia_, Rome, 1894.

[75] The _camorre_ were tyrannical secret societies that were formerly prevalent and powerful in Italy.--Translator.

[76] I must recognize that one of the recent historians of socialism, _M. l'Abbe Winterer_--more candid and honorable than more than one jesuitical journalist--distinguishes always, in each country, the _socialist_ movement from the _anarchist_ movement.

WINTERER, _le Socialisme contemporain_, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition.

PART THIRD.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.

XIII.

THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.

One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science _par excellence_, political economy.

It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte--whose name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age--to the creation of a new science, _Sociology_, which should be, together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method.

I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some specialized branches of sociology, of which _criminal sociology_, thanks to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results.

But when the politico-social question is entered upon, the new science of sociology is overpowered by a sort of hypnotic sleep and remains suspended in a sterile, colorless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to be in public economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in accordance with their respective whims or subjective tendencies.

And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the relations between the individual and the species, and evolutionist sociology itself by describing in human society the organs and the functions of a new organism, was making the individual a cell in the animal organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his English individualism extending to the most absolute theoretical anarchism.

A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific productive activity of sociology, after the first original observations in descriptive social anatomy and in the natural history of human societies. Sociology represented thus a sort of arrested development in experimental scientific thought, because those who cultivated it, wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical and radical conclusions that the modern scientific revolution was destined to establish in the social domain--the most important domain of all if science was to become the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself with that barren formula, science for the sake of science.

The secret of this strange phenomenon consists not only in the fact that, as MalaG.o.di said,[77] sociology is still in the period of scientific _a.n.a.lysis_ and not yet in that of _synthesis_, but especially in the fact that the logical consequences of Darwinism and of scientific evolutionism applied to the study of human society lead inexorably to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing pages.

FOOTNOTE:

[77] MALAG.o.dI, _Il Socialismo e la scienza_. In _Critica Sociale_, Aug.

1, 1892.

XIV.

MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.

To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in his writings, with a mult.i.tude of technical details and of apparently dogmatic formulae, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES of Spencer, and are not the luminous pa.s.sages on _evolution_ in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, s.p.a.ce, the unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three t.i.tans of the scientific revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed in the domain of social economy the revolution effected by science are in number three.

The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. This law gives us a scientific explanation of the acc.u.mulation of private property not created by the labor of the acc.u.mulator; as this law has a more peculiarly technical character, we will not lay further stress upon it here, as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding pages.