Essays on the Materialistic Conception of HistoryLabriola, Antonio
Philosophy
Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History
Labriola, Antonio
History -- Philosophy; Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei; Materialism; Socialism
is not the forms of consciousness which determine the human being, but
it is the manner of being which determines the consciousness (Marx).
But these forms of consciousness, even as they are determined by the
conditions of life, constitute in themselves also a part of history.
This does not consist only in the economic anatomy, but in all that
combination which clothes and covers that anatomy even up to the
multicolored reflections of the imagination. In other words, there is no
fact in history which does not recall by its origin the conditions of
the underlying economic structure, but there is no fact in history which
is not preceded, accompanied and followed by determined forms of
consciousness, whether it be superstitious or experimental, ingenuous or
reflective, impulsive or self-controlled, fantastic or reasoning.
IV.
I was saying a moment ago that our doctrine makes history objective and
in a certain sense naturalizes it, going from the explanation of the
data, evident at first sight, of the personalities acting with design,
and of the auxiliary conceptions of the action, to the causes and the
motives of the will and the action, in order to find thereupon the
co-ordination of these causes and of these motives in the pre-elementary
_processus_ of the production of the immediate means of existence.
Now this term "naturalizing" has led more than one mind into confusing
this order of problems with another order of problems, that is to say,
into extending to history the laws and the manners of thinking which
have already appeared suitable to the study and explanation of the
material world in general and of the animal world in particular. And
because Darwinism succeeded in carrying, thanks to the principle of the
transformation of species, the last citadel of the metaphysical fixity
of things, and in discerning, in the organisms, phases, as it were, and
moments of a real and proper natural history, it has been imagined that
it was a commonplace and simple enterprise to borrow for an explanation
of the future and the history of human life the concepts, the principles
and the methods of examination to which that animal life is subjected
which in consequence of the immediate conditions of the struggle for
existence is unfolding to topographical environments not modified by the
action of labor. Darwinism, political and social, has, like an epidemic,
for many years invaded the mind of more than one thinker, and many more
of the advocates and declaimers of sociology, and it has been reflected
as a fashionable habit and a phraseological current even in the daily
language of the politicians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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