The existing condition of human society can only be described frankly, in Renouvier’s opinion, as a state of war. Each individual, each class, each nation, each race, is actually at war with others. It matters not whether a diplomatic state of peace, as it is called, exists or not; that must not blind us to the facts. By institutions, customs, laws, hidden fraud, diplomacy, and open violence, this conflict is kept up. It is all war, says Renouvier. Modern society is based on war, economic, military or judicial. Indeed, military and naval warfare is a clear issue, but only a symbol of what always goes on. Might always has the upper hand, hence ordinary life in modern society is just a state of war. Our civilisation does not rest on justice, or on the conception of justice; it rests on power and might. Until it is founded on justice, peace, he urges, will not be possible; humanity will be enslaved in further struggles disastrous o itself. This doctrine of the _état de guerre_, as descriptive of modern society, he makes a feature of his ethics, upon which we must not here encroach, but may point out that he insists upon justice as the ultimate social criterion, and claims that this is higher than charity, which is inadequate as a basis for society, however much it may alleviate its ills. One of the chief necessities, he points out, an essential to any progressive measure would be to moralise our modern notion of the state.[10] In the notes to his last chapter of the _Nouvelle Monadologie_ Renouvier attacks the Marxian doctrine of the materialistic determination of history. [10] This point was further emphasised by Henri Michel in his work, _L’Idée de l’Etat_. This same book, however, we must note, marks a stage in Renouvier’s own thought different from his doctrines in the earlier _Essais de Critique générale_, and this later philosophy, of which the _Monadologie_ and _Personnalisme_ are the two most notable volumes, displays an attempt to look upon progress from a more ultimate standpoint. His _théodicée_ here involves the notion, seen in Ravaisson, of an early perfection, involving a subsequent “fall,” the world now, with its _guerre universelle_, being an intermediate stage between a perfect or harmonious state in the past and one which lies in the future. The march of humanity is an uncertain one because it is free. The philosophy of history thus reiterates the central importance of freedom. The actual end or purpose of this freedom is not simply, says Renouvier, the attainment of perfection, but rather the possibility of progress. It was this thought which led him on in his reflections further than any of the thinkers of our period, or at least more deliberately than any, to indicate his views on the doctrine of a future life for humanity. So far from this being a purely religious problem, Renouvier rightly looks upon it as merely a carrying further afield of the conception of progress.