Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/27

Rh of feudal economy called forth in the seventeenth century scientific observations, but the new capitalist economy which was arising by its side.

But economic science was still more encouraged by another agency. The capitalist production is production en masse; the type of the modern capitalist State is the large State. Modern economics, like modern politics, have to do with phenomena en masse. The larger, however, the number of similar phenomena which one observes, the more, as already mentioned, does the universal, the normal, assert itself, the more do the individual and the accidental recede to the background; the more readily, therefore, it becomes possible to see the laws underlying their movements. The systematic observation of social phenomena en masse—statistics—and the science of society which starts from political economy, and reaches its high water mark in the materialist conception of history—these only became possible with the capitalist mode of production. It is only now that the classes have been able to acquire a clear insight into the social contents of their struggles, and could set up great social ideals, not as arbitrary dreams and pious wishes liable to shatter against the hard facts of life, but as results of scientific insight into what was economically possible and necessary. Well may this scientific knowledge also err and several of its conclusions prove illusory. Nevertheless, great as these errors may sometimes prove, they cannot obscure the characteristic feature of every true science, namely, the striving after a homogeneous conception of all the phenomena as a consistent whole, that is in application to social science, the recognition of the whole of Society as a compact organism, in which single component parts cannot be altered arbitrarily and apart from the rest. The theoretical criticism of the oppressed classes is directed henceforth more and more, not simply against individuals or individual institutions, but against the entire existing social order, and in the same way every oppressed class, when gaining political power, will by this very recognition be forced to transform the entire foundations of Society.

he Capitalist Society which sprang from the Revolution of 1789 and its offshoots, had already in its outlines been previously seen mentally by the Physiocrats and their English successors.

On these distinctions between the modern State and modern Society, and the ancient and mediæval organisations, rests the difference in the forms of their development: there a development essentially unconscious, split up into continual local and personal feuds, struggles, rebellions of countless small communities of the most varied degree of development; here a development growing ever more and more conscious, striving after well-recognised, great social aims, defined and propagated by the labour of scientific criticism. The political revolutions become less frequent, but embracing ever larger and larger fields, and growing more powerful in their social effects.