Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/205

 stance which leads him to see the foundation of a new science in a utopian interpretation of the theory of Ricardo. Finally, I sum up my judgment of his point of view in these words:—

Each economic relation has a good and bad side: that is the single point upon which M. Proudhon does not contradict himself. The good side, he sees explained by the economists; the bad side, he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty only poverty. He is in agreement with both in wishing to refer it to the authority of science. Science, for him, is reduced to the insignificant proportions of a scientific formula. It is thus that M. Proudhon flatters himself to have made the criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is below both the one and the other. Below the economists, since as a philosopher, who has under his hand a magic formula, he has believed himself able to do without entering into purely economic details; below the Socialists, since he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient intelligence to raise himself, were it only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.

He wished to soar as man of science above the bourgeoisie and the proletarians; he is only the petty bourgeois, tossed about constantly between capital and labor, between political economy and communism.

However severe this judgment may appear, I am obliged still to maintain it word for word. But it is important to remember that at the time when I declared and proved theoretically that Proudhon's book was only the code of petty bourgeois Socialism, this same Proudhon was being anathematised as an arch-revolutionist by the economists and the Socialists of the period. That is