Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/174

 where inequality is brought to a climax and, then, transformed into its opposite, again becomes the reason of equality, for to despots all are equal, that is equally of no account. Here is the extreme of inequality, the crowning point which closes the circle, and touches the point from which we have proceeded; here all private individuals are equal, since they are of no account, and subjects have no law other than the will of their master. "But the despot is master only as long as he has the power, and for this reason he cannot complain of the use of force if he is banished. … Force upholds him, force throws him down, everything goes according to a straight and naturally appointed path." And thus again inequality is transformed into equality, but not into the old materialistic equality of speechless, primitive men, but into the higher equality of organised society. The oppressor is oppressed, it is negation of the negation.

We have then, as regards Rousseau, not merely a method of thought which is quite analogous to that pursued in Marx's "Capital," but also a whole series of single dialectic turns of which Marx avails himself: Processes, which are antagonistic in their nature, containing a contradiction in themselves, are transformed from one extreme to its opposite, finally, as the quintessence of the whole, negation of the negation. Although Rousseau in 1754 could not speak the jargon of Hegel, he was then, at a period twenty-three years before the birth of Hegel, deeply infected with the Hegel contagion, the dialectic of contradiction, doctrine of logic, theology, etc. And if Duehring in his misapplication of Rousseau's theory of equality, operates with his two victorious men, he having lost his feet, falls, of necessity into the arms of the negation of the negation.

The conditions under which the equality of the two