Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/82

 enumerated what happens under such conditions, without specifying and analysing the conditions themselves. Even if they were mentioned, they were forgotten immediately, to be spoken of no more.

This is bad enough, but there is in their teachings something worse than that. The economists represent the facts which result from these conditions as laws—as fatal, immutable laws. And they call that Science.

As to the Socialist political economists, they criticise, it is true, some of the conclusions of the academical economists, or they explain differently certain facts; but all the time they also forget the just-mentioned conditions and give to the economic facts of a given epoch too much stability, by representing them as natural laws. None of them has yet traced his own way in economic science. The most that was done (by Marx in his "Capital") was to take the metaphysical definitions of the academical economists, like Ricardo, and to say: "You see, even if we take your own definitions, we can prove that the capitalist exploits the worker!" Which sounds very nice in a pamphlet, but is very far from being Economic Science.

Altogether, we think that to become a science, Political Economy has to be built up in a different way. It must be treated as a natural science, and use the methods used in all exact, empirical sciences; and it must trace for itself a different aim. It must take, with regard to human societies, a position analogous to that which is occupied by Physiology with regard to plants and animals. It must be a Physiology of Society.

Its aim must be the study of the ever-growing sum of needs of society, and the means used—both formerly and nowaday for satisfying them. It must see how far these means were, and are now, suitable for the aims that are kept in view. And then—the purpose of each science being prediction and application to the demands of practical life (Bacon said so long since)—Political Economy must study the means of best satisfying the present and future needs with the least expenditure of energy (with economy), and with the best results for mankind altogether.

It is thus evident why our conclusions are so different in many respects from those arrived at by the economists, both academic and Social Democratic; why we do not consider as "laws" certain "correlations" indicated by them; why our exposition of Socialism is so different from theirs; and why we