SECULAR HUMANISM - NATURALISM

Philosophical or metaphysical naturalism refers to the view that nature is the "whole show." There is no supernatural realm and/or intervention in the world. In the strict sense, all forms of nontheisms are naturalistic, including atheism, pantheism, deism, and agnosticism.

However; some theists, especially scientists, hold a form of methodological naturalism.. That is, while acknowledging the existence of God and the possibility of miracles, they employ a method of approaching the natural world that does not admit of miracles. This is true of many theistic evolutionists, such as Douglas Young and Donald MacKay. They insist that to admit miracles in nature to explain the unique or anomalous is to invoke "the God of the gaps." In this sense they are bedfellows with the antisupernaturalists, who deny miracles on the grounds that they are contrary to the scientific method.

Forms of Metaphysical Naturalism. Metaphysical naturalists are of two basic kinds: materialists and pantheists. The materialist reduces all to matter and the pantheist reduces all to mind or spirit. Both deny that any supernatural realm intervenes in the natural world. They differ chiefly about whether the natural world is composed ultimately of matter or mind [spirit]. Those who hold the latter often admit the possibility of supernormal events by tapping into this invisible spiritual Force. However, these are not supernatural events in the theistic sense of a supernatural being intervening in the natural world he created.

3. Human beings are complex "machines" personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do not yet fully understand.

5. History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose.

Naturalism is an approach to philosophical problems that interprets them as tractable through the methods of the empirical sciences or at least, without a distinctively a priori project of theorizing. For much of the history of philosophy it has been widely held that philosophy involved a distinctive method, and could achieve knowledge distinct from that attained by the special sciences. Thus, metaphysics and epistemology have often jointly occupied a position of ‘first philosophy,’ laying the necessary grounds for the understanding of reality and the justification of knowledge claims. Naturalism rejects philosophy’s claim to that special status. Whether in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, or other areas naturalism seeks to show that philosophical problems as traditionally conceived are ill-formulated, and can be solved or displaced by appropriately naturalistic methods. Naturalism often assigns a key role to the methods and results of the empirical sciences, and sometimes aspires to reductionism and physicalism. However, there are many versions of naturalism and some are explicitly non-scientistic. What they share is a repudiation of the view of philosophy as exclusively a priori theorizing concerned with a distinctively philosophical set of questions. Naturalistic thinking has a long history, but it has been especially prominent in recent decades, and its influence is felt all across philosophy. We will look at why and in what ways it is prominent and we will describe some of the most influential versions of naturalism.

‘Naturalism’ is a term that is applied to many doctrines and positions in philosophy, and in fact, just how it is to be defined is itself a matter of philosophical debate. Still, the overall landscape of naturalism can be surveyed, and that is what we will do here. This discussion will not present a defense or critique of one or another specific version of naturalism. Its aim is to characterize the broad range of views typically identified as naturalistic and to say something about what motivates them. It will also locate the debate about naturalism in the larger setting of philosophical inquiry and theorizing overall.

Different periods in the history of philosophy exhibit different emphases in what are the most prominent and pressing concerns, and there are reasons why different issues are at the forefront at different times. In antiquity, basic questions about the constitution of reality motivated various conceptions about the material substance of things, about whether that substance is material, and about the relation between matter and whatever else might be constitutive of reality. Views ranged from variants of (recognizably naturalistic) materialism to those that included decidedly non-materialist and non-naturalist elements, such as Platonism and Aristotelianism. During the medieval period, debates over the status of universals and the nature of the intellect, the will, and the soul were especially central. In large part, this had to do with their significance for issues in natural theology. Also, questions concerning the relation between soul and body and whether and how the soul survives the death of the body were prominent. This was because of their significance for the individuation of persons, the possibility and nature of immortality, and for the nature of providence. These families of issues were prominent in all three of the great Western religious traditions. They are though, enduring philosophical questions. Many of them have roots in the Classical tradition.

With respect to the epistemological dimension of naturalism, the main claim is roughly the following: the acquisition of belief and knowledge is a (broadly) causal process within the natural order, and a priori norms, principles, and methods are not essential to the acquisition or justification of beliefs and knowledge. Compare Hume and Descartes, for example. Hume explains our acceptance of beliefs on the basis of habits of association—causal tendencies that we can reflectively articulate into rules of epistemic practice. There are processes of belief acquisition and acceptance, but they are not underwritten by principles formulated a priori, nor are they structured by such principles. Epistemology is part of the overall science of human nature, It is not a project that is prior to or independent of the empirical sciences. There are norms of belief acceptance and of inquiry, but they are derived from consideration of experience and practice. (Here too, there is also an important point of contrast with Kant and also with the Platonic theory of knowledge as recollection of innate ideas, as well as with Descartes.)

Hume, David: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Moore, G. E.: “A Defense of Common Sense,” “Proof of the External World”

Peirce, Charles Sanders: Reasoning and the Logic of Things, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism

Quine, W. V.: “Epistemology Naturalized,” “Natural Kinds,” Pursuit of Truth

Rorty, Richard: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Consequences of Pragmatism

Secular Humanism is a term which has come into use in the last thirty years to describe a world view with the following elements and principles:

Secular humanists accept a worldview or philosophy called naturalism, in which the physical laws of the universe are not superseded by non-material or supernatural entities such as demons, gods, or other "spiritual" beings outside the realm of the natural universe. Supernatural events such as miracles (in which physical laws are defied) and psi phenomena, such as ESP, telekinesis, etc., are not dismissed out of hand, but are viewed with a high degree of skepticism.

Secular humanists hail from widely divergent philosophical and religious backgrounds, ranging from Christian fundamentalism to liberal belief systems to lifelong atheism. Some have achieved a comfortable secular humanist stance after a period of deism. Deists are those who express a vague or mystical feeling that a creative intelligence may be, or was at one time, connected to the universe or involved with its creation, but is now either nonexistent or no longer concerned with its operation.

Secular humanists do not rely upon gods or other supernatural forces to solve their problems or provide guidance for their conduct. They rely instead upon the application of reason, the lessons of history, and personal experience to form an ethical/moral foundation and to create meaning in life. Secular humanists look to the methodology of science as the most reliable source of information about what is factual or true about the universe we all share, acknowledging that new discoveries will always alter and expand our understanding of it and perhaps change our approach to ethical issues as well.

Secular humanism as an organized philosophical system is relatively new, but its foundations can be found in the ideas of classical Greek philosophers such as the Stoics and Epicureans as well as in Chinese Confucianism. These philosophical views looked to human beings rather than gods to solve human problems.

During the Dark Ages of Western Europe, humanist philosophies were suppressed by the political power of the church. Those who dared to express views in opposition to the prevailing religious dogmas were banished, tortured or executed. Not until the Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, with the flourishing of art, music, literature, philosophy and exploration, would consideration of the humanist alternative to a god-centered existence be permitted. During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with the development of science, philosophers finally began to openly criticize the authority of the church and engage in what became known as "free thought."

The nineteenth century Freethought movement of America and Western Europe finally made it possible for the common citizen to reject blind faith and superstition without the risk of persecution. The influence of science and technology, together with the challenges to religious orthodoxy by such celebrity freethinkers as Mark Twain and Robert G. Ingersoll brought elements of humanist philosophy even to mainline Christian churches, which became more concerned with this world, less with the next.

In the twentieth century scientists, philosophers, and progressive theologians began to organize in an effort to promote the humanist alternative to traditional faith-based world views. These early organizers classified humanism as a non-theistic religion which would fulfill the human need for an ordered ethical/philosophical system to guide one's life, a "spirituality" without the supernatural. In the last thirty years, those who reject supernaturalism as a viable philosophical outlook have adopted the term "secular humanism" to describe their non-religious life stance.

Critics often try to classify secular humanism as a religion. Yet secular humanism lacks essential characteristics of a religion, including belief in a deity and an accompanying transcendent order. Secular humanists contend that issues concerning ethics, appropriate social and legal conduct, and the methodologies of science are philosophical and are not part of the domain of religion, which deals with the supernatural, mystical and transcendent.

Secular humanism, then, is a philosophy and world view which centers upon human concerns and employs rational and scientific methods to address the wide range of issues important to us all. While secular humanism is at odds with faith-based religious systems on many issues, it is dedicated to the fulfillment of the individual and humankind in general. To accomplish this end, secular humanism encourages a commitment to a set of principles which promote the development of tolerance and compassion and an understanding of the methods of science, critical analysis, and philosophical reflection.

"What is Secular Humanism" was written by Fritz Stevens, Edward Tabash, Tom Hill, Mary Ellen Sikes, and Tom Flynn. http://www.secularhumanism.org/intro/what.html 2/28/03 10:16:39 AM

TIMELINE TO NATURALISM

~ HUMANISM

BECOMING DOMINANT

The Roman Catholic Church believed all dogma must be controlled by Roman leadership. We see the papacy and various councils of the church [Magisterium] making important decisions for the western world. An intellectual revolt in some circles began emerging between 1300 and 1500. We see this manifesting itself in different ways. Many were happy to remain loyal to Rome as their authority in faith and practice, others introduced folk religions, some believed the human spirit itself should be followed, others wanted to go on with Christianity but with a reformed church. By the time of the Reformation we see the camps becoming more deeply defined: Roman Catholics, Protestants, folk religions, and Humanists who were experimenting with naturalism and atheism.

A HUNGER TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

Demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination, astrology, relic-worship, and miraclemongering went on though unauthorized by the church. Historians say these additions to the religious life beneath the surface became more troublesome than unbelief. Even university professors at times were teaching classes in astrology which retarded the maturity and growth of genuine theology.

In Brescia more than 25,000 witches gathered for a special witches Sabbath. Many were in danger of falling away from orthodox worship being drawn more to spells, magic rhymes and curses. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII published a bull forbidding witchcraft. To many the fact that the pope would need to issue such a bull evidenced the reality of witches.

Bruno was born in the town of Nola, located near Naples, Italy, in 1548. He was an outspoken youth and eventually became an outspoken Dominican monk. During his tenure as a Dominican, it was suggested that he had read some of the "forbidden works" of Desiderius Erasmus, and along with his unorthodox views of Christianity, this prompted the Catholic Church to issue an indictment of heresy against Bruno in 1578. On learning the indictment was imminent, Bruno fled to France, beginning a life as an intellectual nomad.

Bruno's outspoken critiques and attacks upon orthodox views made him welcome at these university centers only for a short time. He began his wanderings by going to Geneva, followed in turn by France, England, France again, Germany and then Venice.

Bruno returned home to Italy in 1591 and stayed in Venice at the insistence of Giovanni Moncenigo, in order to teach some of his "natural magic of memory training." Moncenigo, after not learning anything from Bruno, turned him over to the Venetian Inquisition. Bruno was held for over a year in Venice, and Rome insisted that he be turned over to them, which happened in February, 1593. Bruno was kept in imprisoned for over six years, without any writing materials and without an explanation for the delay in his trial. In January, 1600, he was handed over to the Grand Inquisitor, was convicted, and turned over to the secular authorities who were required to carry out the sentence imposed by the Inquisition.

Bruno and his works were largely ignored until some of the 18th Century Deists started reading his works and making him their champion. In the 19th Century, Italy's freethinkers also adopted Bruno as a martyr to the cause of freethought. The exact reason why Bruno was killed. Some scholars have attributed it to his knowledge of magic and Hermetic philosophy. His errors in theology, which included the idea that Christ was a master magician. After hearing the judgment of the Church, Bruno is quoted as saying "Perchance your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it." "Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind" Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper. [Durant, Story of Western Civilization]

RENE DESCARTE 1596-1650

This French philosopher was a mathematician and scientist who is known as the father of modern philosophy. He was educated by Jesuits, and remained a Roman Catholic. That church's authority on truth for the last 300 years had been Thomas Aquinas who Descarte rejected.

Descarte began by asserting all must approach any test with the assumption he called "universal doubt." Descarte used Cartesian geometric models to help him. He was confident that once he found something he could not doubt he could be certain of its truth. As he looked around the only thing he could not fully deny was his own existence. His formula was Cogito, ergo sum I think, therefore I am. His approach to God was humanistic and rational. He had thoughts of a "more perfect being" than himself. He felt these thoughts could not have come from his own mind so he concluded they evidenced the existence of God.

Descarte applied his Cartesian models to the relationship between spirit and matter in his own humanity. He began solving the problems of how the body and soul communicate by presenting three theories: 1) occasionalism, 2) monism, 3) preestablished harmony. Most of the heretical movements that rose in western civilization were energized by one of these choices.

This view held that the body and soul were unable to communicate at all which forced a divine element for every communication. Its defender were the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx and the French priest Nicolas Malebranche. God moves on the body "on occasion" of the soul's decision. This view was difficult to explain God as being holy and righteous since he would be blamed for all events and thoughts.

This view was defended by the Jewish Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza. Spinoza explained reality using Descarte methods concluding that communication of any other substance must be denied. Thought and physical extension are not two different substances but are different attributes of the same substance as "red" and "round" are attributes of a single substance. Spinoza concluded the same can be said of God and the world. These are really different attributes of the same substance the universe.

This view was defended by German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz concluded that he saw evidence for an infinite number of substances which were all absolutely independent of each other. Leibniz named these substances "monads." He concluded they had no windows from which to communicate with other monads. He believed God created them like a "clockmaker" who created each to interact interdependently in a preestablished order. This view is hard to defend because it makes God fully responsible for every action committed by every human being. Human freedom is not allowed. A holy view of God is impossible.

"Having given the matter careful attention, I am convinced that existence can no more be taken away from the divine essence than the magnitude of its three angles taken together being equal to two right angles can be taken away from the essence of a triangle, or that the idea of a valley can be taken away from the idea of a mountain. So it is absurd to think of God [that is, a supremely perfect being] lacking existence [that is, lacking a certain perfection], than to think of a mountain without a valley …. I am not free to think of God apart from existence [that is, of a supremely perfect being apart from supreme perfection] in the way that I am free to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings. Whenever I choose to think of the First and Supreme Being, and as it were bring this idea out of the treasury of my mind, it is necessary that I ascribe all perfections to him. This necessity clearly ensures that, when I subsequently point out that existence is perfection, that I am correct in concluding that the First and Supreme Being exists."

BENEDICT SPINOZA 1632-1677

MODAL PANTHEISM

Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza was influenced by Descarte. He used rational approaches to discover God and Nature are identical. He was known as a rationalist because he based his discovery on what he could deduce from self evident principles rather than on church, tradition or scripture.

JOHN LOCKE 1632-1704 ~ EMPIRICISM

EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

Rationalists in Britain were called Empiricists. Empiricism comes from the Greek word "experience." The founder of that movement was John Locke. While he agreed with Descarte much of the time he denied the idea that truth could be discovered by looking within oneself.

Locke believed that knowledge must be gained from experience. He defined three levels of experience. First is from ourselves, second is from outer realities which presently surround us, and last from God. Apart from these three levels there is no knowledge we can be sure about.

In 1695 Locke published his treatise titled The Reasonableness of Christianity which evidenced his feelings that Christianity was the most reasonable of all religions. Locke did not believe Christianity added anything of importance that could not be known through the use of reason and judgment. Natural faculties clearly expressed truth best.

"For if we examine the idea we have of the incomprehensible supreme Being, we shall find that we come by it the same way, and that the complex ideas we have both of God, and separate Spirits, are made up of the simple ideas we receive from Reflection; v.g., having from what we experiment in our selves, got the ideas of existence and duration, of knowledge and power, of pleasure and happiness, and of several other qualities and powers which it is better to have, than be without, when we would frame an idea of the most suitable we can to the supreme Being, we enlarge every one of these with our idea of infinity, and so putting them together, make our complex idea of God. For that the mind has such a power of enlarging some of its ideas, received from sensation, has been already showed."

DEISM

This movement emerged out of the endless squabbles between the many sects and movements of the seventeenth century. This movement was made up of those who were too freethinking to accept orthodoxy but saw no reason to abandon God altogether. Deism opposed narrow dogmatism while refuting skepticism of those who advocated abandoning all religion.

LORD HERBERT CHERBURY

He saw five theological points, 1) the existence of God, 2) the obligation to worship God, 3) the ethical requirements behind worship, 4) the need for repentance, 5) the reward and punishments associated with this life and the next. This movement claimed divine revelation was possible it could not contradict the basic five points and could not be considered exclusive as there was no reason to expect all to accept revelation.

JOHN TOLAND

After John Locke's works were published Toland authored, "Deism, Christianity Not Mysterious, or a Treatise Showing That There is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary Nor Above It, and That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Called a Mystery" in 1730. His work presents Christianity as coincides with "natural religion."

DAVID HUME 1711-1776

Wrote in reaction to the struggles of his century was to present his own skepticism of about much of what the philosophers were saying. He said the knowledge produced by Locke's empiricism was wide. He said irrational mental habits were themselves producing knowledge with no basis. He said the empiricist knowledge based only on experience was flawed. He gave the example of the billiard game where motion of the balls moving in sequence were said to be the result of the first ball placed in movement. Hume said this was wrong as the real action began in the mind of the player.

BISHOP BERKELEY 1685-1753

Berkeley followed John Locke taking Locke's view further by pointing out that, if all our knowledge is of the senses we have no way of knowing whether any of them truly resemble external objects which are just collections of ideas.

BLAISE PASCAL 1623-1662

"We know the truth, not only through our reason, but also through our heart. It is through this latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with this, vainly tries to refute them. The skeptics have no intention other than this, and they fail to achieve it. We know that we are not dreaming. Yet however unable we may be to prove this by reason, this inability demonstrates nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they assert."

FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET "VOLTAIRE" 1694-1778

Voltaire was a Deist who took Locke's writings into the practical realm of government. He was banished to Holland in 1713 and imprisoned in the Bastille between 1717-1718. He believed in the clockmaker view of God.

"This one mover is very powerful, otherwise he could not regulate so vast and complicated a machine [the universe]." "He is very intelligent, since we, who are intelligent, can produce nothing equal to the least of the springs of this machine." "I am forced to admit eternity, but I am not forced to admit that there is any such thing as infinity." "I know no reason why God should be infinite." He sees God as being finite in agreement with John Stuart Mill. Voltaire's God needed to perform miracles at creation, but God has not manifest providence since. He was very skeptical of the existence of the human soul quipping in 1752 "may God, if there is one, save my soul if I have one." Voltaire denounced all revealed religion. Voltaire loved the ethic example of Christ. He did see Christ as superior to Confucius who he also admired. But Voltaire's Christ was a humanist and deist. In 1763 he wrote that the Biblical idea of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity was common to all religions as revealed in nature. The reason Voltaire rejected Biblical Christianity can be summed up in this statement, "Either God can remove all evil from the world and will not; or being willing to do so, cannot; or he neither can or will; or he is both able and willing." But if God is "willing and cannot, he is not omnipotent. If he can but will not, he is not benevolent. If he is neither willing nor able, he is not omnipotent nr benevolent. If he both wants to and can, whence comes evil over the face of the earth?"

JEANE- JACQUES ROUSEAU 1712-1778

HUMANIST

Rouseau believed if a man were to be truly virtuous he should always obey his heart rather than his reason. Rouseau believed progress was not beneficial for human beings who were better off in more natural states. He said rulers are employees of the people. He rejected all religious dogma as part of the danger of progress. He believed in God, the immortality of the soul and moral order which should be the basis of natural religion. Both Rouseau and Voltaire paved the way for the radical French Revolution.

IMMANUAL KANT 1724-1804

Kant was a full believing rationalist until he read Hume who awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber." He was not able to overcome the difficulties associated with the communicating substances using Cartesian principles. Empiricism led Kant to conclude that if knowledge can only be based on experience no valid knowledge is possible about critical substance. In 1781 Kant proposed a radical alternative which said there is no such thing as innate ideas. Instead he called them "fundamental structures of the mind" that provide mental structures to place sense data on. He named these structures, time, space and twelve other organizational categories. He declared there is no such thing as "objective knowledge" of Hume's Cartesians or of Empiricist, or Deists. All of these "experiences" were nothing more than illusions. For Kant and his many followers in the future this placed arguments supportive of Christian faith and practice into an invalid category. People who used the reality of their own existence as a datum from which to make proofs found "existence" itself removed from reality becoming one of the Kant's categories instead. If God, the soul or eternity are true Kant's form of reason can not know them just as the eye cannot hear and the ear cannot see. In 1788 Kant wrote Critique of Practical Reason which offered the moral life as evidence for God. "In the affairs of life, therefore, it is impossible to for us to count on miracles or to take them in consideration at all in our use of reason."

GEORG HEGEL 1770-1831

Hegel followed Kant. He believed the mind stamps its seal on all knowledge. Kant saw reason as not something that exists in human minds but as being reality itself. Reason is reality and the only reality there is. Hegel does not use reason to refer to a way of coming to understanding but to the process of thinking. Hegel developed the idea of having a thesis which should be questioned by an antithesis. This whole process Hegel called reason or dynamic reason since it continuously advanced. He proposed the idea that this was beyond the human mind in what he called a universal reason or Spirit. While Hegel saw Christianity as the "absolute religion" he saw it in a pantheistic way that included other religions. Hegel saw Christianity as the latest in the process of natural religion evolving. Hegel's view of Christianity as the apex of history was free of all dogmatic narrowness of past religions. Hegel's view of the Bible is revealed in the way he presented a Jesus who performed no miracles but offered a Kantian ethic.

He developed the view of Absolute Idealism which was the view that matter is only an appearance or illusion with the only true reality being Absolute Spirit. Truth is expressed in a historical process of struggle and conflict out of which emerges Spirit toward a perfect society where all conflicts are resolved in a higher synthesis. This was later adopted by Karl Marx [1818-1883]. Hegel was also influential to the theistic existentialism expressed by Kierkegaard who said truth is lived not known. The atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre was also dependent on Hegel.

DANE SOREN KIERKEGAARD 1813-1855

CHRISTIAN EXISTENTIALIST

While Kierkegaard was himself a Christian his method of determining truth set aside the value of objective knowable facts. Dane Soren Kierkegaard was one of the most influencial Christian thinkers of the nineteenth century. Kant's third option was important for Kierkegaard. Reason was unable to penetrate ultimate truth without faith. While reason can either prove or disprove God's existence, faith knows God directly. For Kierkegaard the basis for Chrsitianity was not its reasonableness nor in Hegel's place of ultimate honor.

For Kierkegaard truth was not even feeling but a matter of faith in God whose revelation comes through Scripture. The kind of faith Kierkegaard spoke of was never easy leading to a tranquil life. He saw no value in either the objective storing of knowledge or the blissful mystical experience. Kierkegaard introduced an intensly subjective philosophy into Christianity in the nineteenth century.

Kierkegaard believed in three life stages with God. First was aesthetic, second was ethical and third was the religious life. His motive was an attack on the dialectical thinking of Hegel. He saw no real value in storing objective knowledge nor in blissful insights. For Kierkegaard faith was passion for the eternal that resulted in a new ethic. Questions he asked was "is it possible to base eternal happiness on historical knowledge? Another was "how can the transcendent God communicate with us? He believed humans could neither know or find truth unless God puts it into them by revelation. He said faith in God cannot be either rationally or empirically grounded. He said objective reason never finds existential truth and proofs can neither establish or overthrow Christianity. He said faith in religious facts such as the incarnation or the authority of Scripture is not true faith. True faith is the gift of God and unattainable b effort. He said eternal salvation can never depend on historical documents so he felt it unnecessary to defend the Scripture. "Faith does not result simply from a scientific inquirey; it does not come directly at all. On the contrary, "in this objectivity one tends to lose that infinite personal interconnectedness in passion which is the condition of faith." He said "faith does not need proof, faith in fact regards proof as its enemy." Men and women must be freed from the shackles of historical necessity.

His writings influenced Karl Barth who was also an existentialist. Both Barth and Emil Brunner were neo-orthodox existentialists. Both denied a historic view of revelation which is prepositional. It also led to the radical demythologizing of Bultmann. Kierkegaard believed that objective truth tests were impossible. He discounted the purpose of miracles. Kierkegaard also called for a suspension of personal ethics in a way that paved the way for situational ethics. Though he believed strongly in God's moral codes the end effect has been generations who lack any real authoritative guide for right and wrong.

Charles Darwin said in 1876 "The clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in miracles by which Christianity is supported, that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do the miracles become."

This set the stage for the ongoing battles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Christianity was dismissed out of hand because it required miracles to prove its existence. In Europe [and in her colonies] we see divisions between states who were either Roman Catholic or Reformed Protestant. In America we see an extension of the form of Protestant life in Great Britain being dominant there. But in France we see the leadership of French Protestants murdered [St. Bartholomomew's Day massacre] in religious wars which left a vacuum in that nation. Very hard lines were left in France between Roman Catholics and Secular Humanists. We see the ideas of Rouseau and Voltaire paving the way for that humanist victory in the bloody French Revolution.

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

In America we see struggling colonies with various forms of Protestant Christianity being held in a unique experiment which allowed people to make a choice between the major denominations. The founding documents of America in 1776 see "the Laws of Nature" as well as Nature's God being foundational. Other language said, "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

1787 - George Washington re the Constitution: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the hand of God."

Thomas Jefferson, on his memorial: "God who gave us life, gave us liberty." "Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that the liberties are the gift of God?"

1787 - At an impasse of several weeks at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin rose and said, "have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this" He then moved they resort to prayer and thus their problems were then solved.

1787 - Washington's Inaugural Address: "... the propitious smiles of heaven cannot be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained, " All inaugural addresses and State constitutions refer to Almighty God, the author and sustained of our liberty.

1789 - Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation: "Whereas, it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits and humbly to implore His protection and favor... "

1797 - Washington's Farewell address: "and let us with caution, indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion."

Patrick Henry: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ."

John Quincy Adams: " The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible." The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: "it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of Civil Government with the principle of Christianity."

John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States 1789-1795: "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers."

1843 - Emma Willard, Educator and historian: "The government of the United States is acknowledged by the wise and good of other nations, to be the most free, impartial and righteous government of the world; but all agree that for such a government to be sustained many years, the principles of truth and righteousness, taught in the Holy Scriptures, must be practiced. The rulers must govern in the fear of God, and the people obey the laws." "A nation cannot exist without religion. France tried that and failed. We were born a Protestant Christian nation and, as such, baptized in blood. Our position ought to be defined as that."

Circa 1861 - Abraham Lincoln: "It is the duty of all nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord."

1863 - Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "...that we here highly resolve... that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people....... shall not perish from the earth."

1892 - The Supreme Court of the United States after citing 87 precedents decided: "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of Mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise: and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian ... This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation ... we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation."

Our motto reads "In God We Trust" is found on all of our coinage, engraved on the walls of both houses of Congress, and that every session begins with a prayer by its Chaplain, that a prayer room is in the Capitol with a glass window depicting Washington in prayer surrounded by a quotation of Psalm 16: 1. The Ten Commandments are emblazoned on the wall in the Supreme Court just over the head of the Chief Justice as a symbol of the source of all our laws.

Biblical quotations are etched on and in the Washington Monument, the Lincoln memorial, the Library of Congress and many other official buildings. Our Pledge of allegiance is to the flag of " One Nation under God."

This was radically different from the language of the French Revolution which outlawed God and burned Bibles. In America one found freedom to be a Roman Catholic, Protestant or a secular humanist. This was a unique experiment of government. For faith and practice do we wish to acknowledge Rome, our Bibles, or our minds. Many nations have patterned their own revolutions after France or America over the next two centuries.

But in America, in the 1960's we see introduced into public life many ideas that were French and not American. We saw a "wall" being insisted upon between church and state that was troubling to historians, ethicists and Christians. We see prayer being banned in public schools. We see after the 1960's a change in textbooks which reflect a strictly humanist view of the world. We also saw in a Republic where anyone can be elected or changes affected by ballot an introduction of rioting similar to those that typified the French Revolution not our own.

FRENCH REVOLUTION

French society was divided into three Estates or Orders. The First Estate consisted of the clergy and the Second Estate the nobility. Together, these two Estates accounted for approximately 500,000 individuals. At the bottom of this hierarchy was the vast Third Estate which basically meant everybody else, or about 25 million people.

The Third Estate was composed of the bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the urban artisans. As a class, the bourgeoisie - merchants, manufacturers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals - had wealth. In some cases, enormous wealth. But, wealth in the ancien regime did not mean status or privilege and it should be clear by now that "success" in 18th century France meant status and privilege. Wealth was nothing without status. By 1789, the bourgeoisie controlled 20% of all the land. They were upwardly mobile, but they felt frustrated and blocked by the aristocracy. By 1789, the bourgeoisie had numerous grievances they wished addressed. They wanted all Church, army and government positions open to men of talent and merit.

I glory in the principles of the French Revolution! I exult in the triumphs of reason! I am an advocate for the rights of man! --- John Thelwall (1795)

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (August 1789)

The Representatives of the French people, organized in National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, so that this declaration, being ever present to all the members of the social body, may unceasingly remind them of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, and those of the executive power, may at each moment be compared with the aim and of every political institution and thereby may be more respected; and in order that the demands of the citizens, grounded henceforth upon simple and incontestable principles, may always take the direction of maintaining the constitution and welfare of all.

In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and citizen:

1. Men are born free and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only on public utility.

2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The sources of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation; no body, no individual can exercise authority that does not proceed from it in plain terms.

4. Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others; accordingly, the exercise of the rights of each man has no limits except those that secure the enjoyment of these same rights to the other members of society. These limits can be determined only by law.

5. The law has only the rights to forbid such actions as are injurious to society. Nothing can be forbidden that is not interdicted by the law, and no one can be constrained to do that which it does not order.

6. Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part personally, or by their representatives, and its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, art equally eligible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacities, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.

7. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained, except in the cases determined by the law and according to the forms it has prescribed. Those who procure, expedite, execute, or cause arbitrary orders to be executed, ought to be punished: but every citizen summoned were seized in virtue of the law ought to render instant obedience; he makes himself guilty by resistance.

8. The law ought only to establish penalties that are strict and obviously necessary, and no one can be punished except in virtue of a law established and promulgated prior to the offense and legally applied.

9. Every man being presumed innocent until he has been pronounced guilty, if it is thought indispensable to arrest him, all severity that may not be necessary to secure his person ought to be strictly suppressed by law.

10. No one should be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious, provided their manifestation does not upset the public order established by law.

11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man; every citizen can then freely speak, write, and print, subject to responsibility for the abuse of this freedom in the cases is determined by law.

12. The guarantee of the rights of man and citizen requires a public force; this force then is instituted for the advantage of all and not for the personal benefit of those to whom it is entrusted.

13. A general tax is indispensable for the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of administration; it ought to be equally apportioned among all citizens according to their means.

14. All the citizens have a right to ascertain, by themselves or by their representatives, the necessity of the public tax, to consent to it freely, to follow the employment of it, and to determine the quota, the assessment, the collection, and the duration of it.

15. Society has the right to call for an account of his administration by every public agent.

16. Any society in which the guarantee of the rights is not secured, or the separation of powers not determined, has no constitution at all.

17. Property being a sacred to and inviolable right, no one can be deprived of it, unless illegally established public necessity evidently demands it, under the condition of a just and prior indemnity.

[Frank Maloy Anderson, ed., The Constitution and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789-1907 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1908), pp. 59-61.] http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/declaration.html 3/18/03 10:25 AM

Barely 300 words in length, it could be printed cheaply on one side of a single sheet of paper. The Declaration appeared all over France and was subsequently translated into every major European language. As a symbol, it became the gospel of the new French social order.

1789 was certainly a pivotal year--it was a watershed. It was the year in which the ancien regime was destroyed and replaced by reason and justice. The French Revolution marks the beginning of the Modern Age. This is the vision of the revolutionaries themselves. Change was in the air--not rebirth but birth itself. A future of improvement, intellectual improvement, human happiness, equality and liberty was near at hand. The result of the battle of words which would develop over the next few years was to supply thinkers with a new vocabulary. Liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, liberty, equality, fraternity, capitalist and capitalism, are all products of the age of the French Revolution.

Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defense! The times are auspicious. Your labours have not been in vain. Behold kingdoms, admonished by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors! Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates EUROPE!

Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments . . . . Call no more reformation, innovation. You cannot hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.

Price correctly saw the American Revolution being the source for the French. The French Revolution was the first response. a pamphlet war which raged as long as the French Revolution survived.

Pamphlets from the French Revolution survived. In the late 1780s, and throughout the 1790s, the number of pamphlets rose dramatically. When the statesman EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797) heard of Price's sermon, his response was one of anger and disbelief. In November 1790, Burke published what would quickly become the manifesto of conservative political opinion. The REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE is nothing less than a direct answer to and attack upon what Burke called the "pulpit style" of Richard Price.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface.

I must be tolerably sure, before venture publicly to congratulate men on a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with the solidity for property; with peace in order; with civil and social manners.

All these (in their way) are good things to; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit while it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints.

Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principals, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . .

The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold a generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.

The unbought grace of life, achieved defensive nations, the nurse of the manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. . . .

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.

All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. . . . On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their terrors, and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or even spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, D.C. nothing but the gallows. . . .

When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle. . . .

To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teacher obedience: and the work is done. To give Freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; and only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraints in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

This identifying to those who take the lead in the National Assembly. Perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear. I rather believe it. It would put them below the common level of human understanding. But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, and the construction of the state, will be of no service.

They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular.

Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traders; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

The improvements of the National Assembly are superficial, their errors are fundamental.

[Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 2 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864), pp. 515-516. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/reflections.html 3/18/03 9:23 AM

Burke glorified the ancient constitution of England and saw nothing but horror and anarchy emanating from France. He was scared to death! He attacked Price as "the spiritual doctor of politics." "No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity," wrote Burke. For Burke, religion and politics ought not to be mixed together.

Burke feared the passions of the mob -- like most conservatives, he believed that the "swinish multitude" had no part in the political life of the nation. So Burke had to sound the alarm. He had to bring England to its senses. In a classic passage, Burke turns from his polemic against Price to the French Revolution itself.

France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities, of moral politicians . . . .

[The French have rebelled] against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence . . . .

Were all these dreadful things necessary? were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace . . . .

What bothered Burke so much about the Revolution was the incidence of violence and tumult. Keep in mind, he is only speaking of events as they unfolded between June 1789 and the summer of 1790. In the future lay the confiscation of church property, the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, the death of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and of course, Napoleon.

Burke's Reflections attracted a great deal of attention as two hundred pamphlets, books and essays poured off the English press between November 1790 and 1795. The first attack came from MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797) -- feminist, novelist, wife of William Godwin (1756-1836) and mother of Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Wollstonecraft was born in London -- she was educated by Richard Price and other Rational Dissenters, and was closely connected to the radical intellectual circles of London. On November 29th, 1790, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Man, the first attack upon Burke. She saw Burke as the defender of hierarchy and the spokesman for society founded on the systematic oppression of all English subjects. "I glow with indignation," she wrote, "when I attempt, methodically, to unravel your slavish paradoxes. . . ." Wollstonecraft's argument, as the title suggests, hinges upon the liberal conception of the natural rights of man. Above all, she argues that

there are rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, who were raised above the brute creation by their improvable faculties; and that, on receiving these, not from their forefathers but, from God, prescription [law] can never undermine natural rights.

The argument regarding natural rights was repeated by JOSEPH PRIESTLEY (1733-1804). Priestley, the illustrious chemist and philosopher, could count among his friends Richard Price and Wollstonecraft as well as the future industrialists Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) and James Watt (1736-1819). He was also close friends with Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the naturalist. Priestley joined the Revolution controversy in 1791, several months after having read Price and Burke. Priestley was more than familiar with the context of the pamphlet war. On July 14, 1791, and while Priestley was attending a meeting in Birmingham, a church and king mob destroyed his home and laboratory. Priestley left his home -- what was left of it -- went to London, and in 1794 emigrated to the banks of the Susquehanna River where he and other intellectuals tried to set up a utopian community (Pantisocracy). Priestley, the Dissenter, chemist, radical and victim, knew, like Richard Price, that the French Revolution meant a great deal:

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we expect to see, not only in the theory, and in books, but in actual practice, calculated for the general good. . . ; leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with man's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine.

One of the most widely admired replies to Burke was that of a Scottish doctor and lawyer, James Mackintosh (1765-1832). On May 17, 1791, Mackintosh published his Defense of the French Revolution. Mackintosh was a friend and admirer of Priestley, editor of two English radical newspapers, and a member of the moderate reform group, the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). In Burke, Mackintosh discovered an "hysterical reaction to events, born of fear." This was a reaction which would soon be dubbed, "counter-revolutionary," and in our own day, "reactionary." Mackintosh was a child of the Enlightenment -- he understood that human progress would only result from the free exercise of human reason. Social evil and social misery then, are the result of government and oppression. Reason -- the light of Reason -- could not become more general while men are being oppressed by tyrannical governments.

There is little doubt that the most important response to Burke came from the son of the Quaker corset-maker from Thetford in East Anglia. THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809) was the kind of man who rose from the ranks of the working classes to become a voice of English radicalism in the 1790s. His reputation was secured in 1776 when he published Common Sense, a book which had enormous influence in the colonies. Common Sense broke with tradition in that it used a literary style intended to appeal to the broad masses of people rather than the elect few. Paine, after all, was a corset maker himself -- he was a man of the people. Hence his name, Citizen Tom Paine. Throughout his writings there it is an emphasis upon the independence of the individual. This is both healthy and natural -- for Paine, this idea grew from his experience as a skilled worker.

Between February 1791 and February 1792, Paine published Part I and II of The Rights of Man (dedicated to George Washington). It is a republican tract -- it made its appeal to those members of the politically excluded in English society. However, the book was also taken up by English radicals and workers as well as by American thinkers. The French liked it too -- Paine was one of two non-Frenchmen elected to sit in the National Assembly (Joseph Priestley was the other). Those who could not read The Rights of Man had it read to them in pubs, coffee houses and at the meetings of the LCS and SCI. Excerpts were published as broadsides available in almost every provincial city. In The Rights of Man, Paine depicted monarchs as nothing more than parasites, sucking up the wealth and health of the nation. They were useless -- they were con artists. The questions Paine would put to monarchs and their do-nothing aristocrats were quite simple: of what utility are they? are they necessary? do monarchs help me, or oppress me?

For Thomas Paine, all governments of the past were founded on tyranny and oppression. As Price, Mackintosh and others had argued before, governments had done nothing but hide truth and dispense falsehood. Monarchy is the engine of human misery and oppression. Monarchy is the supreme evil. It is the obstacle to human improvement -- it is hocus pocus.

Whether I have too little sense to see, or too much to be impressed upon; whether I have to much or too little pride, or of anything else, I leave out of the question; but certain it is, that is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.

We must shut our eyes against reason, we must basely degrade our understanding, not to see the folly of what is called monarchy. Nature is orderly in all her works; but this is a mode of government that counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties up side down. It's subjects age to be governed by children, and wisdom by folly.

In contrast to the folly and imposture of monarchy, Paine argues the necessity of introducing a representative system of government. This is what is meant by the expression, republicanism. The best that can be hoped for from a republican government is to explode myth, falsity and superstition, by bringing everything before the tribunal of human reason.

But the case is, that the representative system diffuses such a body of knowledge throughout a nation, on the subject of government, as to explode ignorance and preclude imposition. The craft of courts cannot be acted on that ground. There is no place for mystery; nowhere for it to begin. Those who are not in the representation, know as much of the nature of business as those who are. An affectation of mysterious importance would there be scouted. Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like those of individuals, are always their defects.

In the representative system, the reason for everything must publicly appear. Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property. He examines the cost, and compares it with the advantages; and above all, he does not adopt the slavish custom of following what in other governments are called LEADERS.

Paine's radicalism was similar to that of Richard Price -- the language comes straight from John Locke (see Lecture 8). That is, government exists to guarantee the natural and inalienable rights of man: life, liberty, and property. This is the sole duty of government -- to protect those rights. Paine believed, in a frequently quoted statement, that "the government which governs best is the one that governs least."

WILLIAM GODWIN (1756-1836) was far more intellectual and nearly without passion. His treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was published in 1793. It was a difficult, lengthy (two volumes) and expensive book. It's impact was largely among a circle of London intellectuals including: Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth as well as a number of radical publishers and booksellers. Like Price, Priestley and Wollstonecraft, Godwin was a Dissenter. He believed the character of the individual was formed by the environment. So, to change man, you must change his environment. For Godwin, this change would only transpire when men treated one another with candor, sincerity, and disinterested benevolence. Godwin attacked everything: monarchy, aristocracy, clergy, radical societies like the LCS and SCI, marriage, and revolutions in general. He was an anarchist -- the father of what is called philosophical anarchism. The best government, for Godwin, was no government at all. He looked at all social institutions and determined that all of them were forms of systematic oppression. Government, the workhouse, law, marriage and the church lay condemned. Why? Because they had made of man something less than he ought to have been. Godwin reminds us of Rousseau when he began The Social Contract (1762) with the following words: "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." This is an important concept -- the late 18th century begins that stage of western intellectual thought which recognizes that (1) man could be improved and (2) man will be improved. Both these concepts are implicit in the prophet of 19th century revolution, Karl Marx (see Lecture 24).

The solution for Godwin was quite simple and quite specific: annihilate government! Godwin was also a keen observer and one of his observations ought to sound familiar:

The rich are in all countries directly or indirectly the legislators of the state; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poor of that little commonage of nature, which might otherwise still have remained to them . . . . Legislation is in almost every country grossly the favourer of the rich against the poor.

What rankled Godwin was that the oppression of the poor by the rich had become systematized. Godwin believed that all government is evil because it chokes the natural tendencies of mankind. Government does not promote good morals, happiness or knowledge. Government is imposture -- it is systematized falsehood.

Godwin stood as a lone voice in the 1790s. He hated monarchy -- he hated government-- and although he helped publish Paine's Rights of Man while Paine was exiled, he did so not because he necessarily agreed with the ideas it contained, but because he believed in the freedom of expression. Godwin was not a reformer -- he was not interested in parliamentary reform. Nor did he care much for the various corresponding societies -- he hated the radical societies. He was no Jacobin. And he condemned all revolutions because they were full of "tumult and violence." Like Burke, natural rights meant nothing to Godwin. And constitutions, whether written or unwritten, ought to be condemned as well. All politics did was to make man less of an individual and more a part of that brute machine of oppression.

In political associations, the object of each man, is to identify his creed with that of his neighbor. We learn the Shibboleth of a party. We dare if not leave our minds at large in the field of enquiry, lest we should arrive if some tenet disrelished by our party. We have no temptation to enquire. Party has a more powerful tendency, than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs, to render the mind quiescent and stationary. Instead of making each man an individual, which the interests of the whole requires, it resolves all understandings into one common mass, and subtracts from each the varieties, that could alone distinguish him from a brute machine.

Where Tom Paine argued that the best government is the one which governs least -- classic laissez-faire ideology -- Godwin argued that government was absolutely unnecessary.

The reader has probably anticipated the ultimate conclusion from these remarks. If juries might at length cease to decide, and be contented to invite, if force might gradually be withdrawn and reason trusted alone, shall we not one day find, that juries themselves, and every other species of public institution, may be laid aside as unnecessary? Will not the reasonings of one wise man, be as effectual as those of twelve? Will not the competence of one individual to instruct his neighbors, be a matter of sufficient notoriety, without the formality of an election? Will there be many vices to correct, and much obstinacy to conquer? This is one of the most memorable stages of human improvement. With what delight must every well informed friend of mankind look forward, to the auspicious period, the dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which, as has abundantly appeared in the progress of the present work, has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its substance, and no otherwise removable than by its utter annihilation.

The French Revolution: The Moderate Stage, 1789-1792

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (August 26, 1789)

It is time to teach kings that the silence of the laws about their crimes is the ill consequence of their power, and not the will of reason or equity. . . . Speech of Marquis de Condorcet (December 3, 1792)

On the night of August 4, several members of the Assembly drew up a key document of the French Revolution – this was the DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND THE CITIZEN. On August 26, the Declaration was formally adopted by the National Assembly. A moral document through and through, the Declaration outlined man’s natural rights. The purpose of such a Declaration was to rally the country and to add support to the National Assembly.

Between the October Days of 1789 and September 1791, the National Assembly busied itself with reforms meant to dismantle the ancien regime. They accomplished this with six basic reforms

By the end of September 1791, the National Assembly announced that its work was done. In many ways, the Constitution of 1791 seemed to fulfill the promises of reform which had been first uttered by the men of 1789. All Frenchmen could now be proud that the following rights had been secured: equality before the law, careers open to talent, a written constitution, and parliamentary government

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790)

The National Assembly, after having heard the report of the ecclesiastical committee, has decreed and do decree the following as constitutional article

ARTICLE I. Each department shall form a single diocese, and each diocese shall have the same extent and the same limits as the department.

II. The seat of the bishoprics of the eighty-three departments of the kingdom shall be established as follows: that of the department of the Lower Seine at Rouen; that of the department of Calvados at Bayeux.

All other bishoprics in the eighty-three departments of the kingdom, which are not included by name in the present article, are, and forever shall be, abolished.

The kingdom shall be divided into ten metropolitan districts of which the sees shall be situated at Rouen, Rheims, Besancon, Rennes, Paris, Bourges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Aix, and Lyons. These archbishoprics shall have the following denominations : that of Rouen shall be called the Archbishopric of the Coast of the Channel.

IV. No church or parish of France nor any French citizen may acknowledge upon any occasion, or upon any pretext whatsoever, the authority of an ordinary bishop or of an archbishop whose see shall be under the supremacy of a foreign power, nor that of his representatives residing in France or elsewhere; without prejudice, however, to the unity of the faith and the intercourse which shall be maintained with the visible head of the universal Church, as hereafter provided.

VI. A new arrangement and division of all the parishes of the kingdom shall be undertaken immediately in concert with the bishop and the district administration.

XX. All titles and offices other than those mentioned in the present constitution, dignities, canonries, prebends, half prebends, chapels, chaplainships, both in cathedral and collegiate churches, all regular and secular chapters for either sex, abbacies and priorships, both regular and in commendam, for either sex, as well as all other benefices and prestimonies in general, of whatever kind or denomination, are from the day of this decree extinguished and abolished and shall never be reestablished in any form.

ARTICLE I. Beginning with the day of publication of the present decree, there shall be but one mode of choosing bishops and parish priests, namely that of election.

II. All elections shall be by ballot and shall be decided by the absolute majority of the votes.

III. The election of bishops shall take place according to the forms and by the electoral body designated in the decree of December 22, 1789, for the election of members of the departmental assembly.

VI. The election of a bishop can only take place or be undertaken upon Sunday, in the principal church of the chief town of the department, at the close of the parish mass, at which all the electors are required to be present.

VII. In order to be eligible to a bishopric, one must have fulfilled for fifteen years at least the duties of the church ministry in the diocese, as a parish priest, officiating minister, or curate, or as superior, or as directing vicar of the seminary.

XIX. The new bishop may not apply to the pope for any form of confirmation, but shall write to him, as to the visible head of the universal Church, as a testimony to the unity of faith and communion maintained with him.

XXI. Before the ceremony of consecration begins, the bishop elect shall take a solemn oath, in the presence of the municipal officers, of the people, and of the clergy, to guard with care the faithful of his diocese who are confided to him, to be loyal to the nation, the law, and the king, and to support with all his power the constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.

XXV. The election of the parish priests shall take place according to the forms and by the electors designated in the decree of December 22, 1789, for the election of members of the administrative assembly of the district.

XI. Bishoprics and cures shall be looked upon as vacant until those elected to fill them shall have taken the oath above mentioned.

ARTICLE I. The ministers of religion, performing as they do the first and most important functions of society and forced to live continuously in the place where they discharge the offices to which they have been called by the confidence of the people, shall be supported by the nation.

II. Every bishop, priest, and officiating clergyman in a chapel of ease shall be furnished with a suitable dwelling, on condition, however, that the occupant shall make all the necessary current repairs. This shall not affect at present, in any way, those parishes where the priest now receives a money equivalent instead of his dwelling. The departments shall, moreover, have cognizance of suits arising in this connection, brought by the parishes and by the priests. Salaries shall be assigned to each, as indicated below.

III. The bishop of Paris shall receive fifty thousand livres; the bishops of the cities having a population of fifty thousand (p. 426) or more, twenty thousand livres ; other bishops, twelve thousand livres.

V. The salaries of the parish priests shall be as follows : in Paris, six thousand livres; in cities having a population of fifty thousand or over, four thousand livres; in those having a population of less than fifty thousand and more than ten thousand, three thousand livres; in cities and towns of which the population is below ten thousand and more than three thousand, twenty-four hundred livres.

In all other cities, towns, and villages where the parish shall have a population between three thousand and twenty-five hundred, two thousand livres; in those between twenty-five hundred and two thousand, eighteen hundred livres; in those having a population of less than two thousand, and more than one thousand, the salary shall be fifteen hundred livres; in those having one thousand inhabitants and under, twelve hundred livres.

VII. The salaries in money of the ministers of religion shall be paid every three months, in advance, by the treasurer of the district.

XII. In view of the salary which is assured to them by the present constitution, the bishops, parish priests, and curates shall perform the episcopal and priestly functions gratis.

ARTICLE I. The law requiring the residence of ecclesiastics in the districts under their charge shall be strictly observed. All vested with an ecclesiastical office or function shall be subject to this, without distinction or exception.

II. No bishop shall absent himself from his diocese more than two weeks consecutively during the year, except in case of real necessity and with the consent of the directory of the department in which his see is situated.

III. In the same manner, the parish priests and the curates may not absent themselves from the place of their duties beyond the term fixed above, except for weighty reasons, and even in such cases the priests must obtain the permission both of their bishop and of the directory of their district, and the curates that of the parish priest.

VI. Bishops, parish priests, and curates may, as active citizens, be present at the primary and electoral assemblies; they may be chosen electors, or as deputies to the legislative body, or as members of the general council of the communes or of the administrative councils of their districts or departments.

[Source: J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn, 1906), pp. 423-427.]

Why the Revolution became radical is interesting and there are basically two reasons why it did so. First, a counter-revolution, loyal to Church and King, was led by the noble and the clergy and supported by staunch Catholic peasants.

The French Revolution: The Radical Stage, 1792-1794

The proof necessary to convict the enemies of the people is every kind of evidence, either material or moral or verbal or written. . . . Every citizen has the right to seize conspirators and counter-revolutionaries and to arraign them before magistrates. He is required to denounce them when he knows of them. Law of 22 Prairial Year II (June 10, 1794)

Inflamed by their poverty and hatred of wealth, the SANS-CULOTTES insisted that it was the duty of the government to guarantee them the right to existence. Such a policy ran counter to the bourgeois aspirations of the National Assembly. The sans-culottes demanded that the revolutionary government immediately increase wages, fix prices, end food shortages, punish hoarders and most important, deal with the existence of counter-revolutionaries. In terms of social ideals the sans-culottes wanted laws to prevent extremes of both wealth and property. Their vision was of a nation of small shopkeepers and small farmers. They favored a democratic republic in which the voice of the common man could be heard. In this respect, their ideology falls into line with that of Thomas Paine (1737-1809), the English radical who argued that the best form of government was the one which governed least: government should guarantee basic natural rights and then lay off the citizen (on Paine, see Lecture 14). In other words, and this is important to grasp, the social and economic ideas of the sans-culottes were politicized by the Revolution itself.

On AUGUST 10, 1792, enraged Parisian men and women attacked the king’s palace and killed several hundred Swiss Guards. The result of this journee was the radicalization of the Revolution. Louis and Marie Antoinette were forced to flee the Tuileries and took refuge in the Legislative Assembly itself. The royal family was placed under house arrest, and lived rather comfortably, but the king could not perform any of his political functions. Although the revolutionaries had drafted a constitution, now they had no monarch.

By September, Paris was in turmoil. Fearing counter-revolution, the sans-culottes destroyed prisons because they believed they were secretly sheltering conspirators. More than one thousand people were killed. Street fights broke out everywhere and barricades were set up in various quarters of the city. All this was done in order to consolidate the Revolution – to keep it moving forward. On September 21^stand 22^nd, 1792, the monarchy was officially abolished and a republic established. The 22^nd of September, 1792 was now known as day one of the year one. In December, Louis XVI was placed on TRIAL for violating the liberty of his subjects and on January 21, 1793, Louis was executed like an ordinary criminal. From this time on, the Revolution had no recourse but to move forward.

After the execution of Louis, the National Assembly, now known as the National Convention, faced enormous problems. The value of paper currency (assignats) used to finance the Revolution had fallen by 50%. There was price inflation, continued food shortages, and various peasant rebellions against the Revolution occurred across the countryside. France was close to civil war.

Meanwhile, the revolutionaries found themselves not only at war with Austria and Prussia, but with Holland, Spain and Great Britain. As the Revolution stumbled under the weight of foreign war and civil war, the revolutionary leadership grew more radical. Up to June 1793, moderate reformers had dominated the National Convention. These were the Girondins, men who favored a decentralized government in which the various provinces or departments would determine their own affairs. The Girondins also opposed government interference in the economy.

In June 1793, factional disputes with the Convention resulted in the replacement of the Girondins with the Jacobins, a far more radical group. The Jacobins and Girondins were both liberal and bourgeois, but the Jacobins desired a centralized government (in which they would hold key positions), Paris as the national capital, and temporary government control of the economy. The Jacobin platform managed to win the support of the sans-culottes. The Jacobins were tightly organized, well-disciplined and convinced that they alone were responsible for saving and "managing" the Revolution from this point forward. On June 22, 1793, 80,000 armed sans-culottes surrounded the meeting halls of the National Convention and demanded the immediate arrest of the Girondin faction. The Convention yielded to the mob and 29 Girondin members of the Convention were arrested.

The Jacobins now had firm control not only of the Convention, but the French nation as well. They were the government. And they now had even more pressing problems: civil war was everywhere, economic distress had not been lifted, they had to keep the sans-culottes satisfied, they suffered continued threats of foreign invasion and the nation’s ports had all been blockaded. They lived, dreading the possibility that if they failed, so too would the Revolution. Only strong leadership could save the Revolution. The Committee of Public Safety assumed leadership, in April 1793. As a branch of the National Convention itself, the Committee of Public Safety had broad powers which included the organization of the nation’s defenses, all foreign policy, and the supervision of ministers. The Committee also ordered arrests and trials of counter-revolutionaries and imposed government authority across the nation. What is amazing is that only twelve men controlled the CPS, although the CPS was ultimately led by MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE (1758-1794).

In Robespierre's utopian vision, the individual has the duty "to detest bad faith and despotism, to punish tyrants and traitors, to assist the unfortunate and respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, to do all the good one can to one's neighbor, and to behave with justice towards all men." Robespierre was a disciple of Rousseau--both considered the general will an absolute necessity. For Robespierre, the realization of the general will would make the Republic of Virtue a reality. Its denial would mean a return to despotism. Robespierre knew that a REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE could not become a reality unless the threats of foreign and civil war were removed. To preserve the Republic, Robespierre and the CPS instituted the Reign of Terror. Counter-revolutionaries, the Girondins, priests, nobles, and aristocrats immediately fell under suspicion. Danton, a revolutionary who sought peace with Europe, was executed.

The CPS also closed the numerous political clubs of the sans-culottes. The CPS feared spontaneous action, that is, that the revolutionary leadership might pass into other hands. About 17,000 people died as a result of the Terror. The choice instrument, was the guillotine -- it was quick and humane. In 1794, there were mass executions at Lyons. Boats were fired upon and sunk at Nantes -- 500 were killed in one execution. About 15,000 people perished officially and over 100,000 people were detained as suspects.

Robespierre and the CPS resorted to the Terror but not because they were blood-thirsty madmen. They did, however, wish to create a temporary dictatorship in order to save the Republic (a Roman idea). By the summer of 1794, there seem to be less need for the Terror. The Republic seemed a reality, an aristocratic conspiracy had subsided, the will to punish traitors decreased, and most sans-culottes went home to tend to business. And, as the need for the Terror decreased, so too did Robespierre's power and leadership. Some members of the Convention, fearing for their own lives, ordered the arrest of Robespierre. On July 27, 1794, (the NINTH of THERMIDOR) Robespierre was arrested and guillotined the next day -- the sans-culottes made no attempt to save him. With the 9th of Thermidor, the machinery of the Jacobin republic was dismantled. Leadership passed to the property owning bourgeoisie, that is, those men of the moderate stage of the Revolution (see Lecture 12).

By 1795, the government had passed into the hands of the five-man Directory. The new legislature sat in two chambers: the Council of 500 and the Ancients (or Senate). The Directory tried to preserve the Revolution of 1789 – they opposed the restoration of the ancien regime as well as popular democracy. They refused to leave the door open for either the excessive radicalism of the Jacobins or the spontaneity of the sans-culottes. The Directory muddled on until 1799. By this time the French Revolution was over and the French tried to get back to business as usual. Radicalism had been effectively thwarted as well. But France was still at war with the rest of Europe. And because of the war, leadership began to pass into the hands of generals. One of these generals would seize control of the government in November 1799. And on December 2, 1804, this general, Napoleon Bonaparte, would declare himself Emperor of the French -- the new Augustus Caesar. As François Furet [The French Revolution, 1770-1814, (Blackwell, 1996)] has remarked:

Ten years after 1789, the French Revolution had largely become in public opinion that very special something which eluded [Benjamin] Constant's analysis: a universalist nationalism, in which the historian can discern its component elements of anti-aristocratic passion and rationalism, transfigured by the idea of the nation's historico-military election. The Directory could no more identify this mixture of sentiments than it could reassure those whose interests were threatened. On both sides there was the implicit demand for a king, but one who was radically different from other kings, since he would be born of the sovereignty of the people and of reason. This was where Napoleon Bonaparte, king of the French Revolution, was born. In 1789, the French had created a Republic, under the name of a monarchy. Ten years later, they created a monarchy, under the name of a Republic. (215)

With all this now behind us, what did the Revolution accomplish? First, the Revolution weakened the political influence and leadership of the aristocracy. The aristocrats lost their privileges based on birth because from this point on, privilege would now be based on property and wealth. As the sans-culottes quickly realized, one evil simply replaced another. Second, because careers were open to talent, the bourgeoisie had access to the highest positions in the state. In fact, throughout the 19^th century, the French state was a bourgeois state which echoed middle-class needs and values. Third, the Revolution transformed the dynastic state of the ancien regime into the modern state (natural, liberal, secular and rational). The state was no longer just a federation of provinces, it was not the private property of the king. Instead, the state now belonged to the people. The individual, formerly a subject in the old order, was now a citizen, with specific rights as well as duties. Lastly, the Revolution managed to give practical application to the ideas of the philosophes -- equality before the law, trial by jury, the freedom of religion, speech and the press. In the 19^th century, all these ideas led to the quickening pace of reform. And in that century, the voices of the sans-culottes would be heard once more. All these developments were accelerated by the Industrial Revolution itself (see Lecture 17). While the French Revolution politicized the sans-culottes, the Industrial Revolution industrialized them. Both events had the ultimate effect of making the European working classes.

The French Revolution and the Socialist Tradition:
Communists

The French communist philosophers of the late eighteenth century went beyond Rousseau in many important respects. These thinkers did not refer to themselves as communists, since the word itself did not gain currency until the 19th century. These thinkers had a more consuming interest than Rousseau in the problem of avarice or greed, and were willing to go to greater lengths to combat it. They began with a criticism of private property that sounded similar to Rousseau, but they took the step of actually calling for its abolition and the establishment of a society based on the egalitarian and communal ownership of property.

The writings of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably (1709-1785) have pretty much passed into obscurity in the 20th century. It is possible that Mably's uncompromising position toward human equality is what made him popular among his contemporaries. This decline in interest is rather odd, because de Mably was one of the 18th century’s most popular writers. He was also the brother of Étienne Condillac (1715-1780), friend of Rousseau and an important French philosophe who helped popularize John Locke’s theory of knowledge in France. Mably was not a modernizer. He did not believe in expanding material production -- an idea which we will encounter full-blown with Utopian Socialists like Charles Fourier or Robert Owen and Saint-Simon Far from praising trade and commerce as sources of new wealth, he expressed deep contempt for the merchant class whom he condemned in quite traditional terms as motivated by antisocial greed and readiness to exploit their fellow men. Mably's theories are directed more toward the past than they are toward the future. What this implies is that Mably falls into better company with the pre-modern spokesmen of social progress, Sir Thomas More. Thomas More. Like Marx, an intellectual. Unlike Marx, he was a devout Christian. In his classic work of social protest and wishful thinking, Utopia, More writes:

The rich men not only by private fraud, but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the poor some part of their daily living. So whereas it seemed before unjust to recompense with unkindness their pains that have been beneficial to the public weal, now they have to this their wrong and unjust dealing given the name of justice, yea, and that by force of law. Therefore when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths, which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

The reason why Morelly was so well known in the 19th century was because his theories were often confused with those of the celebrated philosophe, Denis Diderot. Like Mably, Morelly pointed an accusing finger at possessions and possessiveness:

The only vice that I perceive in the universe is Avarice, all the others, by whatever name they are known, are only variations . . . of this one.

He believed that society should be so organized that natural self-love could flower into general benevolence or love for all mankind. The existence of private property, even when divided equally, prevents this flowering: it corrupts natural self-love into a cancerous greed. "I dare to concede," he wrote, "that all division of goods, whether equal or unequal, and all that private property . . . is, in all societies, what Horace calls ‘material for the highest evil’." Morelly's influence is great. His ideas were picked up by a man who has been considered the first communist revolutionary thinker, a heroic martyr to the communist cause: this was Francois Noel Babeuf, better known as Graachus Babeuf (1760-1797).

Babeuf was even less original in thought than the communist philosophes who came before him. His ideas are a rather hodge-podge amalgam of the ideas of Rousseau, Mably and Morelly. We can even throw in a good measure of sans-culottist influence as well because Babeuf, unlike our other representatives of the early French communist movement, was mired in the French Revolution itself. His statements were not intended to be taken lightly -- he saw his ideas as hardened manifestos. He was also part Jacobin, in other words, he was attracted to the political devices of the Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror. Of greatest significance, however, is the fact that Babeuf went beyond the confines of the Jacobin ideology. Politically, we could say that Babeuf stood to the left of left. Babeuf became a communist revolutionary.

Babeuf’s beliefs were based on the Enlightenment idea that all men have a natural right to happiness. But he also argued that true happiness was not possible without "real equality," that is, social equality, which he also called a natural right. If a society failed to fulfill its obligations in these regards, then it was to be considered tyrannical and a person then had no obligation to obey its laws. On the contrary, one had the duty to struggle against it and to overthrow it. Babeuf believed that until private property was abolished, real equality and thus happiness, could not be assured. After the next revolution and after the abolition of all forms of private property, there would be a community of goods and property and the state would see to it that all goods were distributed equally. Babeuf justified going to these lengths to preserve equality because he believed that people would continue to be unhappy without it. A harmonious society demanded strict equality.

Babeuf knew, like Rousseau, that people needed to be forced to be free. Babeuf openly declared that the state might have to be organized along despotic-military lines at least until the ignorant masses had been brought up to a particular consciousness of their own aims and interests.

This direction in Babeuf’s thought brings him directly into line with modern totalitarian thinking, especially along the lines of the Leninist-Stalinist model. What the majority of the people think at any given moment in time is unimportant to the revolutionary. The only thing that is important is what kind of men are in power. The thoughtful revolutionary recognizes that the moment for revolution must be chosen carefully. At the same time, the prospect of at least some bloodshed cannot dampen the resolution of the true revolutionary since the system in existence is already violent. In a society characterized by repression and exploitation, great numbers of people die daily, if not at the hands of the policeman’s bullet, then through over-work, malnutrition, poverty and a hundred other things related to an oppressive class system. In other words, violence is endemic and cannot be avoided. The revolutionary, then, must use violence in a rational way.

History does nothing, it "possesses no immense wealth," it "wages no battles." It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own gains; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his names.

KARL MARX (1818-1883) was an insensitive man -- he was not that concerned about the feelings of those individuals with whom he came in contact. The majority of men, he thought, were either fools or sycophants. His public attitude was over-bearing, offensive and unyielding. But, within his circle of friends and family, he was quite intimate. Here, in the bosom of his family, Marx was secure, happy, considerate and generous. It is odd that throughout his entire life Marx remained an isolated figure among other revolutionaries of the period. But mid-19th century European revolutionaries were a diverse lot. Whether or not they believed in violent revolution, there is at least one thing they did have in common -- they appealed explicitly to moral standards common to all mankind. They criticized and condemned the existing condition of humanity in terms of an ideal, of a system whose desirability was self-evident to all men of moral vision. Their schemes varied -- some were utopian, some were not. But they were agreed on the ultimate end which needed to be pursued. In their minds, what needed to be done was (1) ascertain the kind of world you wanted to see built, (2) consider how much of the present state of things ought to be retained and (3) find the most effective means of accomplishing the desired transformation. This is an attitude of the vast majority of revolutionaries and reformers, not only in 1850 but at earlier times as well. Marx would have nothing to do with this attitude. He was convinced that human history is governed by scientific laws which cannot be altered by the mere intervention of individuals embracing one idea or another.

Marx denounced the existing state of things by making his appeal to history and not to a set of ahistorical ideals as the Utopian Socialists and liberal bourgeois reformers had done before him. Bourgeois society was the result of those laws of social development which made it inevitable that at a certain stage of historical development one social class, pursuing its own interests, should dispossess and exploit another social class. The oppressors are threatened not with deliberate retribution on the part of their victims, but with the inevitable destruction which history has in store for them. As a class, the bourgeoisie are doomed to disappear and without knowing it, they have dug their own graves. Marx's language is always that of the herald or prophet. He speaks not in the name of human beings but of universal laws. He seeks not to rescue, nor to improve, but to warn and condemn, to reveal the truth and to refute falsehood.

Marx was an intellectual, a philosopher, historian and revolutionary whose total life experience was that of the 19th century.

"After having spent two sessions in Edinburgh, my father perceived or he heard from my sisters, that I did not like the thought of being a physician, so he proposed this I should become a clergyman. He was very properly vehement against my turning an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination." ("Autobiography of Charles Darwin" Nora Barlow editor, W. W. Norton, 1958, page 56)

The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labelled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England.

DARWIN'S EVOLUTION AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY

"Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the noveltry of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. The question then continually rose before my mind and would not be banished, -- is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindoos, would he permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c, as Christianity is connected with the Old Testament. This appeared to me utterly incredible."

By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is suppoted, -- that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, -- that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, -- that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneous with the events, -- that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; -- by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least noveltry or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.

A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to supose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddists of no God. There are also many barbarian tribes who cannot be said with any truth to believe in what we call God: they believe indeed in spirits or ghosts, and it can be explained, as Tyler and Herbert Spencer have shown, how such a belief would be likely to arise.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

As for myself I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science. I feel no remorse from having committed any great sin, but have often and often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures. http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm 3/18/03 12:20 PM

Most historians who study the life of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich see his connection with Darwin.

JOHN DEWEY [1859-1952]

John Dewey at Johns Hopkins Dewey came under the tutelage of two powerful and engaging intellects who were to have a lasting influence on him. George Sylvester Morris, a German-trained Hegelian philosopher, exposed Dewey to the organic model of nature characteristic of German idealism.

Upon obtaining his doctorate in 1884, Dewey accepted a teaching post at the University of Michigan, a post he was to hold for ten years, with the exception of a year at the University of Minnesota in 1888. While at Michigan Dewey wrote his first two books: Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888). Both works expressed Dewey's early committment to Hegelian idealism, while the Psychology explored the synthesis between this idealism and experimental science that Dewey was then attempting to effect.

He later became professor at Chicago and Columbia; philosopher and educational theorist; pragmatist; designed progressive education; strong evolutionist; critical of traditional religion; humanist; emphasized science, intelligence and education. Wrote 1. A Common Faith, 2. The Quest for Certainty, 3. How We Think, 4. Reconstruction in Philosophy, 5. Human Nature and Conduct, and 6. Art as Experience. Note not related to Melville Dewey of the Dewey Decimal library classification system.

John Dewey signed the First Humanist Manifesto. Dewey was instrumental in seeing the public schools of America become based around the Humanist Manifesto. This included a ban on the Bible in schools as well as a ban on prayer. [In the Minds of Men, 425]

in 1962, citing no precedents, a liberal Supreme Court abolished prayer from the public schools and the next year abolished Bible reading from the schools.

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." [In Minds of Men, 397]

HUMANISM IS A RELIGION

‘A religion is essentially an attitude to the world as a whole. Thus evolution, for example, may prove as powerful a principle to co-ordinate men’s beliefs and hopes as God was in the past. Such ideas underlie the various forms of Rationalism, the Ethical movement and scientific Humanism.’

‘Humanism: An outlook that places man and his concerns at the centre of interest. Modern Humanism, which does away with traditional Christianity, is characterised by its faith in the power of human beings to create their own future, collectively and personally.’ [Growth of Ideas. The evolution of thought and knowledge. Ed. Sir Julian Huxley, 1965, pp. 99, 336.]

Julian Huxley is one of the principle architects of global humanism. He was the first director general of UNESCO, or the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. This organization is located in Paris France.

"It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form."

WITNESSING TO NATURALISTIC FRIENDS

The French mathematician and theologian, Blaise Pascal put forward a famous wager in his Pensees (Thoughts). Pascal wrote:

"Men despise religion. They hate it, and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it. Then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true. Finally, we must prove it is true." [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 68].

PEOPLE ARE INCAPABLE OF HAPPINESS WITHOUT GOD

"There are only three kinds of persons. Those who serve God, having found Him. Others who are occupied in seeking Him, not having found Him. While the remainder live without seeking Him, and without having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy. Those between are unhappy and reasonable." [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 94].

Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good. And two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss of wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hestitation that He is. That is very fine. Yes, I must wager. [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 84-85].

Pascal's argument has led many freethinkers to consider the God of Christianity. His claim says, if I believe and then it turns out to be true I get to enjoy heavenly bliss; but if my belief turns out to be false, and there is no God, then when I die, I lose nothing. If I remain an atheist however and it turns out to be wrong, I will suffer an eternity of torment. If the atheist turns out to be right then it is only equal to the believer's "worst case." Obviously then, the believer will say, you must wager on the side of belief.

Pascal begins with a two-by-two matrix: either God exists or does not, and either you believe or do not.

If God exists then theists will enjoy eternal bliss (cell a), while atheists will suffer eternal damnation (cell b). If God does not exist then theists will enjoy finite happiness before they die (say 250 units worth), and atheists will enjoy finite happiness too, though not so much because they will experience angst rather than the comforts of religion. Regardless of whether God exists, then, theists have it better than atheists; hence belief in God is the most rational belief to have.

PASCAL & TRUTH

"Nothing gives certainty but truth. Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth." [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 317].

He who will give the meaning of Scripture, and does not take it from Scripture is the enemy of Scripture." [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 315].

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it." [Blaise Pascal's Thoughts, Harvard Classics, vol. 48, 307].

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA NATURALISM

Naturalism

Naturalism is not so much a special system as a point of view or tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems; not so much a well-defined set of positive and negative doctrines as an attitude or spirit pervading and influencing many doctrines. As the name implies, this tendency consists essentially in looking upon nature as the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. Either the limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality, or at least the first cause, if its existence is found necessary, has nothing to do with the working of natural agencies. All events, therefore, find their adequate explanation within nature itself. But, as the terms nature and natural are themselves used in more than one sense, the term naturalism is also far from having one fixed meaning.

These three forms are not mutually exclusive; what the third denies the first and the second, a fortiori, also deny; all agree in rejecting every explanation which would have recourse to causes outside of nature. The reasons of this denial — i. e., the philosophical views of nature on which it is based — and, in consequence, the extent to which explanations within nature itself are held to suffice, vary greatly and constitute essential differences between these three tendencies.

Materialistic Naturalism asserts that matter is the only reality, and that all the laws of the universe are reducible to mechanical laws. What theory may be held concerning the essence of matter makes little difference here. Whether matter be considered as continuous or as composed of atoms distant from one another, as being exclusively extension or as also endowed with an internal principle of activity, or even as being only an aggregate of centres of energy without any real extension (see ATOMISM; DYNAMISM; MECHANISM), the attitude of Naturalism is the same. It claims that all realities in the world, including the processes of consciousness from the lowest to the highest, are but manifestations of what we call matter, and obey the same necessary laws. While some may limit their materialistic account to nature itself, and admit the existence of a Creator of the world, or at least leave this question open, the general tendency of Materialism is towards Atheism and exclusive Naturalism. Early Greek philosophers endeavoured to reduce nature to unity by pointing to a primordial element out of which all things were composed. Their views were, implicitly at least, Animistic or Hylozoistic rather than Materialistic, and the vague formative function attributed to the Nous, or rational principle, by Anaxagoras was but an exception to the prevailing naturalism. Pure mechanism was developed by the Atomists (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius), and the soul itself was held to be composed of special, more subtile, atoms. In the Christian era materialism in its exclusive form is represented especially by the French school of the latter half of the eighteenth century and the German school of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Since matter is the only reality, whatever takes place in the world is the result of material causes and must be explained by physical antecedents without any teleology. Life is but a complex problem of physics and chemistry; consciousness is a property of matter; rational thought is reduced to sensation, and will to instinct. The mind is a powerless accompaniment or epiphenomenon of certain forms or groupings of matter, and, were it suppressed altogether, the whole world would still proceed in exactly the same way. Man is a conscious automaton whose whole activity, mental as well as physiological, is determined by material antecedents. What we call the human person is but a transitory phase in the special arrangement of material elements giving rise to special mental results; and it goes without saying that in such a system there is no room for freedom, responsibility, or personal immortality.

Pantheism in its various forms asserts that God, the First Reality, World-Ground, or Absolute, is not transcendent and personal, but immanent in the world, and that the phenomena of nature are only manifestations of this one common substance. For the Stoics, He is the immanent reason, the soul of the world, communicating everywhere activity and life. According to Scotus Eriugena, "God is the essence of all things, for He alone truly is" (De divisione naturæ, III); nature includes the totality of beings and is divided into

Giordano Bruno also professes that God and nature are identical, and that the world of phenomena is but the manifestation of the Divine substance which works in nature and animates it. According to Spinoza, God is the one substance which unfolds itself through attributes, two of which, extension and thought, are known to us. These attributes manifest themselves through a number of modes which are the finite determinations of the infinite substance. As absolute substance, God is natura naturans; as manifesting himself through the various modes of phenomena, he is natura naturata. To-day Monism reproduces essentially the same theories. Mind is not reduced to a property, or epiphenomenon, of matter, but both matter and mind are like parallels; they proceed together as phenomena or aspects of the same ultimate reality. What is this reality? By some, explicitly or implicitly, it is rather conceived as material, and we fall back into Materialism; by others it is claimed to be nearer to mind than to matter, and hence result various idealistic systems and tendencies; by others, finally, it is declared to be strictly unknown and unknowable, and thus Monistic Naturalism comes into close contact with Agnosticism.

Whatever it may be ultimately, nature is substantially one; it requires nothing outside of itself, but finds within itself its adequate explanation. Either the human mind is incapable of any knowledge bearing on the question of origins, or this question itself is meaningless, since both nature and its processes of development are eternal. The simultaneous or successive changes which occur in the world result necessarily from the essential laws of nature, for nature is infinitely rich in potencies whose progressive actualization constitutes the endless process of inorganic, organic, and mental evolution. The evolution and differentiation of the one substance according to its own laws and without the guiding agency of a transcendent intelligence is one of the basic assumptions of Monistic and Agnostic Naturalism. Nor is it possible to see how this form of Naturalism can consistently escape the consequences of Materialistic Naturalism. The supernatural is impossible; at no stage can there be any freedom or responsibility; man is but a special manifestation or mode of the common substance, including in himself the twofold aspect of matter and consciousness. Moreover, since God, or rather "the divine", as some say, is to be found in nature, with which it is identified, religion can only be reduced to certain feelings of admiration, awe, reverence, fear, etc., caused in man by the consideration of nature its laws, beauties, energies, and mysteries. Thus, among the feelings belonging to "natural religion", Haeckel mentions "the astonishment with which we gaze upon the starry heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous working of energy in the motion of matter, the reverence with which we grasp the universal dominance of the law of substance throughout the universe" ("Die Welträthsel", Bonn, 1899, V, xviii, 396-97; tr. McCabe, New York, 1900, 344).

For those who admit the existence of a transcendent First Cause of the universe, naturalism consists essentially in an undue limitation of God's activity in the world. God is only Creator, not Providence; He cannot, or may not, interfere with the natural course of events, or He never did so, or, at least, the fact of His ever doing so cannot be established. Even if the soul of man is regarded as spiritual and immortal, and if, among human activities, some are exempted from the determinism of physical agents and recognized to be free, all this is within nature, which includes the laws governing spirits as well as those governing matter. But these laws are sufficient to account for everything that happens in the world of matter or of mind. This form of naturalism stands in close relation with Rationalism and Deism. Once established by God, the order of nature is unchangeable, and man is endowed by nature with all that is required even for his religious and moral development. The consequences are clear: miracles, that is, effects produced by God himself and transcending the forces of nature, must be rejected. Prophecies and so-called miraculous events either are explainable by the known, or hitherto unknown, laws of nature or, if they are not thus explainable, their happening itself must be denied, and the belief in their reality attributed to faulty observation. Since, for religious and moral, as well as for scientific truths, human reason is the only source of knowledge, the fact of a Divine Revelation is rejected, and the contents of such supposed revelation can be accepted only in so far as they are rational; to believe in mysteries is absurd. Having no supernatural destiny, man needs no supernatural means — neither sanctifying grace as a permanent principle to give his actions a supernatural value nor actual grace to enlighten his mind and strengthen his will. The Fall of Man, the mysteries of the incarnation and the Redemption, with their implications and consequences, can find no place in a Naturalistic creed. Prayers and sacraments have only natural results explainable on psychological grounds by the confidence with which they inspire those who use them. If man must have a religion at all, it is only that which his reason dictates. Naturalism is directly opposed to the Christian Religion. But even within the fold of Christianity, among those who admit a Divine Revelation and a supernatural order, several naturalistic tendencies are found. Such are those of the Pelagians and Semipelagians, who minimize the necessity and functions of Divine grace; of Baius, who asserts that the elevation of man was an exigency of his nature; of many sects, especially among Liberal Protestants, who fall into more or Less radical Rationalism; and of others who endeavour to restrict within too narrow limits the divine agency in the universe.

From the fundamental principles of Naturalism are derived some important consequences in æsthetical, political, and ethical sciences. In æsthetics Naturalism rests on the assumption that art must imitate nature without any idealization, and without any regard for the laws of morality. Social and political Naturalism teaches that "the best interests of public society and civil progress require that in the constitution and government of human society no more attention should be given to religion than if there were no religion at all, or at least that no distinction should be made between true and false religion" (Pius IX, Encycl., "Quanta cura", 8 Dec., 1864). Leo XIII lays it down that "the integral profession of the Catholic Faith is in no way consistent with naturalistic and rationalistic opinions, the sum and the substance of which is to do away altogether with Christian institutions, and; disregarding the rights of God, to attribute to man the supreme authority in society" (Encycl., "Immortale Dei", 1 Nov., 1885). Moreover, like individual organisms, social organisms obey fatal laws of development; all events are the necessary results of complex antecedents, and the task of the historian is to record them and to trace the laws of their sequences, which are as strict as those of sequences in the physical world.

In ethics, the vague assumption that nature is the supreme guide of human actions may be applied in many different ways. Already the principle of the Stoics, formulated first by Zeno, that we must live consistently or harmoniously (to homologoumenos zen), and stated more explicitly by Cleanthes as the obligation to live in conformity with nature (to homologoumenos te physei zen) gave rise to several interpretations, some understanding nature exclusively as human nature, others chiefly as the whole universe. Moreover as man has many natural tendencies, desires, and appetites, it may be asked whether it is moral to follow all indiscriminately; and when they are conflicting or mutually exclusive, so that a choice is to be made, on what ground must certain activities be given the preference over the others? Before the Stoics, the Cynics, both in theory and in practice, had based their rules of conduct on the principle that nothing natural can be morally wrong. Opposing customs, conventions, refinement, and culture, they endeavoured to return to the pure state of nature. Rousseau, likewise, looks upon the social organization as a necessary evil which contributes towards developing conventional standards of morality. Man, according to him, is naturally good, but becomes depraved by education and by contact with other men. This same theme of the opposition of nature and culture, and the superiority of the former, is a favourite one with Tolstoi. According to Nietzsche, the current standards of virtue are against nature, and, because they favour the poor, the weak, the suffering, the miserable, by commending such feelings as charity, compassion, pity, humility, etc., they are obstacles in the way of true progress. For the progress of mankind and the development of the "Superman", it is essential to return to the primitive and natural standard of morality, which is energy activity, strength, and superiority; the most powerful are also the best.

If ethical naturalism is considered in its relation with the three philosophical views explained above, it sometimes means only the rejection of any duties based on a Divine Revelation, and the assumption that the only source of right and wrong is human reason. Generally, however, it means the more radical tendency to treat moral science in the same manner as natural science. There is freedom nowhere, but absolute necessity everywhere. All human actions, as well as physical events, are necessary results of antecedents that are themselves necessary. The moral law, with its essential distinction of right and wrong conduct, is, not an objective norm, but a mere subjective result of associations and instincts evolved from the experience of the useful and agreeable, or of the harmful and painful, consequences of certain actions. It is, nevertheless, a motive that prompts to act in certain directions, but the effectiveness of which is strictly determined by the degree of its intensity in a given individual compared with the resistance it encounters on the part of antagonistic ideas. Thus, the science of ethics is not normative: it does not deal with laws existing antecedently to human actions, and which these ought to obey. It is genetic, and endeavours to do for human actions what natural science does for physical phenomena, that is, to discover, through an inference from the facts of human conduct, the laws to which it happens to conform.

It is impossible to state in detail the attitude of the Catholic Church towards the assumptions, implications, and consequences of Naturalism. Naturalism is such a wide and far-reaching tendency, it touches upon so many points, its roots and ramifications extend in so many directions, that the reader must be referred to the cognate topics treated in other articles. In general it can only be said that Naturalism contradicts the most vital doctrines of the Church, which rest essentially on Supernaturalism. The existence of a personal God and of Divine Providence, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, human freedom and responsibility, the fact of a Divine Revelation, the existence of a supernatural order for man, are so many fundamental teachings of the Church, which, while recognizing all the rights and exigencies of nature, rises higher, to the Author and Supreme Ruler of nature.

BALFOUR, The Foundations of Belief (New York, 1895); LLOYD MORGAN, Naturalism in Monist, VI (1895-96), 76; WARD, Naturalism and Agnosticism (New York, 1899); RADEMACHER, Gnade und Natur (1908); SCHAZLER, Natur und Uebernatur (Mains, 1865); SCHEEBEN, Natur und Gnade (Mainz, 1861); SCHRADER, De triplici ordine, naturali, supernaturali et prœternaturali (Vienna, 1864); BALDWIN, Diction. of Philos. and Psychol. (New York und London, 1901); EISLER, Worterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe.

1. Introduction. Since the Creation Satan has had an agenda that is by this time, clearly evident: Firstly from Scripture and secondly from history, this agenda has been: A) Elimination of God, B) Abolition of truth, C) Justification of sin, D) Deification of Satan through man.

2. Scriptural Background. After the Genesis Flood (9:6) God introduced the death penalty; this was the beginning of human government. At the Tower of Babel the human race spoke one language and was one nation, any tyrant in control would thus be unopposed. For man's own good, God divided them into many nations. He who controls a one-world State controls the world.

3. Historical Background. Greek civilization reached its intellectual peak in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Plato (428-327 BC) was the disciple of Socrates, founded the Academy and was the teacher of Aristotle; these three men laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. Plato's most influential work, The Republic, describes an ideal state ruled by wise men and since the 4th century BC has been the principal humanist objective.

The Christian era introduced the Mosaic Law to Western culture and, with the rising influence of the Church, this became the foundation for Ecclesiastical Law i.e. the Judeo-Christian ethic; Roman Law was superimposed upon this.

The English Renaissance flourished between the 14th and 16th centuries and the influence of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) towers above others. He introduced his scientific method that eliminated the Bible as the prerequisite to the search for scientific truth in 1620: this laid the foundation for the Royal Society in 1662. Bacon also left an unfinished work, The New Atlantis that not only promoted Plato's Republic (the Royal Society were the "wise men") but also laid the foundation for Freemasonry that officially began in 1717.

The common objective of the humanists, the Royal Society and Freemasonry is a New World Order based upon a one-world government. For this to be effective those governing must have absolute control of every aspect of human life. Prior to the Industrial Revolution (say, 1720 to 1850) 90% of families lived in the country, had an average of seven children, were largely self-sufficient and divorce was virtually unknown. With the introduction of machines to supplement or replace manpower from about 1720, the family was attacked from two directions: From Industry and from the State. Contrary to commom perception, Industry and State often work hand in hand. Today, multinational corporations virtually control the State.

4. Effect of Industry. Steam engines provided the power and factories were built to house them and the workers; the workers now slept and worked in two different locations. Workers competed for work thus wages were kept low, the unit cost of goods dropped and traditional tradesmen could not compete. Goods produced could now be counted and taxed by government. Following World War II, big industry and the military began a deliberate campaign of relocating the family head thus producing the nuclear family whose sole allegiance was to the organization. Women had achieved equal pay for equal work and feminist Betty Friedan encouraged them to join the labour force and have a career. Machines had largely obviated the need for much physical strength. These double-income families now caused housing prices to rise to meet this new family income level. The traditional single-income family was now left behind in the race to keep up with the Jones'.

5. The Effect of the State. The American Revolution of 1776 was aimed at the ideals of Plato's Republic and the exclusion of Roman Catholics from the new State. Christians rightly insisted on having an opposition party as a means of checks and balances against corruption.

The French Revolution of 1789 dechristianized the country and was far more successful at introducing the one-party Republic. The French leaders saw the Church, the old regime and even the family as a threat to the State. They introduced the decimal system and attempted to metricate time itself. The steady introduction of control over the family and the individual by the State has been through the avenues of: A) Education, B) Social programs and C) Taxation. A State in debt is today increasingly subject to multinational corporate control.

6. The State and Education. Humanist historians "invented" the Dark Ages ascribing them to Christianity and thus by contrast elevated the humanist Enlightenment.

Historians slanted history to emphasize the "Progress of Man" thus denying the Fall while writer Washington Irving ascribed belief in the flat earth to the Church. In the sciences, man and certainly animals, tended to become mere automata by the anatomist Vesalius (1514-1564) who failed to find the soul, by the discoveries of William Harvey who found the circulation of the blood and Alessandro Volta who found the electrical nature of nerve impulses.

In education, Horace Mann (1796-1859) founded the "normal school" in 1839 with the claim that fathers were not competant to teach their children but with the real motive to reindoctrinate all immigrant Catholic children. Legislation in 1840 forced attendance at State schools by seizure if necessary. It became evident that with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish children all in the same classroom, references to the role of religion in history had to be dropped if conflict was to be avoided.

American educator John Dewey (1859-1952) introduced "Progressive Education" including the teaching of Darwinian evolution to the school system. Since the 1950's belief in our supernatural origins has been effectively expunged, by forbidding this teaching even making it illegal.

Natualistic science and dismissal of prayer removed God from the educational system thus God's Laws were also removed as moral authority standing between the State and the citizen. Today, legislation is being enacted to ensure the indoctrination of students by one belief system (evolution) to the exclusion of another.

7. The State and Social Programs. Following the Divorce Act in 1857 (UK) the rate of divorce has increased steadily. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) produced an impression that restraint on population was necessary and the number of children per family has dropped from an average of 7 in 1840 to 2 by 1940.

Women in the labour force and loosening morals have resulted in later marriages while Planned Parenthood has fostered the notion that more than two children is socially irresponsible.

Following WWII, the birth rate increased to four, mainly due to Catholics, but has declined since to an alarming 1.75 (US). With the introduction of mandatory State social programs e.g. pension programs, family taxation has increased dramatically. Many former charitable organizations are now an arm of the State. The Children's Aid Society founded by Charles Loring Brace (1826-1890) became affiliated with the SPCC in 1881 when the Law gave them power to remove children from "undesirable homes." By 1974 and sanctioned by the State, they were given greater power.

The number of homeless children in Europe in 1959 caused The United Nations to propose a Convention for the rights of the child. By 1991 this Convention was forced upon most western nations, including Canada, completely undemocratically. This Convention has the power to transfer the rights of the parent to the State and invests power with the untrained child. Article 3 states: "In all actions concerning children, the courts, social workers ... are empowered to regulate families based upon their subjective determination of `the best interests of the child.'

8. The State and Taxation. The increase of government taxation from 1961 to 1986 in Canada has far exceeded all levels of increase in the cost of food, clothing and housing combined. This is the inevitable result of social programs and is compounded by an increasing national debt. More taxes mean less discretionary money, less savings and invites more control.

9. Introduction of the Goddess. Throughout history megalomanic rulers such as the King of Tyre (Ezekiel 28:9) and Roman emperor, Caligula, have believed themselves to be actual gods; Scripture points out that this is Satan working through them. Today, we see the raising of the Earth goddess, Gaia, who ironically is being offered to the public consciousness through the biology classroom!

In 1933 a gathering of the western world's foremost humanists produced their now infamous Humanist Manifesto in which their central belief was defined as: "Evolution is an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process." The National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) was set up specifically to combat the teaching of creation and used this same definition but in October 1997 they voted to remove the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal." This imediately cleared the way for the words "supervised" and "personal" to later be added.

Little known to the general public is the current division within the humanist academic camp. On the left hand are the arts faculties, many of whom are feminists and supporters of the homosexual agenda, who acknowledge the recent findings of science there is in nature clear-cut indications of intelligent design. On the right hand, there are those of the science faculties who are firmly committed to evolution and insist on random chance and time as the driving force. They correctly perceive the intelligent design argument will inevitably lead to a Designer and are caught between the prospect of giving credence to creation and its Creator or the introduction of a pagan deity. Either way, they see this as a total loss of credibility.

The concept of Gaia was introduced by James E. Lovelock in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1989) and has been dressed more respectably in the robes of science by Tylor Volk in his Gaia's Body: Towards a Physiology of Earth (1998). The academic conflict has been finely documented by P. R. Gross & N. Levitt in their Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. (1994). The obvious evidences for intelligent design were forcefully brought before both the public and academia by Michael Behe in his Darwin's Black Box (1996) while the words "intelligent design" can now be found in textbooks such as Year 2000 edition of Kingsley Stearn's Introductory Plant Biology (p.265).

The concept of the goddess has always been present in cult religions but a new twist was introduced by United Methodist minister and feminist Susan Cady in her 1986 book Sophia. She rightly pointed out from Proverbs 1:20 that wisdom is in the feminine gender. Then from 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30 she notes that Jesus is referred to as, "the wisdom of God." Her conclusion is that the name "Jesus" should be replaced by "Sophia," the Greek word for wisdom. In her second book, Wisdom's Feast (1989), Cady opens her preface with these words: "She is strong and proud. She is creator and designer of all things." At the 1999 National Conference of the National Organization for Women (NOW) a banner sign read: "MY GODDESS GAVE BIRTH TO YOUR GOD" Clearly, Father God is destined to be replaced by Mother Earth and this will finally complete Satan's agenda.

HUMANIST SOURCE MATERIAL

HUMANIST MANIFESTO I

The Manifesto is a product of many minds. It was designed to represent a developing point of view, not a new creed. The individuals whose signatures appear would, had they been writing individual statements, have stated the propositions in differing terms. The importance of the document is that more than thirty men have come to general agreement on matters of final concern and that these men are undoubtedly representative of a large number who are forging a new philosophy out of the materials of the modern world.

The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience. In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism. In order that religious humanism may be better understood we, the undersigned, desire to make certain affirmations which we believe the facts of our contemporary life demonstrate.

There is great danger of a final, and we believe fatal, identifi- cation of the word religion with doctrines and methods which have lost their significance and which are powerless to solve the problem of human living in the Twentieth Century. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life. Their end has been accomplished through the interpretation of the total environing situation (theology or world view), the sense of values resulting therefrom (goal or ideal), and the technique (cult), established for realizing the satisfactory life. A change in any of these factors results in alteration of the outward forms of religion. This fact explains the changefulness of religions through the centuries. But through all changes religion itself remains constant in its quest for abiding values, an inseparable feature of human life.

Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion. Such a vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satis- factions may appear to many people as a complete break with the past. While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none the less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present. It is a responsibility which rests upon this generation. We therefore affirm the following:

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

SECOND: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.

THIRD: Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

FOURTH: Humanism recognizes that man's religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded by that culture.

FIFTH: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Obviously humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered, but it does insist that the way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities is by means of intelligent inquiry and by the assessment of their relations to human needs. Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.

SIXTH: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought".

SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation — all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

EIGHTH: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social passion.

NINTH: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.

TENTH: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.

ELEVENTH: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

TWELFTH: Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, religious humanists aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life.

THIRTEENTH: Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.

FOURTEENTH: The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

FIFTEENTH AND LAST: We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow.

So stand the theses of religious humanism. Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: There were 34 signers of this document, including Anton J. Carlson, John Dewey, John H. Dietrich, R. Lester Mondale, Charles Francis Potter, Curtis W. Reese, and Edwin H. Wilson.]

HUMANIST MANIFESTO II

Preface

It is forty years since Humanist Manifesto I (1933) appeared. Events since then make that earlier statement seem far too optimistic. Nazism has shown the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable. Other totalitarian regimes have suppressed human rights without ending poverty. Science has sometimes brought evil as well as good. Recent decades have shown that inhuman wars can be made in the name of peace. The beginnings of police states, even in democratic societies, widespread government espionage, and other abuses of power by military, political, and industrial elites, and the continuance of unyielding racism, all present a different and difficult social outlook. In various societies, the demands of women and minority groups for equal rights effectively challenge our generation.

As we approach the twenty-first century, however, an affirmative and hopeful vision is needed. Faith, commensurate with advancing knowledge, is also necessary. In the choice between despair and hope, humanists respond in this Humanist Manifesto II with a positive declaration for times of uncertainty.

As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.

Those who sign Humanist Manifesto II disclaim that they are setting forth a binding credo; their individual views would be stated in widely varying ways. This statement is, however, reaching for vision in a time that needs direction. It is social analysis in an effort at consensus. New statements should be developed to supersede this, but for today it is our conviction that humanism offers an alternative that can serve present-day needs and guide humankind toward the future.

The next century can be and should be the humanistic century. Dramatic scientific, technological, and ever-accelerating social and political changes crowd our awareness. We have virtually conquered the planet, explored the moon, overcome the natural limits of travel and communication; we stand at the dawn of a new age, ready to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit other planets. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.

The future is, however, filled with dangers. In learning to apply the scientific method to nature and human life, we have opened the door to ecological damage, over-population, dehumanizing institutions, totalitarian repression, and nuclear and bio- chemical disaster. Faced with apocalyptic prophesies and doomsday scenarios, many flee in despair from reason and embrace irrational cults and theologies of withdrawal and retreat.

Traditional moral codes and newer irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow. False "theologies of hope" and messianic ideologies, substituting new dogmas for old, cannot cope with existing world realities. They separate rather than unite peoples.

Humanity, to survive, requires bold and daring measures. We need to extend the uses of scientific method, not renounce them, to fuse reason with compassion in order to build constructive social and moral values. Confronted by many possible futures, we must decide which to pursue. The ultimate goal should be the fulfill- ment of the potential for growth in each human personality — not for the favored few, but for all of humankind. Only a shared world and global measures will suffice.

A humanist outlook will tap the creativity of each human being and provide the vision and courage for us to work together. This outlook emphasizes the role human beings can play in their own spheres of action. The decades ahead call for dedicated, clear- minded men and women able to marshal the will, intelligence, and cooperative skills for shaping a desirable future. Humanism can provide the purpose and inspiration that so many seek; it can give personal meaning and significance to human life.

Many kinds of humanism exist in the contemporary world. The varieties and emphases of naturalistic humanism include "scientific," "ethical," "democratic," "religious," and "Marxist" humanism. Free thought, atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, deism, rationalism, ethical culture, and liberal religion all claim to be heir to the humanist tradition. Humanism traces its roots from ancient China, classical Greece and Rome, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to the scientific revolution of the modern world. But views that merely reject theism are not equivalent to humanism. They lack commitment to the positive belief in the possibilities of human progress and to the values central to it. Many within religious groups, believing in the future of humanism, now claim humanist credentials. Humanism is an ethical process through which we all can move, above and beyond the divisive particulars, heroic personalities, dogmatic creeds, and ritual customs of past religions or their mere negation.

We affirm a set of common principles that can serve as a basis for united action — positive principles relevant to the present human condition. They are a design for a secular society on a planetary scale.

For these reasons, we submit this new Humanist Manifesto for the future of humankind; for us, it is a vision of hope, a direction for satisfying survival.

Religion

FIRST: In the best sense, religion may inspire dedication to the highest ethical ideals. The cultivation of moral devotion and creative imagination is an expression of genuine "spiritual" experience and aspiration.

We believe, however, that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species. Any account of nature should pass the tests of scientific evidence; in our judgment, the dogmas and myths of traditional religions do not do so. Even at this late date in human history, certain elementary facts based upon the critical use of scientific reason have to be restated. We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of survival and fulfillment of the human race. As nontheists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity. Nature may indeed be broader and deeper than we now know; any new discoveries, however, will but enlarge our knowledge of the natural.

Some humanists believe we should reinterpret traditional religions and reinvest them with meanings appropriate to the current situation. Such redefinitions, however, often perpetuate old dependencies and escapisms; they easily become obscurantist, impeding the free use of the intellect. We need, instead, radically new human purposes and goals.

We appreciate the need to preserve the best ethical teachings in the religious traditions of humankind, many of which we share in common. But we reject those features of traditional religious morality that deny humans a full appreciation of their own potentialities and responsibilities. Traditional religions often offer solace to humans, but, as often, they inhibit humans from helping themselves or experiencing their full potentialities. Such institutions, creeds, and rituals often impede the will to serve others. Too often traditional faiths encourage dependence rather than independence, obedience rather than affirmation, fear rather than courage. More recently they have generated concerned social action, with many signs of relevance appearing in the wake of the "God Is Dead" theologies. But we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.

SECOND: Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful. They distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization, and from rectifying social injustices. Modern science discredits such historic concepts as the "ghost in the machine" and the "separable soul." Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body. We continue to exist in our progeny and in the way that our lives have influenced others in our culture.

Traditional religions are surely not the only obstacles to human progress. Other ideologies also impede human advance. Some forms of political doctrine, for instance, function religiously, reflecting the worst features of orthodoxy and authoritarianism, especially when they sacrifice individuals on the altar of Utopian promises. Purely economic and political viewpoints, whether capitalist or communist, often function as religious and ideological dogma. Although humans undoubtedly need economic and political goals, they also need creative values by which to live.

Ethics

THIRD: We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole basis of life. Human life has meaning because we create and develop our futures. Happiness and the creative realization of human needs and desires, individually and in shared enjoyment, are continuous themes of humanism. We strive for the good life, here and now. The goal is to pursue life's enrichment despite debasing forces of vulgarization, commercialization, and dehumanization.

FOURTH: Reason and intelligence are the most effective instruments that humankind possesses. There is no substitute: neither faith nor passion suffices in itself. The controlled use of scientific methods, which have transformed the natural and social sciences since the Renaissance, must be extended further in the solution of human problems. But reason must be tempered by humility, since no group has a monopoly of wisdom or virtue. Nor is there any guarantee that all problems can be solved or all questions answered. Yet critical intelligence, infused by a sense of human caring, is the best method that humanity has for resolving problems. Reason should be balanced with compassion and empathy and the whole person fulfilled. Thus, we are not advocating the use of scientific intelligence independent of or in opposition to emotion, for we believe in the cultivation of feeling and love. As science pushes back the boundary of the known, humankind's sense of wonder is continually renewed, and art, poetry, and music find their places, along with religion and ethics.

The Individual

FIFTH: The preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value. Individuals should be encouraged to realize their own creative talents and desires. We reject all religious, ideological, or moral codes that denigrate the individual, suppress freedom, dull intellect, dehumanize person- ality. We believe in maximum individual autonomy consonant with social responsibility. Although science can account for the causes of behavior, the possibilities of individual freedom of choice exist in human life and should be increased.

SIXTH: In the area of sexuality, we believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. The right to birth control, abortion, and divorce should be recognized. While we do not approve of exploitive, denigrating forms of sexual expression, neither do we wish to prohibit, by law or social sanction, sexual behavior between consenting adults. The many varieties of sexual exploration should not in themselves be considered "evil." Without countenancing mindless permissiveness or unbridled promiscuity, a civilized society should be a tolerant one. Short of harming others or compelling them to do likewise, individuals should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their life-styles as they desire. We wish to cultivate the development of a responsible attitude toward sexuality, in which humans are not exploited as sexual objects, and in which intimacy, sensitivity, respect, and honesty in interpersonal relations are encouraged. Moral education for children and adults is an important way of developing awareness and sexual maturity.

Democratic Society

SEVENTH: To enhance freedom and dignity the individual must experience a full range of civil liberties in all societies. This includes freedom of speech and the press, political democracy, the legal right of opposition to governmental policies, fair judicial process, religious liberty, freedom of association, and artistic, scientific, and cultural freedom. It also includes a recognition of an individual's right to die with dignity, euthanasia, and the right to suicide. We oppose the increasing invasion of privacy, by whatever means, in both totalitarian and democratic societies. We would safeguard, extend, and implement the principles of human freedom evolved from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, the Rights of Man, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

EIGHTH: We are committed to an open and democratic society. We must extend participatory democracy in its true sense to the economy, the school, the family, the workplace, and voluntary associations. Decision-making must be decentralized to include widespread involvement of people at all levels — social, political, and economic. All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives. Institutions should be responsive to expressed desires and needs. The conditions of work, education, devotion, and play should be humanized. Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated and bureaucratic structures should be held to a minimum. People are more important than decalogues, rules, proscriptions, or regulations.

NINTH: The separation of church and state and the separation of ideology and state are imperatives. The state should encourage maximum freedom for different moral, political, religious, and social values in society. It should not favor any particular religious bodies through the use of public monies, nor espouse a single ideology and function thereby as an instrument of propaganda or oppression, particularly against dissenters.

TENTH: Humane societies should evaluate economic systems not by rhetoric or ideology, but by whether or not they increase economic well-being for all individuals and groups, minimize poverty and hardship, increase the sum of human satisfaction, and enhance the quality of life. Hence the door is open to alternative economic systems. We need to democratize the economy and judge it by its responsiveness to human needs, testing results in terms of the common good.

ELEVENTH: The principle of moral equality must be furthered through elimination of all discrimination based upon race, religion, sex, age, or national origin. This means equality of opportunity and recognition of talent and merit. Individuals should be encouraged to contribute to their own betterment. If unable, then society should provide means to satisfy their basic economic, health, and cultural needs, including, wherever resources make possible, a minimum guaranteed annual income. We are concerned for the welfare of the aged, the infirm, the disadvantaged, and also for the outcasts — the mentally retarded, abandoned, or abused children, the handicapped, prisoners, and addicts — for all who are neglected or ignored by society. Practicing humanists should make it their vocation to humanize personal relations.

We believe in the right to universal education. Everyone has a right to the cultural opportunity to fulfill his or her unique capacities and talents. The schools should foster satisfying and productive living. They should be open at all levels to any and all; the achievement of excellence should be encouraged. Innovative and experimental forms of education are to be welcomed. The energy and idealism of the young deserve to be appreciated and channeled to constructive purposes.

We deplore racial, religious, ethnic, or class antagonisms. Although we believe in cultural diversity and encourage racial and ethnic pride, we reject separations which promote alienation and set people and groups against each other; we envision an integrated community where people have a maximum opportunity for free and voluntary association.

We are critical of sexism or sexual chauvinism — male or female. We believe in equal rights for both women and men to fulfill their unique careers and potentialities as they see fit, free of invidious discrimination.

World Community

TWELFTH: We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government. This would appreciate cultural pluralism and diversity. It would not exclude pride in national origins and accomplishments nor the handling of regional problems on a regional basis. Human progress, however, can no longer be achieved by focusing on one section of the world, Western or Eastern, developed or underdeveloped. For the first time in human history, no part of humankind can be isolated from any other. Each person's future is in some way linked to all. We thus reaffirm a commitment to the building of world community, at the same time recognizing that this commits us to some hard choices.

THIRTEENTH: This world community must renounce the resort to violence and force as a method of solving international disputes. We believe in the peaceful adjudication of differences by international courts and by the development of the arts of negotiation and compromise. War is obsolete. So is the use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. It is a planetary imperative to reduce the level of military expenditures and turn these savings to peaceful and people-oriented uses.

FOURTEENTH: The world community must engage in cooperative planning concerning the use of rapidly depleting resources. The planet earth must be considered a single ecosystem. Ecological damage, resource depletion, and excessive population growth must be checked by international concord. The cultivation and conservation of nature is a moral value; we should perceive ourselves as integral to the sources of our being in nature. We must free our world from needless pollution and waste, responsibly guarding and creating wealth, both natural and human. Exploitation of natural resources, uncurbed by social conscience, must end.

FIFTEENTH: The problems of economic growth and development can no longer be resolved by one nation alone; they are worldwide in scope. It is the moral obligation of the developed nations to provide — through an international authority that safeguards human rights — massive technical, agricultural, medical, and economic assistance, including birth control techniques, to the developing portions of the globe. World poverty must cease. Hence extreme disproportions in wealth, income, and economic growth should be reduced on a worldwide basis.

SIXTEENTH: Technology is a vital key to human progress and development. We deplore any neo-romantic efforts to condemn indiscriminately all technology and science or to counsel retreat from its further extension and use for the good of humankind. We would resist any moves to censor basic scientific research on moral, political, or social grounds. Technology must, however, be carefully judged by the consequences of its use; harmful and destructive changes should be avoided. We are particularly disturbed when technology and bureaucracy control, manipulate, or modify human beings without their consent. Technological feasibility does not imply social or cultural desirability.

SEVENTEENTH: We must expand communication and transportation across frontiers. Travel restrictions must cease. The world must be open to diverse political, ideological, and moral viewpoints and evolve a worldwide system of television and radio for information and education. We thus call for full international cooperation in culture, science, the arts, and technology across ideological borders. We must learn to live openly together or we shall perish together.

Humanity As a Whole

IN CLOSING: The world cannot wait for a reconciliation of competing political or economic systems to solve its problems. These are the times for men and women of goodwill to further the building of a peaceful and prosperous world. We urge that parochial loyalties and inflexible moral and religious ideologies be transcended. We urge recognition of the common humanity of all people. We further urge the use of reason and compassion to produce the kind of world we want — a world in which peace, prosperity, freedom, and happiness are widely shared. Let us not abandon that vision in despair or cowardice. We are responsible for what we are or will be. Let us work together for a humane world by means commensurate with humane ends. Destructive ideological differences among communism, capitalism, socialism, conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism should be overcome. Let us call for an end to terror and hatred. We will survive and prosper only in a world of shared humane values. We can initiate new directions for humankind; ancient rivalries can be superseded by broad-based cooperative efforts. The commitment to tolerance, understanding, and peaceful negotiation does not necessitate acquiescence to the status quo nor the damming up of dynamic and revolutionary forces. The true revolution is occurring and can continue in countless nonviolent adjustments. But this entails the willingness to step forward onto new and expanding plateaus. At the present juncture of history, commitment to all humankind is the highest commitment of which we are capable; it transcends the narrow allegiances of church, state, party, class, or race in moving toward a wider vision of human potentiality. What more daring a goal for humankind than for each person to become, in ideal as well as practice, a citizen of a world community. It is a classical vision; we can now give it new vitality. Humanism thus interpreted is a moral force that has time on its side. We believe that humankind has the potential, intelligence, goodwill, and cooperative skill to implement this commitment in the decades ahead.

We, the undersigned, while not necessarily endorsing every detail of the above, pledge our general support to Humanist Manifesto II for the future of humankind. These affirmations are not a final credo or dogma but an expression of a living and growing faith. We invite others in all lands to join us in further developing and working for these goals.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Thousands of names have been added to the list of signatories which followed the original Humanist Manifesto II, published in the September/October 1973 issue of The Humanist magazine by the American Humanist Association. You may become a signer yourself by contacting the AHA at the address below.]

Manifesto
of the Communist Party

1848

A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS [1]

The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune [4]: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general -- the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? One the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the Ten-Hours Bill in England was carried.

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

FOOTNOTES

[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [Note by Engels - 1888 English edition]

[2] That is, all _written_ history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeaval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in _Der Ursprung der

Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats_, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels: 1888 English edition]

[4] This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels: 1890 German edition]

"Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels: 1888 English edition]

II -- PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:

(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production -- this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. (Ah, those were the days!)

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading civilized countries at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical, and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in he hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

III -- SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature, the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible. [1]

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this spectacle:

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this: that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up, root and branch, the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a _revolutionary_ proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all corrective measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin' phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. [2]

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilization has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, as being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as Modern Industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism ended in a miserable hangover.

The socialist and communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie in that country had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure will, of will as it was bound to be, of true human will generally.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic saints _over_ the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote "alienation of humanity", and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote "dethronement of the category of the general", and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms, they dubbed "Philosophy of Action", "True Socialism", "German Science of Socialism", "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism", and so on.

The French socialist and communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased, in the hands of the German, to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.

This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction -- on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths", all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part German socialism recognized, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. [3]

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois -- for the benefit of the working class.

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf [4] and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The socialist and communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon [5], Fourier [6], Owen [7], and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these socialist and communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of production -- all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.

The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing "Home Colonies", or setting up a "Little Icaria" [8] -- pocket editions of the New Jerusalem -- and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary conservative socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.

FOOTNOTES

[1] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830).

[2] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier british aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies.

[3] NOTE by Engels to 1888 German edition: The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.

[4] Francois Noel Babeuf (1760-1797): French political agitator; plotted unsuccessfully to destroy the Directory in revolutionary France and established a communistic system.

[5] Comte de Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy (1760-1825): French social philosopher; generally regarded as founder of French socialism. He thought society should be reorganized along industrial lines and that scientists should be the new spiritual leaders. His most important work is _Nouveau_Christianisme_ (1825).

[6] Charles Fourier (1772-1837): French social reformer; propounded a system of self-sufficient cooperatives known as Fourierism, especially in his work _Le_Nouveau_Monde_industriel_ (1829-30)

[7] Richard Owen (1771-1858): Welsh industrialist and social reformer. He formed a model industrial community at New Lanark, Scotland, and pioneered cooperative societies. His books include _New_View_Of_Society_ (1813).

[8] NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: "Home Colonies" were what Owen called his communist model societies. _Phalansteres_ were socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Caber to his utopia and, later on, to his American communist colony.

IV -- POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO

THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social Democrats* against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the Great Revolution.

In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Krakow in 1846.

In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty-bourgeoisie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

FOOTNOTES

* NOTE by Engels to 1888 English edition: The party then represented in Parliament by Ledru-Rollin, in literature by Louis Blanc (1811-82), in the daily press by the Reforme. The name of Social-Democracy signifies, with these its inventors, a section of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with socialism.

PREFACE TO 1872 GERMAN EDITION

The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be only a secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February Revolution. First published in German, it has been republished in that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English for the first time in 1850 in the _Red Republican_, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different translations in America. The french version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in _Le Socialiste_ of New York. A new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the 'sixties. Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.

However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Assocation, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.

But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.

PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.

What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Bother were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.

How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.

And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION

The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else -- rests at Highgate Cemetary and over his grave the first first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 13, 1883], there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto -- that economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles -- this basic thought belongs soley and exclusively to Marx.

[ENGELS FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH: "This proposition", I wrote in the preface to the English translation, "which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my _Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here."]

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.

PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney's _Red Republican_, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.

The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 -- the first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie -- drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested and, after eighteen months' imprisonment, they were tried in October 1852. This selebrated "Cologne Communist Trial" lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence, the League was formlly dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion.

When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men's Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.

[ENGEL'S FOOTNOTE: Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx, and, as such, stood on the ground of the Manifesto. But in his first public agitation, 1862-1864, he did not go beyond demanding co-operative worhsops supported by state credit.]

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men's minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror for us." In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.

The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in _Woorhull and Claflin's Weekly_. From this English version, a French one was made in _Le Socialiste_ of New York. Since then, at least two more English translations, moer or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen's Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in _Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek_, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in _Le Socialiste_, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.

Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a _socialist_ manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the "educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, "respectable"; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself," there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, th prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -- the proletariat -- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class -- the bourgeoisie -- without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my _Conditions of the Working Class in England_. But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.

"However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." (See _The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Assocation_ 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.

"But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter."

The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx's _Capital_. We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.

PREFACE TO 1890 GERMAN EDITION

Since [the 1883 German edition preface] was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.

A second Russian translation -- by Vera Zasulich -- appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which will in no way improve the text. It reads:

"The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the 'sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.

"What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.

"How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed property -- large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.

"And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina, and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.

"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeaval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

"The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: _Manifest Kommunistyczny_.

Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the _Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek_, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are saigns of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an excellent piece of work.

A new French version appeared in 1886, in _Le Socialiste_ of Paris; it is the best published to date.

From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in _El Socialista_ of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: _Manifesto del Partido Communista_ por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.

As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own name as author, which the latter however declined.

After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled: _Manifesto of the Communist_Party_, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that edition to the present one.

The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated "by law" in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers' movement that had begun with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.

When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men's Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into _one_ huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not _set out_ from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme -- the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International -- was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in their name: "Continental socialism has lost its terror for us." Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.

Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a _socialist_ manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather to the "educated" classes. The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself _Communist_. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism. Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism -- in France, the "Icarian" communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very decidely of the opinion as early as then that "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself," we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occured to us to repudiate it.

"Working men of all countries, unite!" But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men's Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as _one_ army, under _one_ flag, for _one_ immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.

NOTES ON THE MANIFESTO AND TRANSLATIONS OF IT

The Communist Manifesto was first published in February 1848 in London. It was written by Marx and Engels for the Communist League, an organisation of German emigre workers living in several western European countries. The translation above follows that of the authorised English translation by Samuel Moore of 1888. In a few places, notably the concluding line 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!, Hal Draper's 1994 translation has been followed, rather than Moore's, which read ''Working men of all countries unite!' For an exceptionally thorough account of the background of the Manifesto, the history of different editions and translations, see Hal Draper The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto Centre for Socialist History, Berkeley 1994.

--Table I--	God exists	God does not exist
You believe in God	(a) infinite reward	(c) 250 utiles
You do not believe in God	(b) infinite punishment	(d) 200 utiles

TIMELINE TO NATURALISM

~ HUMANISM

BECOMING DOMINANT

A HUNGER TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

RENE DESCARTE 1596-1650

BENEDICT SPINOZA 1632-1677

MODAL PANTHEISM

JOHN LOCKE 1632-1704 ~ EMPIRICISM

EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

DEISM

LORD HERBERT CHERBURY

JOHN TOLAND

DAVID HUME 1711-1776

BISHOP BERKELEY 1685-1753

BLAISE PASCAL 1623-1662

FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET "VOLTAIRE" 1694-1778

JEANE- JACQUES ROUSEAU 1712-1778

HUMANIST

IMMANUAL KANT 1724-1804

GEORG HEGEL 1770-1831

DANE SOREN KIERKEGAARD 1813-1855

CHRISTIAN EXISTENTIALIST

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

FRENCH REVOLUTION

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (August 1789)

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

The French Revolution: The Moderate Stage, 1789-1792

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790)

The French Revolution: The Radical Stage, 1792-1794

The French Revolution and the Socialist Tradition: Communists

DARWIN'S EVOLUTION AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY

JOHN DEWEY [1859-1952]

WITNESSING TO NATURALISTIC FRIENDS

PEOPLE ARE INCAPABLE OF HAPPINESS WITHOUT GOD

PASCAL & TRUTH

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA NATURALISM

Naturalism

HUMANIST SOURCE MATERIAL

HUMANIST MANIFESTO I

HUMANIST MANIFESTO II

Preface

Religion

Ethics

The Individual

Democratic Society

World Community

Humanity As a Whole

Manifesto of the Communist Party

1848

I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS [1]

FOOTNOTES

II -- PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

III -- SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

FOOTNOTES

IV -- POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO

THE VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES

FOOTNOTES

PREFACE TO 1872 GERMAN EDITION

PREFACE TO 1882 RUSSIAN EDITION

PREFACE TO 1883 GERMAN EDITION

PREFACE TO 1888 ENGLISH EDITION

PREFACE TO 1890 GERMAN EDITION

NOTES ON THE MANIFESTO AND TRANSLATIONS OF IT

The French Revolution and the Socialist Tradition:
Communists

Manifesto
of the Communist Party