This volume—which it has been desired to make known to the great public in the French language—in entering upon a question so complex and so vast as socialism, has but a single and definite aim. My intention has been to point out, and in nearly all cases by rapid and concise observations, the general relations existing between contemporary socialism and the whole trend of modern scientific thought. The opponents of contemporary socialism see in it, or wish to see in it, merely a reproduction of

Convinced Darwinian and Spencerian, as I am, it is my intention to demonstrate that Marxian Socialism—the only socialism which has a truly scientific method and value, and therefore the only socialism which from this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social Democrats throughout the civilized world—is only the practical and fruitful fulfilment, in the social life, of that modern scientific revolution which—inaugurated some centuries since by the rebirth of the experimental method in a

On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter polemical attacks. A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,—an active member of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in politics just as much as in science—violently assailed the Darwinian theory of org

The first of the objections, which is brought against socialism in the name of Darwinism, is absolutely without foundation. If it were true that socialism aspires to "the equality of all individuals," it would be correct to assert that Darwinism irrevocably condemns it. [3] But although even to-day it is still currently repeated—by some in good faith, like parrots who recite their stereotyped phrases; by others in bad faith, with polemical skillfulness—that socialism is synonymous with equality

Socialism and Darwinism, it is said, are in conflict on a second point. Darwinism demonstrates that the immense majority—of plants, animals and men—are destined to succumb, because only a small minority triumphs "in the struggle for life"; socialism, on its part, asserts that all ought to triumph and that no one ought to succumb. It may be replied, in the first place, that, even in the biological domain of the "struggle for existence," the disproportion between the number of individuals who are

The third and last part of the argument of Haeckel is correct if applied solely to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but its starting point is false if it is intended to apply it to the social domain and to turn it into an objection against socialism. It is said the struggle for existence assures the survival of the fittest; it therefore causes an aristocratic, hierarchic gradation of selected individuals—a continuous progress—and not the democratic leveling of socialism. Here again, l

Not one of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism, which Haeckel formulated, and which so many others have echoed since, resists a candid and more accurate examination of the natural laws which bear the name of Charles Darwin. I add that not only is Darwinism not in contradiction with socialism, but that it constitutes one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing but a logical and vital corollary, in part of Darwinism, in part of

It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by an examination of the different modes of conceiving of the individual in relation to the species. The eighteenth century closed with the exclusive glorification of the individual, of the man —as an entity in himself. In the works of Rousseau this was only a beneficent, though exaggerated re-action against the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages. This individualism led directly to that artificiality

Darwinism has demonstrated that the entire mechanism of animal evolution may be reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of the same species on the one hand, and between each species and the whole world of living beings. In the same way all the machinery of social evolution has been reduced by Marxian socialism to the law of the Struggle between Classes . This theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific explanation of the history of mankind; it also

The theory of universal evolution which—apart from such or such a more or less disputable detail—is truly characteristic of the vital tendency of modern scientific thought, has also been made to appear in absolute contradiction with the theories and the practical ideals of socialism. In this case the fallacy is obvious. If socialism is understood as that vague complex of sentimental aspirations so often crystallized into the artificial utopian creations of a new human world to be substituted by

What, in substance, is the message of socialism? That the present economic world can not be immutable and eternal, that it merely represents a transitory phase of social evolution and that an ulterior phase, a differently organized world, is destined to succeed it. That this new organization must be collectivist or socialist—and no longer individualist—results, as an ultimate and certain conclusion, from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism. I must now demonstrate that this fu

Admitting, say our adversaries, that in demanding a social transformation socialism is in apparent accord with the evolutionist theory, it does not follow that its positive conclusions—notably the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership—are justified by that theory. Still further, they add, we maintain that those conclusions are in absolute contradiction with that very theory, and that they are therefore, to say the least, utopian and absurd. The first alleged contradiction bet

The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in the examination of the second contradiction that, it is pretended, exists between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is asserted and repeated in all possible tones that socialism constitutes a tyranny under a new form which will destroy all the blessings of liberty won with such toil and difficulty in our century, at the cost of so many sacrifices and of so many martyrs. I have already shown, in speaking of anthropological in

The last and the gravest of the contradictions that it is attempted to set up between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, relates to the question of how socialism, in practice, will be inaugurated and realized. Some think that socialism ought, at the present time, to set forth, in all its details, the precise and symmetrical form of the future social organization.—"Show me a practical description of the new society, and I will then decide whether I ought to prefer it to the present

One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science par excellence , political economy. It has led, it is true, throu

To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in his writings, with a multitude of technical details and of apparently dogmatic formulæ, but may not the same be said of the First Principles of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on evolution in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the unknowable, etc.?

Editor, etc. Dear Sir :— I have read in your journal a letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer in which he, relying on indirect information conveyed to him, regarding my book, Socialism and Modern Science , expresses "his astonishment at the audacity of him who has made use of his name to defend socialism." Permit me to say to you that no socialist has ever dreamt of making Mr. Spencer (who is certainly the greatest of living philosophers) pass as a partisan of socialism. It is strange, indeed, that any

Among the numerous publications which, for or against socialism, have appeared in Italy since my Socialismo e scienza positiva [90] —which demonstrated the agreement of socialism with the fundamental lines of contemporary scientific thought—the book of Baron Garofalo was looked forward to with eager interest. It received attention both because of the fame of the author and the open and radical disagreement which its publication made manifest in the ranks of the founders of the school of positive