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Frederick Engles
Anti-Dühring; Part I: Philosophy
Abstract from:
Chapter 10: Morality and Law. Equality.
The idea that all men, as men, have something in common, and
that to that extent they are equal, is of course primeval. But
the modern demand for equality is something entirely different
from that; this consists rather in deducing from that common
quality of being human, from that equality of men as men, a
claim to equal political and social status for all human beings,
or at least for all citizens of a state or all members of a
society. Before that original conception of relative equality
could lead to the conclusion that men should have equal rights
in the state and in society, before that conclusion could even
appear to be something natural and self-evident, thousands of
years had to pass and did pass.
In the most ancient, primitive communities, equality of rights
could apply at most to members of the community; women, slaves
and foreigners were excluded from this equality as a matter of
course. Among the Greeks and Romans the inequalities of men were
of much greater importance than their equality in any
respect. It would necessarily have seemed insanity to the
ancients that Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves,
citizens and peregrines, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to
use a comprehensive term) should have a claim to equal political
status. Under the Roman Empire all these distinctions gradually
disappeared, except the distinction between freemen and slaves,
and in this way there arose, for the freemen at least, that
equality as between private individuals on the basis of which
Roman law developed -- the completest elaboration of law based
on private property which we know. But so long as the antithesis
between freemen and slaves existed, there could be no talk of
drawing legal conclusions from general equality of men; we saw
this even recently, in the slave-owning states of the North
American Union.
Christianity knew only one point in which all men were equal:
that all were equally born in original sin -- which corresponded
perfectly to its character as the religion of the slaves and the
oppressed. Apart from this it recognised, at most, the equality
of the elect, which however was only stressed at the very
beginning. The traces of common ownership which are also found
in the early stages of the new religion can be ascribed to
solidarity among the proscribed rather than to real equalitarian
ideas. Within a very short time the establishment of the
distinction between priests and laymen put an end even to this
incipient Christian equality. The overrunning of Western Europe
by the Germans abolished for centuries all ideas of equality,
through the gradual building up of such a complicated social and
political hierarchy as had never existed before. But at the same
time the invasion drew Western and Central Europe into the
course of historical development, created for the first time a
compact cultural area, and within this area also for the first
time a system of predominantly national states exerting mutual
influence on each other and mutually holding each other in
check. Thereby it prepared the ground on which alone the
question of the equal status of men, of the rights of man, could
at a later period be raised.
The feudal Middle Ages also developed in their womb the class
which was destined, in the course of its further development, to
become the standard-bearer of the modern demand for equality:
the bourgeoisie. Originally itself a feudal estate, the
bourgeoisie developed the predominantly handicraft industry and
the exchange of products within feudal society to a relatively
high level, when at the end of the fifteenth century the great
maritime discoveries opened to it a new career of wider
scope. Trade beyond the confines of Europe, which had previously
been carried on only between Italy and the Levant, was now
extended to America and India, and soon surpassed in importance
both the mutual exchange between the various European countries
and the internal trade within each individual country. American
gold and silver flooded Europe and forced its way like a
disintegrating element into every fissure, rent and pore of
feudal society. Handicraft industry could no longer satisfy the
rising demand, in the leading industries of the most advanced
countries it was replaced by manufacture.
But this mighty revolution in the conditions of the economic
life of society was, however, not followed by any immediate
corresponding change in its political structure. The political
order remained feudal, while society became more and more
bourgeois. Trade on a large scale, that is to say, particularly
international and, even more so, world trade, requires free
owners of commodities who are unrestricted in their movements
and as such enjoy equal rights; who may exchange their
commodities on the basis of laws that are equal for them all, at
least in each particular place. The transition from handicraft
to manufacture presupposes the existence of a number of free
workers -- free on the one hand from the fetters of the guild
and on the other from the means whereby they could themselves
utilise their labour-power -- workers who can contract with the
manufacturer for the hire of their labour-power, and hence, as
parties to the contract, have rights equal to his. And finally
the equality and equal status of all human labour, because and
in so far as it is human labour, found its unconscious
but clearest expression in the law of value of modern bourgeois
political economy, according to which the value of a commodity
is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in
it. (This derivation of the modern ideas of equality from the
economic conditions of bourgeois society was first demonstrated
by Marx in Capital. [Noted by Engels])
However, where economic relations required freedom and equality
of rights, the political system opposed them at every step with
guild restrictions and special privileges. Local privileges,
differential duties, exceptional laws of all kinds affected in
trade not only foreigners and people living in the colonies, but
often enough also whole categories of the nationals of the
country concerned; everywhere and ever anew the privileges of
the guilds barred the development of manufacture. Nowhere was
the road clear and the chances equal for the bourgeois
competitors -- and yet that this be so was the prime and ever
more pressing demand.
The demand for liberation from feudal fetters and the
establishment of equality of rights by the abolition of feudal
inequalities was bound soon to assume wider dimensions, once the
economic advance of society had placed it on the order of the
day. If it was raised in the interests of industry and trade, it
was also necessary to demand the same equality of rights for the
great mass of the peasantry who, in every degree of bondage,
from total serfdom onwards, were compelled to give the greater
part of their labour-time to their gracious feudal lord without
compensation and in addition to render innumerable other dues to
him and to the state. On the other hand, it was inevitable that
a demand should also be made for the abolition of the feudal
privileges, of the freedom from taxation of the nobility, of the
political privileges of the separate estates. And as people were
no longer living in a world empire such as the Roman Empire had
been, but in a system of independent states dealing with each
other on an equal footing and at approximately the same level of
bourgeois development, it was a matter of course that the demand
for equality should assume a general character reaching out
beyond the individual state, that freedom and equality should be
proclaimed human rights. And it is significant of the
specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the
American constitution, the first to recognise the rights of man,
in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races
existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race
privileges sanctified.
As is well known, however, from the moment when the bourgeoisie
emerged from feudal burgherdom, when this estate of the Middle
Ages developed into a modern class, it was always and inevitably
accompanied by its shadow, the proletariat. And in the same way
bourgeois demands for equality were accompanied by proletarian
demands for equality. From the moment when the bourgeois demand
for the abolition of class privileges was put forward,
alongside it appeared the proletarian demand for the abolition
of the classes themselves -- at first in religious
form, leaning towards primitive Christianity, and later drawing
support from the bourgeois equalitarian theories themselves. The
proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not
be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the
state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the
social, economic sphere. And especially since the French
bourgeoisie, from the great revolution on, brought civil
equality to the forefront, the French proletariat has answered
blow for blow with the demand for social, economic equality, and
equality has become the battle-cry particularly of the French
proletariat.
The demand for equality in the mouth of the proletariat has
therefore a double meaning. It is either -- as was the case
especially at the very start, for example in the Peasant War --
the spontaneous reaction against the crying social inequalities,
against the contrast between rich and poor, the feudal lords and
their serfs, the surfeiters and the starving; as such it is
simply an expression of the revolutionary instinct, and finds
its justification in that, and in that only. Or, on the other
hand, this demand has arisen as a reaction against the bourgeois
demand for equality, drawing more or less correct and more
far-reaching demands from this bourgeois demand, and serving as
an agitational means in order to stir up the workers against the
capitalists with the aid of the capitalists' own assertions; and
in this case it stands or falls with bourgeois equality
itself. In both cases the real content of the proletarian demand
for equality is the demand for the abolition of
classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of
necessity passes into absurdity. We have given examples of this,
and shall find enough additional ones when we come to Herr
Dühring's fantasies of the future.
The idea of equality, both in its bourgeois and in its
proletarian form, is therefore itself a historical product, the
creation of which required definite historical conditions that
in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history. It is
therefore anything but an eternal truth. And if today it is
taken for granted by the general public -- in one sense or
another -- if, as Marx says, it "already possesses the fixity of
a popular prejudice", this is not the effect of its axiomatic
truth, but the effect of the general diffusion and the continued
appropriateness of the ideas of the eighteenth century.
Abstract from
Chapter 11: Morality and Law. Freedom and Necessity.
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between
freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into
necessity {die Einsicht in die Notwendigheit}. "Necessity is
blind only in so far as it is not understood [begriffen]."
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from
natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the
possibility this gives of systematically making them work
towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the
laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and
mental existence of men themselves -- two classes of laws which
we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not
in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the
capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject.
Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a
definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the
content of this judgment will be determined; while the
uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an
arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible
decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it
is controlled by the very object it should itself
control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over
ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on
knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a
product of historical development.
The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom
were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but
each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards
freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery
that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat: the
production of fire by friction; at the close of the development
so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be
transformed into mechanical motion: the steam-engine.
And, in spite of the gigantic liberating revolution in the
social world which the steam-engine is carrying through, and
which is not yet half completed, it is beyond all doubt that the
generation of fire by friction has had an even greater effect on
the liberation of mankind. For the generation of fire by
friction gave man for the first time control over one of the
forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the
animal kingdom. The steam-engine will never bring about such a
mighty leap forward in human development, however important it
may seem in our eyes as representing all those immense
productive forces dependent on it -- forces which alone make
possible a state of society in which there are no longer class
distinctions or anxiety over the means of subsistence for the
individual, and in which for the first time there can be talk of
real human freedom, of an existence in harmony with the laws of
nature that have become known. But how young the whole of human
history still is, and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to
ascribe any absolute validity to our present views, is evident
from the simple fact that all past history can be characterised
as the history of the epoch from the practical discovery of the
transformation of mechanical motion into heat up to that of the
transformation of heat into mechanical motion. [....]
[Ancient history will] remain a historical epoch of the greatest
interest for all future generations, because it forms the basis
of all subsequent higher development, because it has for its
starting-point the moulding of man from the animal kingdom, and
for its content the overcoming of obstacles such as will never
again confront associated mankind of the future. And secondly,
that the close of this [so-called] "hoary antiquity" -- in
contrast to which the future periods of history, which will no
longer be kept back by these difficulties and obstacles, hold
the promise of quite other scientific, technical and social
achievements -- is in any case a very strange moment to choose
to lay down the law for these thousands of years that are to
come, in the form of final and ultimate truths, immutable truths
and deep-rooted conceptions discovered on the basis of the
intellectually immature childhood of our so extremely "backward"
and "retrogressive" century. Only a Richard Wagner in philosophy
-- but without Wagner's talents -- could fail to see that all
the depreciatory epithets slung at previous historical
development remain sticking also on what is claimed to be its
final outcome -- the so-called philosophy of reality.
One of the most significant morsels of the new deep-rooted science {219} is the section on individualisation and increasing the value of life. In this section oracular commonplaces bubble up and gush forth in an irresistible torrent....
Next: Part II: Political Economy
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