Benedetto Croce

“ But the materialist and socialist interpretation of the State is not therefore any the less new. The common proverb, indeed, tells us that interest is the most powerful motive for human actions and conceals itself under the most varied forms; but it is none the less true that the student of history who has previously examined the teachings of socialist criticism, is like a short-sighted man who has provided himself with a good pair of spectacles: he sees quite differently and many mysterious shadows reveal their exact shape. ”

“ It may study a society—in all its aspects during a given period of time, or at a given moment of its existence, or it may even take up one or more aspects of social life and study them as they present themselves in different societies and at different times, and so on. It is history always, even when it avails itself of comparison as an instrument of research. And such a study will not have to make concepts, but will take them as it needs them from those sciences, which do, in fact, elaborate concepts. ”

“ An apprehension, little justified, lest the political organisation of the proletariat may lead to a brutal and unrestrained outbreak of the masses and to I know not what kind of social ruin; as if such outbreaks were not recorded by history in precisely those periods in which it is usual to suppose that the dominion of religion over conscience was greatest,—as in the jacqueries of the fourteenth century in France, and again in the peasants' wars in Germany,—and in which there was no organisation and political culture amongst the common people. ”

“ And from this recognition is inferred in its turn the true criticism of the hedonistic conception of the economic principle. You say that 'the equations of pure economics express merely the fact of a choice, and can be drawn up independently of the ideas of pleasure and pain,' but you admit at the same time that the fact of the choice 'can be expressed equally well as a fact of pleasure.'
It is true that every case of economic choice is at the same time, a case of feeling: of agreeable feeling if the economic choice is rightly made, of disagreeable feeling, if it is ill made. ”

“ Alongside, then, of the Marxian investigation, there can, or rather must, exist and flourish a general economic science, which may determine a concept of value, deducing it from quite different and more comprehensive principles than the special ones of Marx. And, if the pure economists, confined to their own special province, have been wrong to show an ungenerous intellectual dislike for Marx's investigations, his followers, in their turn, have been wrong to regard ungratefully a branch of research which was alien to them, calling it now useless, and now frankly absurd. ”

“ For me, on the contrary, the difficulty in it arises from its denoting a very simple fact, a summum genus, i.e. the fact of the very activity of man. Activity is value. For us nothing is valuable except what is an effort of imagination, of thought, of will, of our activity in any of its forms. As Kant said that there was nothing in the universe that could be called good except the good will; so, if we generalise, it may be said that there is nothing in the universe that is valuable, except the value of human activity. Of value as of activity you cannot demand a so-called genetic definition. ”

“ Social economics should not merely examine into the change in the actual working out of one and the same social order, but remains, now as formerly, the seat of all knowledge of actual social life. It must start from the knowledge of a given social existence, both in regard to its form and in regard to its content; and enlarge and deepen it up to the most minute peculiarity of its actual working out, with the accuracy of a technical science, the conditions and concrete objects of which are clearly indicated; and thus free the reality of social life from every obscurity. ”

“ The moral worth of actions cannot be determined by their success or failure in giving men satisfaction. For there are some things in which men find satisfaction which they yet judge to be bad. We must distinguish therefore the moral question whether such and such an action is good or bad from the economic whether it is or is not useful, whether it is a way by which men get what they, rightly or [xvi] wrongly want. In economics then we are merely discussing the efficiency or utility of actions. We can ask of any action whether it ought or ought not to be done at all. ”

“ But it will suffice to put on their guard all those classes of society who see their ruin in the sequence of history and to pledge them to a long struggle, although the final outcome may be useless. Amongst these classes is the proletariat, which indeed aims at the extinction of its class. Moral conviction and the force of sentiment must be added to give positive guidance and to supply an imperative ideal for those who neither feel the blind impulse of class interest, nor allow themselves to be swept along by the whirling current of the times. ”

“ Socialism, on the contrary, from Marx onwards, has placed little reliance on the good sense and good intentions of men, and has declared that the social revolution must be accomplished chiefly by the effort of a class directly interested, i.e. the proletariat. And socialism has made such advances that history must inquire whether the experience that we have of the past justifies the supposition that a social movement, so widespread and intense, can be reabsorbed or dispersed without fully testing itself in the sphere of facts. ”

“ And if, in Marx's hypothesis, commodities appear as congealed labour, or crystalised labour, why by another hypothesis, should not all economic goods and not only commodities, appear as congealed methods of satisfying needs or as crystalised needs? I read at one point in Das Kapital: 'Things which in themselves are not commodities, e.g. knowledge, honour, etc., may be sold by their owners; and thus, by means of their price, acquire the form of commodities. A thing may formally have a price without having a value. ”

“ But economics does not consider physical things and objects, but actions. The physical object is merely the brute matter of an economic act: in measuring it we remain in the physical world, we do not pass over to that of economics, or else, when measured, the economic fact has become volatile. You say that 'political economy only concerns itself with choices, which fall on things that are variable in quantity and capable of measurement' ”

“ If all things which have economic value have not had labour expended on them, we must look elsewhere for their common characteristic. We should probably say that they all have in common the fact that they are desired and that there is not an unlimited supply of them. The pure economist finds the key to this analysis of value in the consideration of the laws of supply and demand, which alone affect all things that have economic value, and finds little difficulty in refuting Marx's theory, on the basis which his investigation assumes. ”

“ And since man lives a natural as well as a social existence, he admits the influence of race, of temperament and of the promptings of nature. And, finally, he does not overlook the influence of the individual, i.e. of the work of those who are called great men, who if they are not the creators, are certainly collaborators of history.
With all these concessions he realises, if I am not mistaken, that it is useless to look for a theory, in any strict sense of the word, in historical materialism; and even that it is not what can properly be called a theory at all. ”

“ If history is always accidental, why in this western Europe of ours, might not a new barbarism arise owing to the effect of incalculable circumstances? Why should not the coming of communism be either rendered superfluous or hastened by some of those technical discoveries, which, as Marx himself has proved, have hitherto produced the greatest revolutions in the course of history? ”

“ If I am not mistaken, you assign to metaphysics the problem of reducing the teleological to the mechanical, value to mere fact. But observe that metaphysics cannot get rid of the distinction; and will only labour, with greater or less good luck, at its old business of reconciling opposites, or of deriving two contraries from one unity.
I foresee what may be advanced against this assertion of the non-mechanical nature of the economic principle. It may be said: What is not mechanical, is not measurable; and economic values, on the contrary, are measured. ”

“ Turn in every direction and in pure economics you will find nothing more. The expropriatory character of profit can be asserted only when to the second society, we apply, almost like a chemical reagent, the standard, which, on the other hand, is characteristic of a type of society [127] founded on human equality, a type 'which has attained the solidity of a popular conviction' (Marx) . Profit 'is surplus-labour not paid for', says Marx, and it may be so; but not paid for in reference to what? In existing society it is certainly paid for, by the price which it actually secures. ”

“ How make the concepts suitable to social economics? Evidently by allowing ourselves to be guided by a principle, by abstracting a single side from concrete reality; and if it is to be for economics this principle can be none other than the economic principle, and social economics will consider only the economic side of [46] a given social life. Profits, rent, interest, labour value, usury, wages, crises, will then appear as economic phenomena necessary under given conditions of the social order, through which the economic principle exerts its influence. ”

“ It is true that Trivero believes that, by going back to the general concept of need, he can establish the parent theory on which rest the particular doctrines of needs; and amongst them economics, which concerns itself with economic needs. If there are species—he says—we ought to determine of what genus they are species. But he will allow me to remark that the genus to look for is, as logic teaches, the proximate genus. To jump to such a great distance as to reality or to fact, would only lead to the noble discovery: that economic needs are part of reality, are a group of facts. ”

“ Let us take two types of society: type A consisting of 100 persons, who, with capital held in common and equal labour, produce goods which are divided in equal proportions; type B consisting of 100 persons, 50 of whom own the land and the means of production, i.e. are capitalists, and 50 are shut out from this ownership, i.e. are proletarians and workmen; in the distribution, the former receive, in proportion to the capital which they employ, a share in the products of the labour of the latter. It is evident that in type A there is no place for surplus value. ”

“ But why christen this assemblage of new facts by the name of historical materialism, which has hitherto expressed the well-defined meaning of a way of interpreting history? Is it not the task of the scientist to distinguish and analyse what in empirical reality and to ordinary knowledge appears mingled into one? ”

“ Let us, instead, take account, in a society, only of what is properly economic life, i.e. out of the whole society, only of economic society. Let us abstract from this latter all goods which cannot be increased by labour. Let us abstract further all class distinctions, which may be regarded as accidental in reference to the general concept of economic society. ”

“ The case of positivism is strange in that, being neither so boldly imaginative as to yield to the conceptions of teleology and rational philosophy, nor so strictly realistic and intellectually disciplined as to attack the error at its roots, it has halted halfway, i.e. at the actual concept of development and of evolution, and has announced the philosophy of evolution as the true philosophy of history: development itself—as the law which explains development! ”

“ But what, pray, has pure economics in common with psychology? The purists start from the hedonistic postulate, i.e. from the economic nature itself of man, and deduce from it the concepts of utility (economic utility which Pareto has proposed to call by a special name, ofelimita, from the Greek ώφἑλιμοϛ) of value, and directly, all the other special laws in accordance with which man behaves in so far as he is an abstract homo oeconomicus. They do exactly what the science of ethics does with the moral nature; and the science of logic with the logical nature ”

“ Croce maintains that Marx's theory of value is economic and not moral. Yet it is hard to read Marx and certainly Marxians without finding in them the implication that the values produced in such an economic society would be just. If that implication be examined, we come on an important difficulty still remaining in this theory. The contention that in a system of unfettered economic competition, men get the reward they deserve, assumes that it is just that if one man has a greater power of serving society than another he should be more highly rewarded for his work. ”

“ No honest student can deny that his work has been of great historic importance and it is hard to believe that a book like Das Kapital which has been the inspiration of a great movement can be nothing but a tissue of false reasoning as some of its critics have affirmed. The doctrine of the economic interpretation of history has revivified and influenced almost all modern historical research. In a great part of his analysis of the nature and natural development of a capitalist society Marx has shown himself a prophet of extraordinary insight. ”