Karl Kautsky
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 56
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ...a bird's-eye view of the thousands of years of antiquity can clearly perceive a social evolution, the average historian takes no notice of it. Not until the age of capitalist production was reached did social evolution proceed at such a pace that men became conscious of it. Of course they first looked for the causes of this evolution ' on the surface. But one who sticks to the surface can see only the forces which determine the immediate course of progress, and these are not the changing conditions of production, but the changing ideas of men. As the capitalist system developed it created among the persons who depended upon it, capitalists, proletarians, etc., new wants wholly different from those of the people connected with the feudal system of production. To these different wants there corresponded also different ideas of right and wrong, of necessities and luxuries, of usefulness and harm. In proportion as the capitalist system grew and the classes that had part in it became more marked, the ideas which corresponded to this system of production became clearer, asserted themselves in the government, and were felt in the social life, until finally the new classes that had been formed took possession of the state and shaped it agreeably to their own wants. The philosophers who first endeavored to investigate the causes of social development thought they found them in the ideas of men. To a certain degree they recognized that these ideas sprang from material wants; but the fact still remained a secret to them that these wants changed from age to age, and that the changes were the results of alterations in economic conditions, that is, in the system of production. They started with the notion that the wants of man--"human nature"--were...