Political economy is, therefore, the natural history of the most
apparent and most universally accredited customs, traditions,
practices, and methods of humanity in all that concerns the
production and distribution of wealth. By this title,
political economy considers itself legitimate in FACT and in
RIGHT: in fact, because the phenomena which it studies are
constant, spontaneous, and universal; in right, because these
phenomena rest on the authority of the human race, the strongest
authority possible. Consequently, political economy calls itself
a SCIENCE; that is, a rational and systematic knowledge of
regular and necessary facts.
Socialism, which, like the god Vishnu, ever dying and ever
returning to life, has experienced within a score of years its
ten-thousandth incarnation in the persons of five or six
revelators,--socialism affirms the irregularity of the present
constitution of society, and, consequently, of all its previous
forms. It asserts, and proves, that the order of civilization is
artificial, contradictory, inadequate; that it engenders
oppression, misery, and crime; it denounces, not to say
calumniates, the whole past of social life, and pushes on with
all its might to a reformation of morals and institutions.
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