Socialism concludes by declaring political economy a false and
sophistical hypothesis, devised to enable the few to exploit the
many; and applying the maxim A fructibus cognoscetis, it ends
with a demonstration of the impotence and emptiness of political
economy by the list of human calamities for which it makes it
responsible.
But if political economy is false, jurisprudence, which in all
countries is the science of law and custom, is false also; since,
founded on the distinction of thine and mine, it supposes the
legitimacy of the facts described and classified by political
economy. The theories of public and international law, with all
the varieties of representative government, are also false, since
they rest on the principle of individual appropriation and the
absolute sovereignty of wills.
All these consequences socialism accepts. To it, political
economy, regarded by many as the physiology of wealth, is but the
organization of robbery and poverty; just as jurisprudence,
honored by legists with the name of written reason, is, in its
eyes, but a compilation of the rubrics of legal and official
spoliation,--in a word, of property.
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