the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

light of increasing amounts of empirical data, yet they remained withinthe abstract and directive frame of political, juridical and legislativereference of the social contract. The writings of Vico, which express hisnotion of man’s creation of mathematics, poetry and legislative acts; ofFerguson, which express the paradox of the nature of man as art, alreadyincorporating the mediacy of man’s relation to nature; of Herder, whoconceived history as tradition, following Vico, and who withdrew humanhistory from the political plan; of Franklin, in part by his notion of manthe toolmaker, but more so by his practical ethic of work, helped todissolve the political abstraction of man in relation to society. AdamSmith expressed his contempt of statesmen or politicians who weresubjected to the fluctuations of momentary affairs.122 The view of mantaken by Rousseau was ambivalent, for he conceived man at one time asa political, at another as a social animal.123 The extreme form of atomisticindividualism of the social contract and of natural law, from whichRousseau was only liberated in part, was an abstraction, further, becauseman in the civilized condition is conceived by all who adhered to thatdoctrine as wholly subjected to the State, the mortal god, and none ofman’s social institutions falls outside its power. The opposite of thedoctrine of the social contract was developed in the nineteenth century asthe science or sciences of man became increasingly empirical, and at thesame time fell increasingly under the influence of the natural sciences.The extreme atomism and the implied abstraction of man expressed inthe doctrine of the social contract were called into question in part wittinglyand in part implicitly by the communal doctrines of the nineteenthcentury which had their root on the one side in the empirical tradition ofthe natural sciences. Both the antiquity of man and his continuity withthe rest of the natural order had been established by empirical observation,inference, doubt, etc., of geology, palaeontology, zoology and othermeans of the natural sciences of the time. On the one hand, the communaldoctrine was embedded in this empirical tradition, on the other, it wasopposed to the doctrine of individualism on ideological grounds. Individualistssuch as Spencer, Maine and T. H. Huxley did not deny thecommunal origin of civilization; at the same time they affirmed the evolutionof man toward individualism, of which the foundation was theprivate ownership of property both for consumption and for furthersocial production.The individualism of the utilitarian doctrine of Bentham on the oneside and the collectivism of the Utopians Fourier, Pecqueur, Owen on theother were polarized in the political camps early in the nineteenth century,but their mutual opposition was not extended into the theoretical conflictover the origin of civilization. Saint-Simon who praised the capitalistpractices in finance and transportation for their contributions to collectivistdoctrine, Max Stimer (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) who confounded70