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PARTISAN REVIEW
he means by examples from the department of law. The laws of
inheritance, he says, have evidently an economic basis, because they
must be supposed to correspond to various stages in the development
of the family; but it would be very hard to prove that the freedom
of testamentary disposition in England or the restricted right of
disposition in France can wholly
be
traced to economic causes. Yet
both of these kinds of law have their effect on the economic system
in
that they influence the distribution of wealth. (It should be noted, by
the way, that in "The Housing Question" [Section 3, II], published
in
1872, he gives a rather more "materialistic" account of the develop–
ment of legal systems.) Marx had once-in a first draught for an
"Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy"-made some
attempt to explore the difficulties of the connection between art and
economic conditions. The periods of the highest development of art
4o not coincide, he says, with the highest developments of society.
Great art-the Greek epic, for example-is not even necessarily the
product of a high period of artistic development. In any given
in–
stance, it is possible to see why a particular kind of art should have
flourished at a particular moment: the very naivete of the Greeks,
who had not yet invented the printing press, their closeness to primi–
tive mythology at an epoch before the prevalence of lightning rods,
when it was still possible for people to imagine that a thunderbolt
meant the anger of Zeus, their childlike charm in the childhood of
society-this rendered their art "in certain respects the standard and
model beyond attainment." The difficulty lay only in discovering
the
general laws
of the connection between artistic and social develop–
ment. One would say that Marx had found a great deal of difficulty
in explaining the above specific case and that his explanation was far
from satisfactory. The trouble is that he has rtot gone into the question
of what is meant when the epoch of the lightning rod is called a
period of "higher" social development than the epoch of
the~omeric
epic. That he was working toward an inquiry into this matter
is
indicated by another passage from the same document: "The unequal
relation, for example, between material and artistic production.
In
general, the conception of progress is not to be taken in the sense of
the usual abstraction
[italics mine]. In the case of art, etc., it is not
so important and difficult to understand this disproportion as in that
of practical social relations: for example, the relation between edu–
cation in the United States and in Europe. The really difficult point,
however, which has to be gone into here is that of the unequal
development of relations of production as legal relations.
As,
for
example, the connection between Roman civil law (this is less true
of criminal and public law ) and modern production." But this manu-
