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that we come to be able to recognize the inner connection between
the social and political forms of an epoch, this only occurs, as a rule,
when these forms are out of date and nearing extinction." And he
adds that in the sciences that deal with the laws of human thought–
logic and dialectics-the situation is not any better.
And yet Marx and Engels were never sceptical about their own
theory of the social revolution; they never doubted that the purpose
they derived from this theory would eventually be accomplished. Nor
did they trouble themselves much to explain how their own brand
of "ideology," avowedly itself a class ideology designed to promote
the interests of the proletariat, could have some different kind of
validity from that of others.
Where do these validities begin and end? the reader may ask
today of Marx and Engels. How shall we determine to what extent
a law or a work of art, for example, is the product of class delusion
and to what extent it has some more general application? To what
extent and under what conditions do the ideas of human beings
react upon their economic bases? The last word that Engels leaves us
on the subject (in his letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890) is
his assertion that, though the economic factor is not "the
sole
deter–
mining factor," yet "the production . and reproduction of real life
constitutes in the
last instance
the determining factor in history"
[italics in both cases Engels']. But what about the carry-over value
of a system of law or a literary culture? Did the Roman jurists and
Virgil really perish with the passing of Rome? What does "the last
instance" mean? No doubt there would be no Aeneid without Augu–
stus; but then it is equally true that there would be no Aeneid, as
we know it, without Virgil's Alexandrian predecessor, Apollonius
Rhodius; and to what degree does Virgil, in tum, enter as a principle
of cultural life into the new forms of society which are to follow him?
Is the "last instance" last in time or is it ultimate in the quite differ–
ent sense of being the fundamental motive of human behavior? In
neither case is the conception really clear. Marx, who had studied
·Roman law, was evidently about to address himself to this subject
in the notes I have quoted above; but why did he never do soi Why,
in a word, were he and Engels content to leave the problem of the
relation of man's conscious creative will to the processes of inorganic
nature and to the less enlightened activities of humanity at such
meager generalizations as the statements that "men make their own
history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circum–
stances for themselves; but have to work upon circumstances as they
find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past"
