364
PARTISAN REVIEW
Europe after the death of Marx was no longer different in principle
from the pseudo-scientific achievements of the bourgeois historians
previously discussed. "Scientific socialism" as conceived by Bern·
stein and Kautsky, Hilferding and Renner, no longer had any
higher ambition than to he admitted to the realm of the established
bourgeois sciences. The true significance of the Marxian attempt
at conceiving world history as a progressive revolution was soon
forgotten on all sides, just as was the true significance of its coun·
terpart, the idealist philosophy of Hegel.* Universal history, as
far as it survived at all, was left as a sideline for professional
historians like Ranke who could be trusted to decide the problem
of what belonged and what did not belong to a professionally
understood universal history-not by any theoretical principle, but
by the use of his "scientific tact."
5.
The next phase of universal history which began near the end
of the third quarter of the 19th century and lasted until the first
world war, 1914-18, can be described, in the view of the writer,
as the age of monopoly-capitalism and imperialism. The alter–
native theory of the predominance of so-called "finance capital,"
promoted hefore the first world war by the Austrian socialist Hil–
ferding, has been entirely refuted by later developments. It sur–
vives today only in the state-controlled ideologies of Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia. Witness the oft repeated references to the
"leading bankers and plutocrats" in Stalin's May Day Order, as
reported by the
New York Times,
May 1, 1942.
During this phase, Western civilization indeed came near
fulfilling the conditions which had been fictitiously assumed for so
long by its historians.
It
cast the net of its economic system around
the world and brought under its sway the whole of mankind and
all the habitable lands and navigable seas on the face of the earth.
Western technics and industries, Western sciences and Western
institutions, were eagerly imitated in the four quarters of the globe.
The whole contemporary world seemed converted into a single
world market, the
fifty
to sixty existing states united in a single
"comity of nations."
Such conditions might have been expected to lead to the
*See
the author's
Marxismw und Philosophie,
2nd ed. Leipzig 1930 pp. 49
ff.
