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harsh "natural" law appeared annulled. The masses' feeling of in–
feriority gave way to confidence, pride, a new optimism. Some roots
of Stalinism are still embedded in the soil of these feelings. In a good
many minds, there is a frank conflict between truth, facts, and newly
acquired faith .
If
the balance sheet of the Revolution ends in an
appalling deficit, they ask, how can there be hope? Many men flinch
from this brutally superficial conclusion and prefer blindness, decep–
tion, and a totalitarian discipline. Others are poisoned with bitter–
n~.
In both cases, rational understanding yields to irrational ration–
alization. It is no longer a question either of knowledge or a clear
conscience. All problems are falsified.
In its development nineteenth-century socialism aimed at being
scientific. To be sure, the spirit of justice, militant humanism, idealism
concerning the future-these could not be confused with scientific
objectivity; in this sense socialism developed more out of the Hebrew
prophets' admirable passion than from experimental method. It is no
less true, however, that socialist idealism, especially in its Marxist
form, wanted to be faithful to the scientific spirit and, by the work
of its founders, placed itself in the vanguard of the intellectual life
of the century. Therefore it easily outstripped conservative thought.
But a movement occupied with forming syndicates, co-operatives,
parties struggling for workers' legislation and power, can neither
stick to the methodological strictness of
Capital,
nor even follow
closely the exceedingly rapid development of ideas between 1847 (the
publication of the
Manifesto
by Marx and Engels ) and the explosion
of nuclear physics. Anthropology, ethnography, comparative sociol–
ogy, psychology, physics, all enlarged, in the meantime, the knowledge
of man and nature beyond the point where socialism was able to
follow them. An
advanced
doctrine, it became occasionally a
retro–
grade
doctrine, a
superseded
doctrine, at least in comparison with
the development of the other sciences. Its last great theoretical works,
untarnished by practical vulgarization like those of the Russians–
the
Finance Capital
of Hilferding, and Rosa Luxembourg's
The
Accumulation of Capital-date
from 1910 and 1913 respectively.
As early as 1908, in contrast, Lenin, in
Materialism and Empirio–
criticism,
formulated a primitive and scholastic philosophy whose
feebleness, compared with the works of the age, is startling.
I think it is evident that the Bolshevik leaders, of whose moral
uprightness and
fanaticism
for science I had personal knowledge,
committed during the Revolution errors of an incalculable gravity
because they often proceeded from outworn or insufficient knowledge.
