TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
57
more adequately as: The philosophers have interpreted the world
long enough; the time has come to change it. For this last state–
ment is in fact only a variation of another, also occurring in an early
manuscript: "You cannot
au/heben
(i.e., elevate, conserve, and
abolish in the Hegelian sense) philosophy without realizing it." In
the later work the same attitude to philosophy appears in the many
predictions that the working class will be the heir of classical phi–
losophy.
None of these statements can be understood in and by itself.
Each acquires its meaning by contradicting some traditionally ac–
cepted truth whose plausibility up to the beginning of the modem
age had been beyond doubt. "Labor created man" means first that
labor and not God created man; secondly, it means that man, insofar
as he
is
human, creates himself, that his humanity is the result of
his own activity; it means, thirdly, that what distinguishes man from
animal, his
differentia speci/ica,
is not reason, but labor, that he is
not an
animal rationale,
but an
animal laborans;
it means, fourthly,
that it is not reason, until then the highest attribute of man, but labor,
the traditionally most despised human activity, which contains the
humanity of man. Thus Marx challenges the traditional God, the
traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of
reason.
"Violence is the midwife of history" means that the hidden
forces of development of human productivity, insofar as they depend
upon free and conscious human action, come to light only through
the violence of wars and revolutions. Only in those violent periods
does history show its true face and dispel the fog of mere ideological,
hypocritical talk. Again the challenge to tradition is clear. Violence
is traditionally the
ultima ratio
in relationships between nations and
the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the
outstanding characteristic of tyranny. (The few attempts to save vio–
lence from disgrace, chiefly by Machiavelli and Hobbes, are of great
relevance for the problem of power and quite illuminative of the
early confusion of power with violence, but they exerted remarkably
little influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own
time.) To Marx, on the contrary, violence or rather the possession
of the means of violence is the constituent element of all forms of
government; the state is the instrument of the ruling class by means
