ricorsi.[1] Thus a revolution which took place in a time of economic decadence had forced the world to pass again through a period of almost primitive civilisation, and had stopped all progress for several centuries.
These dreadful events have been many times invoked by the adversaries of Socialism; I do not deny the validity of the argument, but two details must be added which may perhaps appear of small importance to professional sociologists. Such events presuppose (1) an economic decadence; (2) an organisation which assures a very perfect conservation of the current system of ideas. The civilised Socialism of our professors has many times been presented as a safeguard of civilisation: I believe that it would produce the same effect as was produced by the classical education given by the Church to the barbarian kings. The proletariat would be corrupted and stultified as the Merovingians were, and economic decadence would only be more certain under the action of these pretended civilising agents.
The dangers which threaten the future of the world may be avoided, if the proletariat hold on with obstinacy to revolutionary ideas, so as to realise as much as possible Marx's conception. Everything may be saved, if the proletariat, by their use of violence, manage to re-establish the division into classes, and so restore to the middle class something of its former energy; that is the great aim towards which the whole thought of men—who are not hypnotised by the event of the day, but who think
- ↑ [Vico's doctrine of "reflux" (ricorsi). Civilisation comes to an end in the "barbarism of reflection" which is worse than the primitive barbarism of sensation…. The mind, after traversing its course of progress, after rising from sensation … to the rational, from violence to equity, is bound, in conformity with its eternal nature, to retraverse the course, to relapse into violence and sensation, and thence to renew its upward movement, "to commence a reflux." See chap. xi. of The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, by Benedetto Croce. Eng. trans.—Trans. Note.]
