THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 137
out seeing therein the revolutionary subversive side which will overturn the old society. From that moment science, produced by the historical movement and linking itself thereto in full knowledge of the facts of the case, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revo- lutionary.
Let us return to M. Proudhon.
Each economic relation has a good and bad side: that is the single point upon which M. Proudhon does not contradict himself. The good side, he sees explained by the economists; the bad side, he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the So- cialists the illusion of seeing in poverty only poverty. He is in agreement with both in wishing to refer it to the authority of science. Science, for him, is reduced to the insignificant proportion of a scientific formula. It is thus that M. Proudhon flatters himself to have made the criticism of both political economy and of com- munism: he is below both the one and the other. Below the economists, since as a philosopher, who has under his hand a magic formula, he has believed himself able to do without entering into purely economic details; below the Socialists, since he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient intelligence to raise himself, were it only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.
He wished to be the synthesis, he is a composite error.
He wished to soar as man of science above the bourgeoisie and the proletarians; he is only the petty bourgeois, tossed about constaatly between capital and labor, between political economy and communism.
