THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 139
necessary, then, that the abstraction, the idea, the word, should suffice him to explain the division of labor in the different epochs of history. Castes, corporations, the manufacturing regime, the great industry, must be ex- plained by the single word division. First study well the meaning of division, and then you will not need to study the numerous influences which give to the division of labor a definite character in each epoch.
Certainly this would be to render things altogether too simple, by merely reducing them to the categories of M. Proudhon. History does not proceed so categorically. Three whole centuries have been necessary in Germany to establish the first great division of labor—that is, the separation of the town from the country. As this single relation, that of town to country, became modified, so the whole society was modified in consequence. To view only this single phase of the division of labor you have the ancient Republics, or Christian feudalism; early England with its barons, or modern England with its cotton-lords. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when yet there were no colonies, when America did not yet exist for Europe, when Asia only existed by the inter- mediary of Constantinople, when the Mediterranean was the centre of commercial activity, the division of labor had quite another form, quite another aspect, to that which it had in the seventeenth century, when the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the English, and the French had colonies established in all parts of the world. The extent of the market, and its physiognomy, give to the division of labor in the different epochs a physiognomy, a character, which it would be difficult to deduce from the single word division, from the idea, or from the category.
“All the economists,” says M. Proudhon, “since Adam Smith have designated the advantages and the imcon-
