THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 157
his own enclosure. I do not know if by this cutting up the field is extended, but I know very well that man is~ lessened thereby.”
The division of labor in the automatic factory is characterised by this, that labor there has lost all specialised character. But from the moment that all special development ceases, the need of universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the ia- dividual begins to make itself felt. The automatic factory effaces species and the stupefying of handicraft.
M. Proudhon, not having so much as comprehended this single revolutionary side of the automatic factory, takes a step backward, and proposes to the workman that he should not only make the twelfth part of a pin, but the whole twelve parts in succession. The workman would thus arrive at the science and conscience of the pin. Such is the synthetic labor of M. Proudhon. No one can deny that to make one movement forward and another backward, is equally to make a synthetic movement.
To sum up, M. Proudhon has not got beyond the ideal of the petty bourgeois. And in order to realise this ideal he thinks of nothing better than to bring us back to the companion, or at most to the master, workman of the Middle Ages. It suffices, he says somewhere in his book, to have made a masterpiece once in a lifetime, to have felt oneself a man for once. Is not that, in its form as well as in its basis, the masterpiece exacted by the trade guild of the Middle Ages?
