From Antonio Labriolas essays on historical materialism: The integral formation of man in his historical development is henceforth no longer a hypothetical datum nor a simple conjecture. It is an intuitive and palpable truth. The conditions of the processus which engenders a step of progress are henceforth reducible into a series of explanations; and up to a certain point we have under our eyes the schedule of all historical developments, morphologically conceived. This doctrine is the clear and definite negation of all ideology, because it is the explicit negation of every form of rationalism, understanding by this word this concept, that things in their existence and their development answer to a norm, an ideal, a measure, an end, in an implicit or explicit fashion. The whole course of human events is a sum, a succession of series of conditions which men have made and laid down for themselves through the experience accumulated in their changing social life, but it represents neither the tendency to realize a predetermined end nor the deviation of a first principle from perfection and felicity. Progress itself implies merely that empirical and circumstantial notion of a thing which is at present defined in our mind, because, thanks to the development thus far realized, we are in a position to estimate the past and to foresee, at least in a certain sense and in a certain measure, the future.
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 23:38:10 +0000
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