historical necessity. In the debate about progress, Marxists sided with the future. They accepted the sociological tradition according to which the demise of the old agrarian order was preordained and therefore irresistible, but they wasted no time in mourning the past. ^* Nor did they seek to balance the gains of progress against losses, in the manner of the sociological critics of modern life. They did not minimize the wretchedness brought into the world by capitalism and industrial production. If anything, they had a stake in exaggerating it. Since capitalism laid the material foundations for socialism, however, this suffering could not be avoided. "We say to the workers and the petty bourgeois," Marx wrote in I849: "It is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you, than to revert to a bygone form of society which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism."

Throughout his career as a revolutionary, Marx had to contend with backward-looking socialists, as he saw them, who conceived of socialism more as the restoration of precapitalist solidarity than as the completion of the bourgeois revolution. His contempt for this kind of thinking knew no bounds. Christian socialism, with its "religion of love," encouraged "slavish self-abasement," the "voluptuous pleasure of cringing and self‐ contempt." Those who appealed to the "social principles of Christianity"

____________________

*

It is the assumption that the development of large-scale production is inevitable, with all the other social changes that go along with it, that justifies the consideration of Marxism as an offshoot of the sociological tradition. Large-scale production develops out of the inner logic of historical change, according to this way of thinking, which is shared by Marxists and conservative sociologists alike and increasingly by liberals as well, for that matter. Centralization is inherent in the underlying structure of technological development. The superior productivity it allegedly makes possible guarantees its triumph. Form (in this case, the centralization of productive forces, the rise of the metropolis, the movement "from status to contract," and so on) follows function. Marxism shares another feature with the sociological tradition. It too is based on the distinction between state and society. As we have seen, this makes society apolitical by definition. Like sociology, Marxism conceives of the good society—in the case of Marxism, that higher form of gemeinschaft known as socialism—as a society without politics.

-150-