were deluding themselves. "The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.... The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble."

As for the radicalism advocated by artisans, peasants, and small shopkeepers, even when it was free of religious influences, it was equally misguided, in Marx's view. A regime of "petty industry" and "simple commodity production" was "compatible only with ... a society moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds." A system of production in which "the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour, ... the peasant of the land which he cultivates, and the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso" precluded the "concentration of the means of production," a "cooperative division of labour," "control over ... the forces of Nature by society," and the "free development of the social productive powers." The simple market society to which artisans and farmers wanted to return would have assured the reign of "universal mediocrity."

Marx did not argue simply that capitalist production created preconditions favorable to the development of socialism. His theory of history required him to see "earlier stages as tending irresistibly" toward later ones, as Jon Elster points out. History had a hidden purpose. Thus the capitalist "stage cannot be avoided," in Marx's words, "any more than it is possible for man to avoid the [earlier] stage in which his spiritual energies are given a religious definition as powers independent of himself." Christian socialists could not see that history had moved beyond the stage in which a religious worldview was appropriate, nor could artisans see that small-scale production was doomed to extinction. "At a certain stage of development it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution.... It must be annihilated; it is annihilated."

The considerations making for an ambivalent assessment of progress in other writers—the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market—were thus dismissed by Marx and his followers as sheer sentimentality, on the whole. Sociological critics of progress agreed with Marx that the transformation of society was irresistible, but they had deep reservations about it. They may have

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