Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/284 (page 27)
    conception was elaborated in the Declaration of the French National Assembly in 1789 as to the “Rights of Man”. Whatever we may think of the truth or validity of this creed of 1776 and 1789—remember¬ ing the existence of chattel slavery, and its continu¬ ance in the United States down to 1864, together with the enormous inequalities in personal riches that have actually gone on increasing—no one can doubt its potency in moulding the political institu¬ tions of the modern world. A typical and no less amazing example of the overwhelming power of an intellectual dogma is the course of events in Soviet Russia from 1917 onwards. Here we see a stupend¬ ous refashioning of the social institutions of one- twelfth of the whole human race, spread over one- sixth part of the habitable globe, carried out accord¬ ing to the dogma of a German Jew of genius, Karl Marx. Whatever truth or validity there may be in the “Materialist Conception of History”—the hypo¬ thesis that political institutions are determined by economic conditions—and exactly why this “law” should lead to a supersession of the “Dictatorship of the Capitalist” by a “Dictatorship of the Pro¬ letariat ”, we need not discuss here. But the estab¬ lishment, for the first time in history, of a whole network of social institutions deliberately aiming at an equalitarian state in which all men will have really equal opportunities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, may well prove to be the most momentous of all the developments of social organisation.