SOCIAL SCIENTIST to the bourgeoisie a certain tragical humor, - they have been compared to dithyrambics. The negative and antithetical definitions of other forms of socialism then current, which have often re-appeared since, even up to the present time, although they are fundamentally beyond criticism both in their form and their aim, nevertheless, do not pretend to be and are not the real history of socialism; they furnish neither its outlines nor its plan for him who would write it. History in reality does not rest upon the distinction between the true and the false, the just and the unjust and still less upon the more abstract antithesis between the possible and the real as if the things were on one side and on another side were their shadows and their reflections in ideas. History is all of a piece, and it rests upon the process of formation and transformation of society; and that evidently in a fashion altogether objective and independent of our approval or disapproval. It is a dynamic of a special class to speak like the positivists who are so dainty with expressions of this sort but are often dominated by the new phrases which they have put out. The different socialist forms of thought and action which have appeared and disappeared in the course of the centuries, so different in their causes, their aspects, and their effects, are all to be studied and explained by the specific and complex conditions of the social life in which they were produced. Upon a close examination it is seen that they do not form one single whole of continuous process because the series is frequently interrupted by changes in the social fabric and by the disappearance and breaking off of the tradition. It is only since the French Revolution that socialism presents a certain unity of process, which appears morq evident since 1830 with the definite political supremacy of the capitalist class in France and England and which finally becomes obvious, we might say even palpable, since the rise of the International. Upon this road the Manifesto stands like a colossal guide post bearing a double inscription: on one side the first sketch of the new doctrine which has now made the circle of the world; on the other, the definition of its relations to the forms which it excludes, without giving, however, any historic account of them. The vital part, the essence, the distinctive character of this work are all contained in the new conception of history which permeates it and which in it is partially explained and developed. By the aid of this conception communism, ceasing to be a hope, an aspiration, a remembrance, a conjecture, an expedient, found for the first time its adequate expression in the realization of its very necessity, that is to