Abstract
Leibniz formulated the proposition, which has remained unrefuted, that no two constituent parts of the organic world are completely the same as each other. That applies already to the tiniest living creatures, and thus so much more to organisms as immensely complex as human beings. And just as no two individuals of the human species are fully alike, so all the more it cannot happen that two peoples are in all respects the same, and that their life plays out in consistent agreement about everything. Even with the development of peoples that are similar in form, there is a whole host of differences between them as regards personalities and facts, which make a completely similar course of events extremely improbable. Can one conclude from that, as some think ingenious today, that history is there for nothing to be learned from it? That would amount to the wise insight that, faced with differences between individuals in eye and hair colour, muscular strength and body length, medical science is impossible. Like the life of individuals, the life of peoples also plays out according to the same laws of development, so that we can recognise very well from the examples of the past what kinds of effects certain causes will probably have here as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Louis Héritier (1862–1898), Swiss anarcho-syndicalist activist and writer, engaged especially in socialist circles and the workers’ secretariat in Geneva, corresponded periodically with Marx and Engels.
- 2.
The 1848 French Revolution, also known as the February Revolution, was among the more prominent events of the 1848–49 wave of revolutions across Europe. It broke out as a result of dissatisfaction with the so-called July Monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830–48), and resulted in the installation of a new, more democratic regime system, the French Second Republic. Between February and December 1848, France was ruled by a shifting series of unstable governments, elected on the basis of universal male suffrage, which initially introduced radical policies to help labour organisation, such as the ‘right to work’ (droit au travail) and ‘National Workshops’ for the unemployed. Yet, buckling under intense economic pressure due to capital flight and France’s worsening credit on the nascent international financial markets, the Second Republic’s government became increasingly reliant on conservative policies and the support of the French military. One of the flashpoints was the bloody violence of the failed June Days uprising by Parisian workers, which came about as a result of latent tensions between liberal Orléanists, radical republicans, and socialists, and which was brutally quashed by the armed forces of the provisional government. Ultimately, the uprising only strengthened the hand of reactionary parties, and laid the foundations for the election to the Presidency of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte in December 1848. Exactly three years later, in December 1851, Bonaparte suspended the Republic’s elected National Assembly and established the Second French Empire under his rule as Napoléon III, which lasted until France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71.
- 3.
Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditionsof Socialism, Henry Tudor (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [1899]); Henry Tudor and J.M. Tudor (eds.), Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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Ostrowski, M.S. (2020). History and Legend. In: Eduard Bernstein on the German Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27719-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27719-2_18
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