But this oscillation, clearly pointed out by the economists, is but the effect of a contradiction which, repeating itself on a vast scale, engenders the most unexpected phenomena.Three years of fertility, in certain provinces of Russia, are a public calamity, just as, in our vineyards, three years of abundance are a calamity to the wine-grower I know well that the economists attribute this distress to a lack of markets; wherefore this question of markets is an important one with them.Unfortunately the theory of markets, like that of emigration with which they attempted to meet Malthus, is a begging of the question.The States having the largest market are as subject to over- production as the most isolated countries:
where are high and low prices better known than in the stock-exchanges of Paris and London?
From the oscillation of value and the irregular effects resulting therefrom the socialists and economists, each in their own way, have reasoned to opposite, but equally false, conclusions: the former have made it a text for the slander of political economy and its exclusion from social science;
the latter, for the denial of all possibility of reconciliation, and the affirmation of the incommensurability of values, and consequently the inequality of fortunes, as an absolute law of commerce.
I say that both parties are equally in error.
1.The contradictory idea of value, so clearly exhibited by the inevitable distinction between useful value and value in exchange does not arise from a false mental perception, or from a vicious terminology, or from any practical error; it lies deep in the nature of things, and forces itself upon the mind as a general form of thought, -- that is, as a category.Now, as the idea of value is the point of departure of political economy, it follows that all the elements of the science -- I use the word science in anticipation -- are contradictory in themselves and opposed to each other: so truly is this the case that on every question the economist finds himself continually placed between an affirmation and a negation alike irrefutable.ANTINOMY, in fine, to use a word sanctioned by modern philosophy, is the essential characteristic of political economy; that is to say, it is at once its death- sentence and its justification.
Antinomy, literally counter-law, means opposition in principle or antagonism in relation, just as contradiction or antilogy indicates opposition or discrepancy in speech.Antinomy, -- I ask pardon for entering into these scholastic details, comparatively unfamiliar as yet to most economists, -- antinomy is the conception of a law with two faces, the one positive, the other negative.Such, for instance, is the law called attraction, by which the planets revolve around the sun, and which mathematicians have analyzed into centripetal force and centrifugal force.Such also is the problem of the infinite divisibility of matter, which, as Kant has shown, can be denied and affirmed successively by arguments equally plausible and irrefutable.
Antinomy simply expresses a fact, and forces itself imperatively on the mind; contradiction, properly speaking, is an absurdity.This distinction between antinomy (contra-lex) and contradiction (contra-dictio) shows in what sense it can be said that, in a certain class of ideas and facts, the argument of contradiction has not the same value as in mathematics.
In mathematics it is a rule that, a proposition being proved false, its opposite is true, and vice versa.In fact, this is the principal method of mathematical demonstration.In social economy, it is not the same: thus we see, for example, that property being proved by its results to be false, the opposite formula, communism, is none the truer on this account, but is deniable at the same time and by the same title as property.Does it follow, as has been said with such ridiculous emphasis, that every truth, every idea, results from a contradiction, -- that is, from a something which is affirmed and denied at the same moment and from the same point of view, -- and that it may be necessary to abandon wholly the old-fashioned logic, which regards contradiction as the infallible sign of error? This babble is worthy of sophists who, destitute of faith and honesty, endeavor to perpetuate scepticism in order to maintain their impertinent uselessness.
Because antinomy, immediately it is misunderstood, leads inevitably to contradiction, these have been mistaken for each other, especially among the French, who like to judge everything by its effects.But neither contradiction nor antinomy, which analysis discovers at the bottom of every simple idea, is the principle of truth.Contradiction is always synonymous with nullity;
as for antinomy, sometimes called by the same name, it is indeed the forerunner of truth, the material of which, so to speak, it supplies; but it is not truth, and, considered in itself, it is the efficient cause of disorder, the characteristic form of delusion and evil.
An antinomy is made up of two terms, necessary to each other, but always opposed, and tending to mutual destruction.I hardly dare to add, as I
must, that the first of these terms has received the name thesis, position, and the second the name anti-thesis, counter-position.This method of thought is now so well-known that it will soon figure, I hope, in the text-books of the primary schools.We shall see directly how from the combination of these two zeros unity springs forth, or the idea which dispels the antinomy.
