FOOTNOTES: 

[44] U. RABBENO, Le leggi economiche e il socialismo, in Rivista di filos. scientif., 1884, vol.  III., fasc. 5.

[45] This is the thesis of COLAJANNI, in Il socialismo, Catane, 1884, P. 277.  He errs when he thinks that I combatted this position in my book Socialismo e criminalita.

[46] MORSELLI, Antropologia generale—­Lezioni sull’ uomo secondo la teoria dell’ evoluzione, Turin, 1890-94, gives an excellent resume of these general indications of modern scientific thought in their application to all branches of knowledge from geology to anthropology.

[47] BONARDI, Evoluzionismo e socialismo, Florence, 1894.

[48] ARCANGELI, Le evoluzioni della proprieta, in Critica sociale, July 1, 1894.

[49] This is exactly analogous to the conflict between the partisans and the opponents of free-will.

The old metaphysics accorded to man (alone, a marvelous exception from all the rest of the universe) an absolutely free will.

Modern physio-psychology absolutely denies every form of the free-will dogma in the name of the laws of natural causality.

An intermediate position is occupied by those who, while recognizing that the freedom of man’s will is not absolute, hold that at least a remnant of freedom must be conceded to the human will, because otherwise there would no longer be any merit or any blameworthiness, any vice or any virtue, etc.

I considered this question in my first work:  Teoria dell’ imputabilita e negazione del libero arbitrio (Florence, 1878, out of print), and in the third chapter of my Sociologie criminelle, French trans., Paris, 1892.

I speak of it here only in order to show the analogy in the form of the debate on the economico-social question, and therefore the possibility of predicting a similar ultimate solution.

The true conservative, drawing his inspiration from the metaphysical tradition, sticks to the old philosophical or economic ideas with all their rigid absolutism; at least he is logical.

The determinist, in the name of science, upholds diametrically opposite ideas, in the domain of psychology as well as in those of the economic or juridical sciences.

The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political economy as in law, is a conservative through and through, but he fondly hopes to escape the difficulties of the conservative position by making a few partial concessions to save appearances.  But if the eclecticism is a convenient and agreeable attitude for its champions, it is, like hybridism, sterile, and neither life nor science owe anything to it.

Therefore, the socialists are logical when they contend that in the last analysis there are only two political parties:  the individualists (conservatives [or Republicans], progressives [or Democrats] and radicals [or Populists]) and the socialists.