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SOCIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 65
stitutions and of specific aspects of social life in terms of
the immediate factors only, such as the historical laws
which explain the development of the state and the forms
of production solely in terms of political and economic
factors.
It has been formulated as a law that the history of
every political unit commences with the political and civil
liberty of a few, spreads from these to the many and finally
to all, and then reverts back to the few and finally to a
single despot. But the fact that the few have liberty can-
not be the cause of the fact that the many obtain it. This
conceptual formulation of the historical sequence is there-
fore not concerned with the inner causal connection of the
successive phenomena. The same holds good for the so-
called law of economic development. It explains nothing
to say that the forces of production in each period outgrow
the forms of production and finally break through them
and create new ones. The actual forces, which according
to this formulation change slavery into serfdom and serf-
dom into a wage system, are not referred to. It would be
impossible to picture with the help of this law the produc-
tion form of the next stage. A real natural law would make
it possible to do this. That one succeeds the other is the re-
sult of a great many laws, but is not a law in itself.
Historical laws of this kind merely give the relation in
time of complex appearances on the surface of life, not the
relation between primary elements and their actual forces.
Each element within the complex is undoubtedly fully de-
termined by and causally related to some preceding ele-
ment, but the complex as a whole is not causally deter-
mined by the preceding complex in the same sense.
What the concept of a law of historical growth actually
stands for may be indicated by a comparison with botan-
ical growth. The laws of plant physiology which are effec-
