||438| Linguet, Th orie des lois civiles, etc., Londres, 1767. In accordance with the plan of my work socialist and communist writers are entirely excluded from the historical reviews. These reviews are only intended to show on the one hand in what form the political economists criticised each other, and on the other hand the historically determining forms in which the laws of political economy were first stated and further developed. In dealing with surplus-value I therefore exclude such eighteenth-century writers as Brissot, Godwin and the like, and likewise the nineteenth-century socialists and communists. The few socialist writers whom I shall come to speak of in this survey either themselves adopt the standpoint of bourgeois economy or contest it from its own standpoint. Linguet however is not a socialist. His polemics against the bourgeois-liberal ideals of the Enlighteners, his contemporaries, against the dominion of the bourgeoisie that was then beginning, are given half-seriously, half-ironically a reactionary appearance. He defends Asiatic despotism against the civilised European forms of despotism; thus he defends slavery against wage-labour. Vol. I. The only statement directed against Montesquieu: l esprit des lois, c est la propri t ,* shows the depth of his outlook. The only economists whom Linguet found to deal with were the Physiocrats. The rich have taken possession of all the conditions of production; [hence] the alienation of the conditions of production, which in their simplest form are the natural elements themselves. In order to get hold of some of this wealth appropriated by the rich, it must be purchased with heavy labour, which increases the wealth of these rich persons. (Here in the gifts of nature the Physiocratic view is echoed.) Society itself the fact that man lives in society and not as an independent, self-supporting individual is the root of property, of the laws based on it and of the inevitable slavery. On the one hand, there were peaceful and isolated husband-men and shepherds. On the other hand Stripped of the conditions of production, the labourers are compelled by need to labour to increase the wealth of others in order themselves to live. By these servants, Linguet says, he does not mean lackeys and the like: He calls to the men of the French Enlightenment, in regard to the labourers: * The sprit of the laws is property. Ed.
Economic Manuscripts: Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter 7