SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



felt in an awakening of evolutionary ideas in 

 social science among the champions of the work- 

 ing class. Fourier began to elaborate his theories 

 of social reconstruction, in 1799, and to aim the 

 dagger thrusts of his critique at the heart of 

 capitalist society. And for the first time since 

 the overthrow of women's equality with men in 

 prehistoric times, a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, 

 raised her voice in public protest against the eco- 

 nomic and social slavery of her sex. Saint Simon 

 saw dimly that material forces are the active 

 element in social movements and compel society 

 to develop mechanically through class-struggles. 

 And Fourier, after him, drew the first theoretical 

 outline of the evolution of man from savagery, 

 through barbarism and patriarchy, to civiliza- 

 tion. The investigators of the iQth century 

 following him were soon to supply the empirical 

 proofs of this theory. On the other side of the 

 channel, Robert Owen startled the comfortable 

 English bourgeois with his colony at New-Lanark 

 and threw the firebrand of the Chartist move- 

 ment into the quiet dulness of British life. 



These first half-conscious movements of pro- 

 letarian thought were as immature as capitalism 

 itself was. But they were at least unmistakably 

 proletarian, and this fact makes the Utopias of 



86 



