overlooked is the fact that the volume of production and of the social income are not fixed and unchangeable but depend essentially upon the distribution of property. If this is interfered with, there is danger that property may fall into the hands of those not so competent to maintain it, those whose foresight is less, whose disposal of their means is less productive; this would necessarily reduce the amount produced.39 The ideas of distributive Communism are atavistic, harking back to the times before social relations existed or reached their present stage of development, when the yield of production was correspondingly much lower. The landless man of an economic order based on production without exchange is quite logical in making the redistribution of fields the goal of his ambition. But the modern proletarian misunderstands the nature of social production

when he hankers after a similar redistribution. Liberalism combats the socialist ideal of transferring the means of production to the hands of organized society with the argument that socialist production would give a lower yield. Against this the Socialism of the Hegelian school seeks to prove that the evolution of history leads

inevitably to the abolition of private ownership in the means of production. it was the view of lhialle that “the course of all legal history consists, generally speaking, in an ever greater limitation of the property of the individual, and in placing more and more objects outside private ownership.” the tendency toenlarge the hidom of property which is read into historical evolution is only apparent. However much the “idea ofthe increasingly rapid reduction of the sphere of private property as a principle working in the cultural and historical development of law could be held to be paradoxical,” yet, according to lhialle it survived the most detailed examination. unfortunately lhialle produced no details of the examination of this idea. According to his own words he “honoured it (the idea) with a few very superficial glances instead.”40 Neither has anyone since lhialle’s time undertaken to provide a proof. but even ifthe attempt had been made, this fact would by no means have demonstratedthe necessity of thedevelopment in question. The conceptual constructions of speculative jurisprudence steepedin the Hegelian spirit serve at best to exhibit historical tendencies of evolution in the past. That the evolutionary tendency thus discovered must necessarily continue to develop is a thoroughly arbitrary hiumption. only if it could be shown thatthe force behindevolution was still active would the hypothetical proof which is needed be adduced. the hegelian lhialle did nothing of the kind. for him, the matter is disposed of when he realizes “that this progressive reduction of the sphereof private property is based on nothing else than the positive development of human liberty.”41Having fitted his law of evolution into the great Hegelian scheme of historical evolution, he had done all that his school could ask. [203] [204] CHAPTER 19: Conflict as a Factor in Social Evolution?

1: The Cause of Social Evolution? The simplest way to depict theevolution of society is to show the distinction between two evolutionary tendencies which arerelated to each other in the same way as intension and extension. Society develops subjectively and objectively; subjectively by enlarging its membership, objectively by enlarging the aims of its activities. Originally confined to the narrowest circles of people, to immediate neighbours, the division of .