CHAPTER VII
THE ETHICS OF THE PRODUCERS
I. Morality and religion—Contempt of democracies for morality—Ethical preoccupations of the "new school."
II. Renan's uneasiness about the future of the world—His conjectures—The need of the sublime.
III. Nietzsche's ethics—The rôle of the family in the genesis of morality; Proudhon's theory—The ethics of Aristotle.
IV. Kautsky's hypothesis—Analogies between the spirit of the general strike and that of the wars of Liberty—Fear inspired in the Parliamentarians by this spirit.
V. The artisan employed in progressive and inventive production, the artist and the soldier in the wars of Liberty: desire to surpass previous models; care for exactitude; abandonment of the idea of exact recompense.
I
Fifty years ago Proudhon pointed out the necessity of giving the people a morality which would fit new needs. The first chapter of the preliminary discourses placed at the beginning of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church is entitled "The State of Morals in the Nineteenth Century. Invasion of moral scepticism; society in danger. What is the remedy?" There one reads these noteworthy sentences: "France has lost its morals. Not that, as a matter of fact, the men of our generation are worse than their fathers. … When I say that France has lost its morals I mean that it has ceased to
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