ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ideas that developed in the public mind, that is, in strict relation to the "life of the law," as it exists in legislatures, in universities, and in the books of legal reformers. It explores how the economy acts on social ideas and the explanations it provides for understanding the influence it has exercised on the ideas of social reformers. The old socialists had proposed to their contemporaries a perfect society, constructed according to a preestablished plan and realizing completely the conceptions they had formulated on human perfection. The capitalist economy treats the proletariat as a passive thing that cannot think; the new juridical system should be the product of the thought of the proletariat refusing to accept the old notions inherited from the Leon bourgeoisie. The socialists are strong enough to consider things under the first perspective, but they are deceiving themselves; communism is a point of departure and not a point of destination.
