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The anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape. But the intimations of a higher animal in lower ones can be understood only if the animal of the higher order is already known. The bourgeois economy furnishes a key to ancient economy, etc. This is, however, by no means true of the method of those economists who blot out all historical differences and see the bourgeois form in all forms of society. , after one has learned the nature of rent. But they must not be considered identical.

It appears that only the work of the American Carey and the Frenchman Bastiat form an exception to this, the latter admitting that he is dependent on the former. Both of them have understood that the opponents of political economy - socialism and communism - find their theoretical basis in the work of classical economies, especially in Ricardo, who must be considered as its most perfect and final expression. Both of them find it therefore necessary to attack the theoretical expression that bourgeois society has attained historically in modern economics by presenting it as a misunderstanding, and to demonstrate the harmony of the conditions of production which the classical economists had naively described as antagonistic.

The whole, as it appears in our heads as a thought-aggregate, is the product of a thinking mind which grasps the world in the only way open to it, a way which differs from the one employed by the artistic, religious or practical mind. The concrete subject continues to lead an independent existence after it has been grasped, as it did before, outside the head, so long as the head contemplates it only speculatively, theoretically. So that in the employment of the theoretical method in political economy, the subject, society, must constantly be kept in mind as the premise from which we start.