Now I come to the economic problem. You have not experienced, perhaps, as much as the Europeans, especially the older ones who come from the 19th century, as I do, the central importance which, in European civilization, was attributed to the economic problem. Don't push this away by identifying it with the most hated name of the last few hundred years, namely Karl Marx—that alone is not a sufficient explanation for the movements which have happened in Europe and now have conquered more than half of the world. But the explanation is: Marx—as always if one man represents something—represents something which otherwise is present.

We have in Europe a continuous development of revolution, since the end of the Middle Ages. First the great Peasant Revolutions; then the bourgeois revolutions; and then the socialist-Communist, the revolutions of the fourth [force? i.e. labor? working?] class of society, as we had it in Europe. All these movements had a special relationship to religion. The peasants' movement, the twelve articles of the peasants were done in the name of the religiously sanctified natural law, as derived from the Stoic-Christian doctrine of the situation of man in the Paradise, which was identified with the natural law. In the bourgeois revolution, it was also the religious idea of the equality of all men before God, which then became secularized to the equality of all men in terms of rationality—not of reasonableness—nobody was ever stupid enough to say such a thing, not even Hegel, who is sometimes considered much more stupid than a 10-year old boy—but what these men meant was that man is potentially rational, and that this power of reason in him can be developed equally in everybody, if the chances are given—whereby reasonableness is not identified with intelligence; the differences in