I am sorry to have to insist at so great length on ideas familiar
to all young college graduates: but I owed these details to
certain economists, who, apropos of my critique of property, have
heaped dilemmas on dilemmas to prove that, if I was not a
proprietor, I necessarily must be a communist; all because they
did not understand THESIS, ANTITHESIS, and SYNTHESIS.

The synthetic idea of value, as the fundamental condition of
social order and progress, was dimly seen by Adam Smith, when, to
use the words of M. Blanqui, "he showed that labor is the
universal and invariable measure of values, and proved that
everything has its natural price, toward which it continually
gravitates amid the fluctuations of the market, occasioned by
ACCIDENTAL CIRCUMSTANCES foreign to the venal value of the
thing."

But this idea of value was wholly intuitive with Adam Smith, and
society does not change its habits upon the strength of
intuitions; it decides only upon the authority of facts. The
antinomy had to be expressed in a plainer and clearer manner: J.
B. Say was its principal interpreter. But, in spite of the
imaginative efforts and fearful subtlety of this economist,
Smith's definition controls him without his knowledge, and is
manifest throughout his arguments.

"To put a value on an article," says Say, "is to DECLARE that it
should be ESTIMATED equally with some other designated article.
. . . . . The value of everything is vague and arbitrary UNTIL
IT IS RECOGNIZED. . . . . ." There is, therefore, a method of
recognizing the value of things,--that is, of determining it;