Douglas Rom Histon简谈政治哲学和共产主义（一篇谈到共产主义社会早已普遍实现的文章）

A Brief Discussion on Political Philosophy and Communism
对政治哲学与共产主义相关的一段简谈

Douglas Rom Histon
道格拉斯•罗姆•希斯顿

Since the nineteenth century, communism has sought to answer a profound question: How can humanity achieve genuine communal life? It advocates common ownership, distribution according to need, collective labor, and the abolition of exploitation, hoping to replace capitalist society with a new form of social relationship. However, its greatest theoretical blind spot may not lie in its pursuit of equality, but rather in its failure to recognize a more fundamental anthropological fact: some of the social relationships it seeks to establish are not something that belongs to the future—they have existed since the very beginning of human society.
十九世纪以来，共产主义试图回答一个伟大的问题：人类如何才能实现真正的共同生活？它提出公有、按需分配、共同劳动、消灭剥削，希望以一种新的社会关系取代资本主义社会。然而，它最大的理论盲点，并不一定在于它追求平等，而在于它忽略了一个更为根本的人类学事实：它所追求的某些社会关系，并不是未来才会出现，而是人类社会最初便已经存在。

When an infant is born, they possess no capacity for labor, no private property, no contractual consciousness, and no market value. Yet parents ordinarily provide food, shelter, care, and protection unconditionally. Children are able to use many of the family's resources without receiving them in proportion to their labor, and parents rarely calculate their care according to market prices. In this sense, within the family there naturally exists a form of social relationship characterized by care, sharing, and the satisfaction of needs.
一个婴儿出生时，没有劳动能力，没有财产，没有契约意识，也没有市场价值。然而，父母通常会无条件提供食物、住所、照料与保护。孩子可以使用家庭中的许多资源，而无需按照劳动多少支付报酬；父母也极少按市场价格计算自己的付出。在这个意义上，家庭内部天然存在着一种以照护、共享和按需满足为主要特征的社会关系。

In other words, some of the principles emphasized by communism did not originate with Marx's theory. Rather, they had already existed within the oldest and most fundamental human society—the family society. What Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accomplished was closer to abstracting this localized form of social relationship and attempting to extend it to human society on a much larger scale, rather than creating the relationship itself.
换言之，共产主义所强调的一部分原则，并非首先诞生于马克思的理论，而是早已存在于人类最古老、最基本的社会——家庭社会之中。马克思和恩格斯所做的，更接近于将这种局部社会关系抽象化，并试图推广到更大范围的人类社会，而不是创造了这种关系本身。

The real question, therefore, emerges: Can a principle originally suited to family society be expanded indefinitely to become the governing principle of all forms of society?
真正的问题因此出现了：一种原本适用于家庭社会的原则，是否能够无限扩张，成为所有社会共同遵循的原则？

The family is capable of practicing extensive sharing not because of any particular ideology, but because it possesses a unique set of preconditions: a limited number of members, deep mutual trust, long-term coexistence, shared risks, and profound emotional bonds. These conditions make distribution according to need stable and sustainable.
家庭之所以能够实行高度共享，并不是因为某种意识形态，而是因为它具备特殊的前提条件：成员数量有限、彼此高度信任、长期共同生活、共同承担风险，并且拥有深厚的情感纽带。这些条件，使得按需分配能够稳定存在。

A modern nation, however, does not naturally possess these preconditions. Tens or even hundreds of millions of people who do not know one another do not share the same information, trust, or responsibilities. Once the principles of the family are detached from their anthropological foundations and expected to govern an entire nation—or even all of humanity—they enter a social environment for which they were never originally suited. The resulting difficulties may arise not from the principles themselves, but from their separation from the conditions that originally made them possible.
然而，一个现代国家并不天然具备这些前提。数千万乃至数亿互不相识的人，并不共享同样的信息、信任与责任。当家庭原则脱离了它赖以存在的人类学基础，而被要求覆盖整个国家乃至整个人类社会时，它便进入了一个并非为它准备的社会环境。此时出现的问题，不一定源于原则本身，而可能源于原则脱离了自己的适用条件。

The same analysis can be applied to other ideologies. Market principles emerged from large-scale exchange among strangers; therefore contracts, prices, and property rights play essential roles within commercial society. Yet if market principles expand without limit, family relationships may become commodified, education reduced to mere transactions, and care subordinated to the logic of profit. Likewise, principles appropriate to the state are indispensable for maintaining public order and administering justice. However, if they expand without restraint, they may intrude into the family, religion, academia, and the arts. The problem is not that these principles lack value, but that each possesses its own proper sphere of application.
同样的分析也适用于其他意识形态。市场原则源于陌生人之间的大规模交换，因此契约、价格和产权在商业社会中具有重要意义；但如果市场原则无限扩张，家庭关系便可能商品化，教育可能沦为纯粹交易，照护关系也可能被利润逻辑所吞没。国家原则适用于公共秩序和司法，但若无限扩张，则可能侵入家庭、宗教、学术、艺术等领域。问题并非这些原则毫无价值，而在于它们都拥有自己的适用范围。

From this perspective, many of the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century may be understood differently. Rather than merely representing competition between rival theories, they may have resulted from one social principle continually exceeding its appropriate boundaries and attempting to dominate fundamentally different kinds of social relationships. Whenever any single principle claims the authority to explain and organize the entirety of human society, it begins to lose the anthropological foundation upon which it originally rested.
因此，二十世纪大量意识形态冲突，或许可以换一种方式理解：它们未必只是不同理论之间的竞争，更可能是一种社会原则不断越出自己的适用边界，试图统治其他类型社会关系。当任何一种原则宣称自己能够解释并组织整个人类社会时，它便开始失去原本赖以成立的人类学基础。

If this is the case, then the primary question of political philosophy should not be, "Which ideology is ultimately correct?" Instead, it should ask: "What kind of human social relationship did this principle originally emerge to address? Why does it function effectively within that context? And why can it not be extended indefinitely to every other form of society?" Ideologies would no longer be regarded as competing claimants to universal truth, but rather as conceptual tools for understanding different forms of social relationships.
如果如此，那么政治哲学真正应当首先回答的，不是“哪一种主义最正确”，而是“这种原则原本回应的是哪一种人类社会关系，它为何在那里成立，又为何不能无限扩张”。意识形态不再是争夺唯一真理的体系，而成为解释不同社会关系的工具。

Human beings do not inhabit a single society. Rather, they simultaneously participate in family society, commercial society, civil society, educational society, caregiving society, state society, and countless other communities. Different societies fulfill different functions, and naturally give rise to different governing principles. A mature political philosophy should therefore not require one principle to eliminate all others, but should instead seek to understand how different forms of society emerge, coexist, and coordinate with one another.
人类并非生活在单一社会之中，而是同时生活于家庭社会、商业社会、公民社会、教育社会、照护社会、国家社会以及其他无数共同体之中。不同社会承担不同功能，自然孕育不同原则。真正成熟的政治哲学，不应当要求一种原则消灭其他原则，而应当理解各种社会关系何以形成、何以共存、何以彼此协调。

The greatest tragedy of communism may not be that it sought a communal form of life, but that it forgot that part of the ideal it pursued had already been experienced by every human being at the very beginning of life. What communism truly needed to explain was not how to create such relationships, but why they could exist within the family while not necessarily being capable of unconditional expansion to every other form of society.
共产主义最大的悲剧，也许并非它追求共同生活，而是它忘记了：它所追求的一部分理想，人类早已在生命开始时体验过；它真正需要解释的，不是如何创造这种关系，而是为什么这种关系能够存在于家庭，却未必能够无条件扩展到所有社会。