That which gives importance to a book is a fact external to the author and his work.

Without the intelligence of society, without its development, and a certain community of ideas, passions, and interests between it and the authors, the works of the latter would be worth nothing.

The exchangeable value of a book is due even more to the SOCIAL CONDITION than to the talent displayed in it.
Indeed, it seems as if I were copying my own words.

This proposition of M.Wolowski contains a special expression of a general and absolute idea, one of the strongest and most conclusive against the right of property.

Why do artists, like mechanics, find the means to live?
Because society has made the fine arts, like the rudest industries, objects of consumption and exchange, governed consequently by all the laws of commerce and political economy.