A history of socialism

Though much has been said and written about socialism for many years, it still remains a questionable name which awakens in the mind of the reader doubt, perplexity, and contradiction.

But there can be no question that it is a growing power throughout the world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the most intelligent and the best organised working-men of all civilised countries are passing over to it. The opinions which are being accepted by the foremost of the working-classes to-day will in all probability have the same attraction for their less advanced brethren to-morrow. It is a subject, however, which concerns all classes, and it is forcing to the front a wide group of problems which are every day becoming more urgent.

In view of this there is only one right and safe course; we should seek to know the truth about socialism. The discontent which tends to disturbance and revolution can be removed only by satisfying the legitimate needs and aspirations of those who suffer.

We all know that the propaganda of socialism has been attended with intemperate and violent language, with wild opinions which are often inconsistent with the first principles of social order, with revolutionary outbreaks leading to bloodshed, desolation and long-continued unrest and suspicion. These things are greatly to be deplored. But we shall be wise if we regard them as symptoms of wide-spread and deep-seated social disease. The best way to cure such disease is to study and remove the causes of it. No physician will have any success in combating a malady if he content himself with suppressing its symptoms.

For the study of socialism two things are essential on the part of the reader—good-will and the open mind. Socialism has at least a most powerful provisional claim on our good-will, that it professes to represent the cause of the sufferers in the world’s long agony, of the working-classes, of women, and of the down-trodden nations and races. If it can make any solid contribution in such a far-reaching cause it has the strongest right to be heard.

Need we say that no new movement like socialism can be understood or appreciated without some measure of the open mind? In the course of history it has been proved over and over again that established ideas and institutions are not always in the right in every respect, and that novel opinions, though presented in extravagant and intemperate language, are not always entirely wrong. Even the most prejudiced reader will do well to consider that a cause which now numbers millions of intelligent adherents, for which men have died and gladly suffered imprisonment and privation of every kind, may contain elements of truth and of well-justified hope for the future.

Above all things, it is essential to remember that socialism is not a stereotyped system of dogma. It is a movement which springs out of a vast and only partially shapen reality. It is therefore living and liable to change. It has a history on which we can look back; but it is above all things a force of the present and the future, and its influence in the future for good or evil will depend on how we the men of the present relate ourselves to it.

On the one hand, it would be a great wrong if we encouraged vain and delusive expectations; but it would be a wrong even greater, on the other hand, if from whim or prejudice or pessimism we did anything that might be an obstacle to truth and progress. In a subject so momentous the only right course is to eschew passion and prejudice, and to follow truth with goodwill and an open mind.

The word ‘socialism’ appears to have been first used in The Poor Man’s Guardian in 1833. In 1835, a society, which received the grandiloquent name of the Association of all Classes of all Nations, was founded under the auspices of Robert Owen; and the words socialist and socialism became current during the discussions which arose in connection with it.[1] As Owen and his school had no esteem for the political reform of the time, and laid all emphasis on the necessity of social improvement and reconstruction, it is obvious how the name came to be recognised as suitable and distinctive. The term was soon afterwards borrowed from England, as he himself tells us, by a distinguished French writer, Reybaud, in his well-known work the Réformateurs modernes, in which he discussed the theories of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. Through Reybaud it soon gained wide currency on the Continent, and is now the accepted world-historic name for one of the most remarkable movements of the nineteenth century.

The name was thus first applied in England to Owen’s theory of social reconstruction, and in France to those also of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The best usage has always connected it with the views of these men, and with the cognate opinions which have since appeared. But the word is used with a great variety of meaning, not only in popular speech and by politicians, but even by economists and learned critics of socialism. There is a growing tendency to regard as socialistic any interference with property undertaken by society on behalf of the poor, the limitation of the principle of laissez-faire in favour of the suffering classes, radical social reform which disturbs the present system of private property as regulated by free competition. It is probable enough that the word will be permanently used to express the change in practice and opinion indicated by these phrases, as a general name for the strong reaction that has now set in against the overstrained individualism and one-sided freedom which date from the end of the eighteenth century. The application is neither precise nor accurate; but it is use and wont that determine the meaning of words, and this seems to be the tendency of use and wont.

Even economic writers differ greatly in the meaning they attach to the word. As socialism has been most powerful and most studied on the Continent, it may be interesting to compare the definitions given by some leading French and German economists. The great German economist Roscher defines it as including ‘those tendencies which demand a greater regard for the common weal than consists with human nature.’[2] Adolf Held says that ‘we may define as socialistic every tendency which demands the subordination of the individual will to the community.’[3] Janet more precisely defines it as follows: ‘We call socialism every doctrine which teaches that the State has a right to correct the inequality of wealth which exists among men, and to legally establish the balance by taking from those who have too much in order to give to those who have not enough, and that in a permanent manner, and not in such and such a particular case—a famine, for instance, a public calamity, etc.’[4] Laveleye explains it thus: ‘In the first place, every socialistic doctrine aims at introducing greater equality in social conditions; and in the second place, at realising those reforms by the law or the State.’[5] Von Scheel simply defines it as the ‘economic philosophy of the suffering classes.’[6]

Of all these definitions it can only be said that they more or less faithfully reflect current opinion as to the nature of socialism. They are either too vague or they are misleading, and they quite fail to bring out the clear and strongly marked characteristics that distinguish the phenomena to which the name of socialism is properly applied. To say that socialism exacts a greater regard for the common weal than is compatible with human nature is to pass sentence on the movement, not to define it. In all ages of the world, and under all forms and tendencies of government and of social evolution, the will of the individual has been subordinated to the will of society, often unduly so.

It is also most misleading to speak as if socialism must proceed from the State as we know it. The early socialism proceeded from private effort and experiment. A great deal of the most notorious socialism of the present day aims not only at subverting the existing State in every form, but all the existing political and social institutions. The most powerful and most philosophic, that of Karl Marx, aimed at superseding the existing Governments by a vast international combination of the workers of all nations, without distinction of creed, colour, or nationality.