A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: SOCIALISM

By Gale and Cengage

Designed with busy students in mind, this concise study guide examines major political theories and is organized into the following easily digestible sections: overview, history, theory in depth, theory in action, analysis and critical response, topics for further study, and bibliography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535831192

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HISTORY

The Origins of Socialism: Early Utopian Socialism

In nineteenth–century England, then the world's most–developed state, just as liberalism was being reshaped to converge with the increasing social power and demands of the working class, socialism was also being reshaped to make it not just an idealist, but a real political movement. There was already a tradition of utopian, idealist thought running through the popular philosophy of the country on which to base socialist doctrines.

The roots of socialist thought, whether they be traced to Plato's Republic, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), to Rousseau's Discourses on the Origins of Inequality Among Mankind (1755), or Morelly's Code of Nature (1755), are invariably idealist. What all these works also have in common is a belief in the fundamental wrongness of private property. In the case of Plato (428–348 B.C.) that wrongness is seen as the cause of war, but at the same time he only envisions that a select group of people should forego private property and possessions and assume as guardians the direction of society.

In Utopia, More approvingly cites Plato's Republic for having argued for an equal distribution of goods. But Utopia was written as a response to the break down of village life, the enclosure of lands for sheep pasturing, and the excessive punishments meted out to the large number of beggars, vagabonds, and thieves in the England of the early–sixteenth century. It was an attempt to devise a society in which poverty would be eliminated. In its attempt to eliminate poverty, like most communist attempts, it commences with the vilification of existing wealth and the power that accompanies it: when I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world, I can't…see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society.

Code of Nature (1755) by the obscure Frenchman Morelly, asserts that where no property exists, none of its pernicious consequences could exist, and if you were to take away property, and the blind and pitiless self–interest that accompanies it you would cause all the prejudices and errors that they sustain to collapse. Like Utopia, this communist vision is frugal, meticulous, tedious, and draconian:

Every citizen between the ages of twenty and twenty–five without exception, will be required to do agricultural work…In every occupational group, there will be one master for every ten or twenty workers, and it will be his task to instruct them, inspect their work…at the age of thirty, every citizen will be allowed to dress according to his taste…The senators and chiefs are authorized by this law to punish all excesses in this manner…Young people between the ages of twenty and thirty will be dressed uniformly with each occupation…every citizen will have both a work suit and holiday suit…Every citizen will be married as soon as he has reached the marriageable age…

During the upheavals of the English Civil War and revolution of the seventeenth century, some of these ideas actively came to the fore. Indeed, Oliver Cromwell, when pursuing his political ascendancy, had to suppress the Levellers (English radicals of the 1640s). But the eclipse of both Cromwell and the radicals permitted the evolution of the constitutional monarchy after the 1688 Restoration and the subsequent development of a prosperous commercial society. In France, however, the absolutist ancien regime survived and in it utopian socialist opposition festered.

The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Aftermath

Morelly's Code contained many of the core elements of later communists—egalitarianism (belief in equal political, economic, and social rights), a sagacious bureaucracy, principles of rotation, prohibition of private property, and the requirement that all work. But it was Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797) who is generally heralded as being the first systematic defender of modern communism. Babeuf, who was tried for conspiracy and executed during the French Revolution, saw his communist ideas as the natural progression of the Enlightenment. It was, he said at his trial, the philosophical poisons of Mably, Helvetius, Diderot and, most importantly, Rousseau which had corrupted him. For him, communism was a means for ending injustice.

In the Manifesto of Equals Babeuf wrote, We declare ourselves unable any longer to tolerate a situation in which the great majority of men toil and sweat in the service and at pleasure of a tiny minority. Men of all classes should be accorded the same rights in order of succession to property and "an absolutely equal portion of all the goods and advantages that can be enjoyed in this mean