Political Theories for Students

called this possibility “administrative despotism.” In

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam argues that meaningful participation in civil associations has declined in the United States. While he himself does not conclude that administrative despotism has arrived, his data has offered some ammunition to those who believe that it is here or on its way.

Unhappy citizens? There is still one more charge to add to the critical indictment of liberal republicanism and the individualism it promotes: they make people unhappy. “Communitarian” critics of liberal republicanism argue that it has detached individuals from communities. But communities provide a feeling of belonging. As Robert Bellah and his fellow authors concluded on the basis of their study of middle–class American life, “it would seem that [the] quest for purely private fulfillment is illusory: it often ends in emptiness instead.”

The liberal republican is not defenseless against these criticisms. For one thing, liberal republicanism, while it may have emphasized education less than classical republicanism, never relied on untaught self–interest. The liberal republican may agree with individualism having gone too far without conceding that liberal republican theory must be changed or even abandoned, for that theory already warns that to be effective, self–interest must be not only properly channeled but liberal citizens must properly understand it. Moreover, the liberal republican may agree that the size and complexity of government makes citizen vigilance very difficult without conceding that liberal republicanism is responsible for an increase in the authority or centralization of governments. The liberal republican teaching that government was instituted among men to secure rights is a teaching of limited government. Finally, the liberal republican may agree that his or her creed often produces lonely individuals, but that standing alone affirms human dignity. In making this defense, the liberal may circumvent the charges but in any case it raises the question: do the dangers of individualism mean liberal republicanism must be abandoned or modified, or do they mean, instead, that the first principles of liberal republicanism need to be recovered?

Economics

Critics of liberal republicanism point not only to its emphasis on the individual but also to its willingness to indulge and even celebrate trade and industry. First, citizens whose main activity is pursuing profit and comfort tend to be soft. Commercial societies, as Paul Rahe pointed out, often have “little sympathy for

the soldier’s calling,” and its members, “able to live the better part of. . .life in peace and in comfort,” are “in no way inured to the loss of life and to the shedding of blood.” Boosters of liberal republicanism may point to the military successes of liberal societies, especially the dramatic victory of the Allied forces in World War II. Such successes seem to dispute the argument that liberal societies are soft. Boosters may point, too, to the superiority in military technology of liberal republican societies, in which hindrances to innovation are few. As Rahe noted, however, liberal societies had great difficulty defeating Hitler, they could easily have lost the war, and their soldiers, despite the worthiness of the cause, were often unwilling or unable to fight. Moreover, even if liberal societies turn out courageous soldiers, they may be held back by a citizenry that is skittish about casualties, fears being drafted, and does not want its business interrupted under any but the most immediately threatening circumstances. The question of the military fitness of liberal commercial societies may still be open.

Second, to dignify commerce is also to justify the economic inequalities that result from commerce, as economic competition produces winners and losers. Yet these inequalities may be unjust. For one thing, success or failure in the marketplace may bear little or no relation to worth, at least as worth is commonly understood. An entertainer whose contribution to society is cracking jokes may make twenty times as much money as a police officer, whose contribution to society is risking his or her life to save others. Not only the basis but also the mere size of inequalities in commercial societies give critics ammunition. Rousseau states the case powerfully: “it is manifestly against the Law of Nature, however defined, that. . .a handful of people abound in superfluities while the starving multitude lacks in necessities.” While liberal commercial societies can point to middle–class multitudes that are not starving as proof that Rousseau and others have it wrong, they have never been altogether able to silence their critics. Such critics insist Rousseau may have overstated the extent of the problem but not its fundamental character, that liberal republican societies leave some astoundingly rich and others virtually without hope. In reply, defenders of liberal society argue that whatever the degree of injustice and suffering found, it is more than matched by the degree of injustice and suffering found in illiberal societies, for government officials are worse at distributing wealth than markets are and curtail people’s liberty in the bargain.

Economic inequality may be not only unjust but also politically dangerous. Michael Sandel has warned of the “civic consequences of economic inequality.”

In particular, as the gap between the rich and the rest widens, unity decreases. The well–off flee the public schools for private ones, city parks for private clubs, city services for private security and private garbage collection. They grow disinclined to pay taxes for services they do not use. The poor and lower middle class, trapped in inferior schools and poorly served neighborhoods, grow increasingly resentful. Both groups feel little stake in a society or government that they have abandoned or that has abandoned them. Amid this class tension, liberal societies cannot muster the energy and resources for great accomplishments, or even the wherewithal for such ordinary accomplishments as keeping the streets clean and the schools safe. Sandel and many other critics pointed to a gap between rich and poor that only deepened in the 1980s and 1990s and that has, in their view, already begun to erode even the limited sense of national community liberal societies need to prosper.

Large corporations In addition, the critics argue, just as the concentration of political power in a big government causes citizens to feel and actually be powerless, so, too, does the concentration of wealth in large corporations. People largely unknown and unaccountable to the public determine in corporate boardrooms whether thousands of employees will live in comfort or suffer. The concentration of economic power threatens to leave citizens powerless in another way. By making large contributions to political campaigns, corporations may be able to influence public servants and to pass legislation and regulations that favor them, at the expense of citizens who can afford neither to make large contributions nor to hire lobbyists and lawyers. The rise of multinational corporations has further complicated matters. Even if citizens can persuade their governments to try to protect wages and livelihoods, corporations could simply move their plants and jobs overseas to countries that better serve their interests. The relative inability of even their big governments to help them contributes to the anxiety of liberal republican citizens who fear that they are “losing control of the forces that [govern] their lives.” Such citizens, even if capable of exercising self– government effectively, would likely be too demoralized to even try.

The liberal republican is not defenseless against these attacks, either. The overall tendency of a free commercial society, the liberal republican argues, is not to concentrate economic power but to distribute power to a variety of centers that include but are not limited to large businesses. Moreover, while the political and economic power of such businesses may be potent, business is not a single interest that always acts

in unison, but a multiplicity of interests often at odds politically and economically. This competition, along with regulations designed to promote competition and discourage conspiracies among businesses to fix wages and prices, at least diminishes the threat that the influence of large corporations will destroy meaningful self–government. Moreover, while world economic growth means money and jobs move easily from nation to nation and that the ability of governments directly to protect the jobs of its citizens is limited, defenders of liberal republicanism argue that citizens in societies open to innovation can best benefit from economic globalization. They argue that nations need more rather than less liberal republicanism, more rather than less restrictions to commerce and innovation.

Critics

Nonetheless, the question remains whether liberal republicanism has unleashed forces beyond its control. Critics on the left lament the dangers commerce and innovation pose to the environment when scientists and entrepreneurs fail to take a long view of the effects of their activities. Critics on the right lament the dangers commerce and innovation pose to humanity itself when scientists and entrepreneurs, for example, do not stop short at human cloning or manipulating genes for profit. Critics of both political persuasions fear liberal republicans have put excessive faith in the ability of reason to check itself and to control its technologies. But few critics wish to relinquish the benefits of progress, and many acknowledge that liberal republicanism has been an enormous success at producing such benefits. For that reason critics of liberal republicanism must grasp the following question: how does one secure the goods liberal republicanism offers without supposing that reason, suitably educated and guided by experience, can be expected to supply solutions to the problems that accompany those goods?

At least some of the criticisms of liberal republicanism draw on classical republican theory. Michael Sandel, for example, understood his project as reviving a republicanism that the triumph of its liberal elements have all but ruined. Sandel’s concerns about the political effects of economic inequality, the importance of political community, and the freedom that consists not in the mere absence of external restraint but in self–government, hearken to a republican tradition that, in his view, sporadically drew from Aristotle’s Greece to at least nineteenth–century America. Yet, as Sandel readily acknowledges, the old republican tradition was coercive, because it used government power to compel individuals to meet the de-

mands of the polity, and exclusive because it distinguished so sharply between insiders and outsiders, where slaves and women were in important ways part of the latter group. Sandel hopes to restore elements of the classical republican ideal while avoiding its tendency toward coercion and exclusion. Yet, as Steven Kautz points out, critics such as Sandel seem to be caught between their real commitment to liberal republicanism and their disappointment in it, which is manifested in their worries about the decay of robust communities, the decline of intense and widespread political participation, and the effects of economic inequality. Kautz’s observation raises this question about modern republicanism: are individualism and inequality accidental components of the republican freedom even critics of liberal republicanism seem to cherish, or are they, for good or for ill, the unavoidable accompaniments of freedom?

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

•The Federalists, who defended the Constitution, typically called themselves republicans. But they were not the only ones. The Anti–Federalists, who opposed the Constitution, also typically called themselves republicans. What were their arguments? In what ways did their understanding of republicanism differ from the Federalist understanding, and why did they think the Constitution threatened republicanism?

•Both classical and modern republicanism depend to some extent on education to produce citizens capable of meeting the responsibilities of republican life. How and to what extent have the public schools been instruments of citizen education, and how so today?

•Both classical and modern republicanism depend to some extent on citizens knowing about and engaging in politics. What does the evidence suggest about the political knowledge and activity of American citizens nowadays, and is it a good or bad sign for American republicanism? What policy measures, if any, can and should be taken to increase the political knowledge and activity of American citizens?

•In the ancient Greek world, Sparta’s great rival was Athens and each polis was known then and has been known since for representing contrasting ways of life. How was Athens similar to Sparta, and how was it different? What does the comparison teach us about classical republicanism?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Bellah, Robert N. et. al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Updated Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.

Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Isaac Kramnick. London: Penguin Books, 1987.

Kautz, Steven. Liberalism and Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1995.

Kitto, H.D.F. The Greeks. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws. Edited and Translated by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Pangle, Thomas L. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. Second Edition. New York: Basic Books, 199.

Plutarch. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. 2 vols. Translated by John Dryden. Revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. New York: Random House, 2001.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Rahe, Paul. Republics Ancient and Modern. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Riesenberg, Peter. Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques. The Discourses and other early political writings. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997.

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques. The Social Contract and other later political writings. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997.

Sandel, Michael J. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Tocqeuville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated and Edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Further Readings

Bloom, Allan, ed.. Confronting the Constitution. Washington D.C.: The AEI Press, 1990. This collection contains valuable essays on the intellectual and historical foundations of American liberal republicanism and on various attacks on those foundations.

Everdell, William R. The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans. Second Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Everdell gives a useful overview of the history of republicanismn.

Kagan, Donald. Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. While its interpretation of the classical republic differs in some ways from the one offered in this article, this history, which focuses on Athens and one of its greatest statesmen, Pericles, is a very useful window into Greek republican politics.

Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. This concise introduction to the thought of Niccolò

Machiavelli, though its understanding of Machiavelli differs in important ways from the one presented here, should be consulted for its views on Machiavelli’s place in the republican tradition.

SEE ALSO

Capitalism, Conservatism, Federalism

OVERVIEW

Socialism is a much used and abused term, which spans the political spectrum from the Right (the National Socialists of Hitler’s Germany) to the Left (Stalin’s communists in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). It has also described a great variety of regimes that have acquired and used the term for their own purposes, stretching from the poor African socialist states and Arab and Asian military dictatorships, to the wealthy social democracies of Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand.

Generally, we may take the term to describe those doctrines which seek to increase the power of society and the state to determine political, social, and economic processes, as against traditional mechanisms and institutions favored by conservatives, and individuals and the market as advocated by liberals. In common usage, the dividing line between socialism and communism is not always clear or sharp, but may be taken to be between those socialists who subscribe to the basic doctrines of Karl Marx, and those socialists who do not.

Within the boundaries of policy and ideology just described, there are still wide varieties of forms of socialism. There are also a considerable number of philosophers, political practices, and state policies embraced by the doctrine. As with so many modern political philosophies, however, in order to uncover their origins we must look to the emergence of socialist thought in modern Europe.

Socialism

WHO CONTROLS GOVERNMENT? Society

HOW IS GOVERNMENT PUT INTO POWER? Revolution or

evolution of other theories

WHAT ROLES DO THE PEOPLE HAVE? Share capital and

means of production

WHO CONTROLS PRODUCTION OF GOODS? Society

WHO CONTROLS DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS? Society

MAJOR FIGURES Pierre–Joseph Proudhon; Julius

Nyerere

HISTORICAL EXAMPLE Tanzania, 1964–1985

CHRONOLOGY

1516: Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is published

1755: The Frenchman Morelly offers his view of a socialist Utopia in Code of Nature

1825: Claude Henri Saint–Simon calls for an easing between social divisions in The New Christianity: Dialogues Between a Conservative and an Innovator

1840: Pierre–Joseph Proudhon rails against private land ownership in What is Property?

1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto

1880s: Sydney Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb help form the English Fabian Socialists

1936: John Maynard Keynes publishes General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

1945–1975: The welfare state evolves in the developed countries

1948–1975: Third World countries adopt socialist model regimes

1967: Julius Nyerere installs ujamaa in Tanzania

1989: Socialist countries in Eastern Europe begin to collapse

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 world.” And in the Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf, written by his followers, the egalitarianism of the Constitution of 1793 was invoked against the wealthy: “The revolution is not finished, because the rich are absorbing all goods and are exclusively in command, while the poor are toiling in a state of virtual slavery.” The way out of this class division was to make everyone work: “no one has ever shirked this duty without having thereby committed a crime.”

What these thinkers had in common was a failure to present a serious economic analysis of what a communist system would entail. Rather, a moral critique was combined with an economic critique and a solution which entailed a revolution in economic activity was presented as if it were guaranteed to reform human nature. Nevertheless, what they also had in common was an emphasis on relieving the suffering of the poorest classes by restricting property rights. This became the core doctrine of socialism.

Social Democracy

During the earlier part of the twentieth century, all the advanced states experienced the rise of such Social Democratic movements with the achievement of the more or less universal franchise. The result was a transfer of demands from the political sphere con-

cerning representation in the deliberations of the state—much of which was achieved at the end of the First World War—to arguments about the purposes for which the state should be used.

The common form of the expression of Social Democracy was a democratic electoral coalition pursuing social rights to add to the political gains already won for the masses. Social Democratic parties were achieving Parliamentary representation by the 1890s and the first Social Democratic government in the world was formed in the semi–sovereign, self–gov- erning British colony of Queensland (Australia) in 1899. Shortly thereafter, Social Democrats began to seriously influence political agendas everywhere. By bargaining for their electoral support with the reforming British Liberal government of 1906–1911 they achieved a significant part of their social agenda. In Australia, the Labour Party, founded in 1891, formed national governments of its own before the First World War and implemented modest reforming programs that either dismayed or astonished European observers of the day. Elsewhere Social Democrats put pressure on Rightist governments to accommodate to their agenda, as in Germany. That agenda emerged from the social composition of industrial society and included pensions, a decent wage, health care, holiday leave, and education.

Social democracy has no outstanding political theoreticians, although a body of literature derives from a variety of political, economic, and philosophical tracts. In the political sphere, among the most developed came from Britain and the Fabian Socialists, including: William Morris (1834–1896), who wrote Why I Am a Socialist in 1884; Sidney and Beatrice Webb; the playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), driving force behind the formation of the Fabian Society in 1884 and writer in 1928 of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; the author and novelist H.G. Wells (1866–1946) in Outline of History, 1920; and the academic Harold Laski (1893–1950) who was on the executive at different times, of both the Fabian Society and the British Labour Party, as well as the author of Communism in 1927; and the politicians of the British Labour Party.

In October 1883 a socialist debating group was formed in London and called themselves the Fabian Society, after the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated weakening the opposition by harassing operations rather than becoming involved in pitched battles. The Fabians came to include intellectuals like Eleanor Marx, J.A. Hobson, George Bernard Shaw, Clement Attlee, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, and H.G. Wells.

These Fabian socialists argued for the pursuit of a vaguely defined form of socialism—which certainly included more state ownership of the economy, higher taxes and more welfare benefits—by using an elected Labour government to legislate for an extension of the egalitarian principle from the political to the economic and social sphere.

The Fabians believed that capitalism had created an unjust and inefficient society and they aimed to reconstruct it more rationally; early discussions included “How Can We Nationalise Accumulated Wealth?” But they rejected revolutionary socialism and wanted society to move to a socialist society painlessly. They tried to convince people by rational argument and they produced pamphlets to this end.

In 1889 they published Fabian Essays—with chapters written by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, among others—which sold extremely well. Fabian members traveled widely, giving lecturers on “Socialism.” They founded a new university, the London School of Economics (LSE), in 1895, to teach political economy along socialist lines. Later, they decided to establish a distinct Labour group in Parliament.

The Fabians adopted similar attitudes to the German Marxist revisionists but were an upper–mid- dle–class intellectual group. They became famous through publishing. These middle–class Fabians rejected revolutionary tactics and were more interested in practical politics and gains to be made through contacts in the international socialist movement, trade unions, and cooperative movements.

In Germany similar arguments were evolved by the previously mentioned Marxist Social Democratic Party, led by Kautsky and Bernstein, before it was twice destroyed—by the 1914 War and then by the Nazi regime. In France, a similar process witnessed the development of the Popular Front Left government of the 1930s, which was in turn to be destroyed by internal conflict with the Right and between competing socialist groups, and later by the Nazi blitzkreig.

In the economic realm, the dominant Social Democratic theoretician became a British academic, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Keynes had achieved some distinction by warning, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, that the punitive peace imposed on Germany, including reparations, would lead to the disruption and dislocation of the international economy, as eventually occurred. By later advocating what amounted to greater state intervention in the running of a capitalist economy in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, Keynes gave theoretical legitimacy to the political as-

pirations of the Social Democrats. For a generation after the Second World War, they were to use this to great advantage and construct Social Democratic societies in capitalist Europe and, to a much lesser extent, in North America.

The U.S. had been created as a liberal state and grew rapidly at a time when liberal rather than socialist ideas were in the ascendancy. The resulting popular antagonism towards the state in part explains why no socialist movement of any significance developed in the U.S. In 1906 the German sociologist Werner Sombart asked, “Why is there no socialism in America?” The ethnic divisions among the newly immigrant working class during the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century, the strength of religious sentiment, and the high level of geographic and social mobility, all made class solidarity and socialist ideology difficult to achieve in the U.S. The great mass movements in opposition to unbridled capitalism— 1890s’ Populism, then Progressivism, and finally the 1930s’ New Deal—all failed to ignite a mass socialist movement. Socialist candidates by the end of the twentieth century routinely achieved only one percent of the Presidential vote.

National unity for Americans was not constructed on the basis of ethnic solidarity or Social Democratic ideals, but on the ideology of American “particularism,” which stressed liberal values and opposition to an interventionist state. Americanism, and with it the legend of the frontier and then upward social mobility, was an alternative ideology to socialism, which it transcended. The communist party in the U.S. was the result of the amalgamation of even smaller Russian immigrant–based sects. Periodically, small socialist parties existed on the slim pickings of intellectuals, migrants, labor unions and protected industry, but as David Mosler and Bob Catley argued in Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World, the U.S. remained determinedly liberal.

In Australia and New Zealand Social Democratic movements had already achieved considerable successes and these were consolidated during the early twentieth century. The Australian Labour Party was founded in 1891 and formed governments in Queensland in the 1890s and nationally before the First World War. The New Zealand Labour Party was created in 1916 and took power in 1935. In both countries the state was expanded deeply into the ownership of capital and the regulation of the economy—arguably to an extent much greater than other capitalist societies by the 1930s. Keynes’ doctrines were quickly adopted by the labor political leaderships in both countries, and were only jettisoned following their inflationary impacts of the 1970s.

In the philosophical sphere, the egalitarian project of the Social Democrats was only to achieve its full expression when the movement itself was mature and arguably past its apogee, in the form of John Rawls’ major work A Theory of Justice in 1971. In this, he influentially argued for a public policy principle, “the original position” which demanded a common status outcome be blindly pursued for all.

THEORY IN DEPTH

Classical Socialism

The same focus was found in the work of Claude Henri Saint–Simon (1760–1825), who saw in Christianity the means to call an easing between social divisions. He wrote, in The New Christianity: Dialogues Between a Conservative and an Innovator (1825), that “God gave only one principle to men: that He commanded them to organise their society in such a way as to guarantee to the poorest classes the promptest and most complete amelioration of their physical and moral existence.” Like Jean Marie Condorcet, who wrote Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the physiocrat financial official who authored

Reflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution Richesses (1766), Saint–Simon shared the belief that human society was progressing.

But progress for Saint–Simon was not primarily about intellectual evolution and the application of ideas to society, as it largely was in Condorcet, but instead entailed the increasing complexity and productivity of social organization and technology. History was conceived of as a series of stages of technological and sociological advances.

What Saint–Simon brought to this perspective was the promise of social fulfilment in a unified, administrative industrial society: science, industry, and the fine arts were seen as conspiring to form a social unity which if rightly administered would bring peace and prosperity to all. In Saint–Simon, the twentieth century bureaucratic cast of mind with its faith in a planned society found its nineteenth century antecedent, as can be gauged from his phrase, later repeated by German socialist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895): that the government of persons will be replaced by the administration of things.

Pierre–Joseph Proudhon In France, it was Pierre–Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) who played the most important intellectual role in contributing to actual working class politics. Proudhon’s What is Prop-

Pierre–Joseph Proudhon. (The Library of Congress)

erty? (1840) formulated what socialists and communists had all in one way or another been saying, when he answered: “It is theft.” But Proudhon also incurred the wrath of communists by arguing:

Communism is oppression and slavery....communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience and equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort.

For Proudhon, liberty was to be found by combining communism and property. But that combination, in his hands, became a plea for a society essentially composed of small–scale property holders, enjoying an interest–free credit system, and each working their land. Thus, while he insisted that he (just like Saint–Simon had done and Marx would do) was merely a messenger who knew the direction of history, his vision, as Marx all too easily saw, was built around a fundamental agrarian anachronism, which was more likely to appeal to the then social conditions of a still mostly agrarian France than industrial England or America.

Karl Marx and Nineteenth Century German Socialism

Karl Marx (1818–1883) dominated German intellectual socialist thought. Marx was a German law student whose philosophical studies of politics,

history, and political economy became a search for the true meaning of human nature and history. After he had realized that German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) had understood that man is a “species being,” and that is the clue to his nature, he went on to find the answer in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to “the riddle of history.” It was communism. Only in a communist society could the powers of man’s species be unlocked.

Marx would later dispense with any talk about liberating the whole people, and let the “working class” become the agent of historical destiny. Marx became obsessed with one thing—the elimination of private interests and property. Having discovered that history as it had hitherto been experienced was the expression of class conflict, as he wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848), he came to see all social relations and institutions as pathologically infected by the existence of private interests. He then fled for refuge to liberal England.

Marx developed his ideas into a theory which came to be known as marxism. He declared that within marxism there would be no division of labor, no property, no law, no money, no state, no religion, and no alienation. That property, law, the division of labor, the state, and religion were not the artefacts of capitalist society but the very elements which emerge wherever there is any moderately large–scale, settled social organization or nation did not bother Marx or his followers. Indeed, when the occasion arose they would denounce the very idea of a nation as a repressive ideological construction.

Marx believed that the elimination of all known forms of social organization, apart from voluntary communal cooperation, would provide so much abundance that alienation stemming from the division of labor, capitalist oppression, and poverty would be eliminated. But he persistently attacked the Saint–Si- monians, who were engaging in voluntary non–vio- lent, social cooperative experiments for being utopians and idealists. Marx believed he had proof that capitalism would break down, but before it had done that it would sufficiently socialize and expand the means of production so that socialism, through marxism, would occur. Throughout his life Marx believed that communism is “not an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

Marx’s followers ranged themselves against “idealists” even when, later, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) made speech after speech declaring communism was an act of will, and of faith; even af-

ter the Italian communist Antonioni Gramsci (1891–1937) had said that socialism was a religion; and even when communist states imprisoned and executed people merely for the ideas they held. Marxism became essentially a Last Judgment doctrine that provided moral orientation for a social group, the intelligentsia, who had lost faith in the gods of religion and mere ethics and were themselves largely lacking in political power. When Marx repeatedly pointed to the scientific rigor of his analysis, even though he did not do one single model study of the mechanics of a modern large scale economy under marxism, he was really making a moral point.

Marxism was also the modern way of making philosophers rulers, at least notionally. This helps explain its popularity among them. But they could rule with a clear egalitarian conscience. For the whole enterprise of Marxism was to reproduce in secular society the religious dream of a life including the attainment of equality. The whole moral force of marxism lay in its promise of the elimination of inequalities by its elimination of classes.

In Russia, under Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), Marx’s political idealism was advanced as scientific and inevitable, in part, so that Marxists could also be free to grab power any way they could in the name of the working class, without moral scruples. The entire legitimacy of the enterprise involved Marxists in a moral substitution racket: the critics and opponents of Marx or the communist party were the enemies of the working class; and the enemies of the working class were the enemies of humanity; and all future generations would live in peace and prosperity if only the communists would be victorious. Since the stakes were so high, Marxists could not be bound by moral scruples. Furthermore, Marx had shown that morals were simply the ideological expression of class interests. Thus, Marxists became extremely ruthless.

Ferdinand Lassalle

While Marx fulminated in exile in London, in Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), President of the General German Workers Association, lay the foundation for the German Socialist Party. Like Marx, Lassalle identified the interests of humanity with the interests of the working class. This class, he wrote in

The Working Class Program of 1862, is:

...the disinterested class of the community, which sets up and can set up no further exclusive condition, either legal or actual, neither nobility nor landed possessions, not the possession of capital, which it could make into a new privilege and force upon the arrangements of society. We are all working men in so far as we have the will to make ourselves useful in any way to the community.