CH 1 INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY




The impossibility of defining Socialism has often been emphasised, and sometimes regarded as a reproach. But neither in Politics nor in Morals is any important idea or system ever capable of being exactly defined. Who can satisfactorily define democracy, or liberty, or virtue, or happiness, or the State, or, for that matter, individualism any more than Socialism ? The most that can be attempted in such cases as these, with any prospect of success, is the discovery of some central core of meaning, present with varying additions in all or most of the manifold uses of the words in question, but in all probability never found alone, without any addition. The discovery of this central core will not enable us to understand these words ; for the added significances form no less essential parts of their acquired meanings. A word means what it is used to mean, or, for practical purposes, at least what it is commonly used to mean, or has been commonly used to mean by persons to whose utterances we need to pay any attention.

Nevertheless, if we can find a central core of meaning, we are better placed for understanding the varieties of usage ; and in the search for this core it is a valuable first step to find out how a word first came into use.

It is not known who first used the words ‘Socialism’ and ‘socialist’. So far as is known, they first appeared in print in Italian in 1803, but in a sense entirely unconnected with any of their later meanings. Thereafter there has, so far, been found 110 trace of them until 1827, when the word ‘socialist’ was used in the Owenite Co-operative Magazine to designate the followers of Owen’s Co-operative doctrines. The word 'socialisme’ made its first known appearance in print in a I’rench periodical — Le Globe — in 1832. This paper was l hen edited by Pierre Leroux, who had made it the principal organ of the Saint-Simonians ; and the word ‘socialisme’ was used as a characterisation of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.

The word was freely used by Leroux and Reynaud during the 1830s in their Nouvelle Encyclopedie and in other writings, and soon came to be employed in a wider sense to include a number of groups aiming at some kind of new social order resting on an economic and social conception of human rights.

Thereafter, both ‘Socialism’ and ‘socialist’ were used quite frequently both in France and in Great Britain ; and they soon spread to Germany and to other European countries and also to the United States. In all probability they had been used in speech before they came to be written down : the earliest known uses of them do not suggest that they were conscious new coinages, though they may have been. They were convenient and quite natural terms for describing certain attitudes and projects of social reorganisation for which, by the third decade of the nineteenth century, a broadly identifying label had come to be needed in everyday speech.




It is easy enough to see, in a general way, what those who

used these labelling words intended to convey by them. They

were formed from the word ‘social’, and were applied to

persons advocating doctrines which were felt to merit the

label ‘social’, and to the doctrines such persons professed.

The word ‘social’ was in this connection contrasted with the

word ‘individual’. The ‘socialists’ were those who, in opposi¬

tion to the prevailing stress on the claims of the individual,

emphasised the social element in human relations and sought

to bring the social question to the front in the great debate

about the rights of man let loose on the world by the French

Revolution and by the accompanying revolution in the eco¬

nomic field. Before the word Socialism came into use men

had spoken of ‘Social Systems’, meaning much the same

thing. The word ‘ Socialists ’ denoted those who advocated one

or another of the many ‘Social Systems’ that were at once con¬

tending one with another and united in hostility to the prevail¬

ing individualist order in economics, and to the pre-eminence

accorded to political over social and economic questions in

contemporary views and attitudes about human relations and

the right ordering of public affairs.




The groups thus originally dubbed ‘socialist’ were princi¬

pally three, though there were many lesser groups representing




broadly similar tendencies. These three were, in France, the

Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists, and in Great Britain the

Owenites, who, in 1841, officially adopted the name of Socialists.

Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen had in common,

despite their many differences, an essentially social approach.

This was true in at least three different, though related, senses.

In the first place, all three regarded the ‘social question’ as by

far the most important of all, and insisted that it was, above all

else, the task of good men to promote the general happiness

and well-being. Secondly, all three regarded this task as wholly

incompatible with the continuance of any social order which

rested on, or set out to encourage, a competitive struggle

between man and man for the means of living. Thirdly, all

three were deeply distrustful of ‘politics’ and of politicians,

and believed that the future control of social affairs should lie

mainly, not with parliaments or ministers, but with ‘the pro¬

ducers’, and that, if the economic and social sides of men’s

affairs could be properly organised, the traditional forms of

government and political organisation would soon be super¬

seded, and a new world of international peace and collaboration

would replace the old world of dynastic and imperialist con-

llicts. This distrust of ‘politics’ and this belief that the

‘political’ order was destined soon to be replaced by a new

and better management of men’s affairs were of course shared

by many thinkers of the early nineteenth century who were

not Socialists in any precise sense —- for example, Victor Hugo.

The contrast between the ‘political’ and the ‘social’ attitude

the problems of mankind runs through much of the thought

of the period after the Napoleonic Wars.




Within this common agreement there were wide diversities.

The Fourierists and the Owenites were community-makers ;




1 hey set out to supersede the old societies by covering the

earth with a network of local communities founded on a truly

social basis, and believed that these new foundations could,

without violence or revolution, supersede the existing struc-

111 res by the sheer effect of their evident superiority in terms

of the promotion of human welfare. The Saint-Simonians,

mi the other hand, were strong believers in the virtues of

large-scale organisation and scientific planning, and aimed at

u.insforming national States into great productive corporations




dominated by the men of science and high technical capacity,

and at linking these regenerated States together by means of

master-plans of world-wide economic and social development.

The Owenites and the Fourierists for the most part eschewed

political activity, in the ordinary sense of the term ; whereas

the Saint-Simonians were bent on capturing States and Govern¬

ments and on transforming them to suit their new purposes.




Again, whereas Fourier’s disciples thought mainly in terms

of intensive cultivation of the land and relegated industry and

commerce to quite minor positions, the Owenites were well

aware of the significance of the Industrial Revolution and

thought in terms of a new society resting on a balance of

agricultural and industrial production; while the Saint-

Simonians’ attention was given mainly to great engineering

feats — canal-cutting, irrigation, road- and railway-building —

and to the organisation of banking and finance as the instru¬

ments of large-scale economic planning.




These were big differences ; but the common element in

the three doctrines was, none the less, enough to endow them,

in popular parlance, with a common name. They were all

enemies of individualism, of the competitive economic system,

and of the idea of a natural economic law which would work

out for the general good if only the politicians would, while

enforcing the rights of property, keep their hands off the

further regulation of economic affairs. They all stood, against

laissez-faire, for the view that economic and social affairs

needed collective organisation of a positive kind for the pro¬

motion of welfare, and that this organisation should rest, in

some sort, on a co-operative, and not on a competitive, prin¬

ciple. In 1839, the economist, Jerome Blanqui, in his pioneer

History of Political Economy, characterised them all as ‘ Utopian

Socialists’ — a name which was to become lastingly attached

to them through its adoption by Marx and Engels in the

Communist Manifesto.




Thus, Socialism, as the word was first used, meant col¬

lective regulation of men’s affairs on a co-operative basis, with

the happiness and welfare of all as the end in view, and with

the emphasis not on ‘politics’ but on the production and

distribution of wealth and on the strengthening of ‘socialising’

influences in the lifelong education of the citizens in co-




operative, as against competitive, patterns of behaviour and

social attitudes and beliefs. It follows that all the ‘Socialists’

were deeply interested in education, and regarded a good social

education as a fundamental ‘right of man’.




It will be observed that in this description of the common

characteristics of early ‘ Socialist ’ doctrine there is not a word

about the proletariat or the class-struggle between it and the

capitalist or employing class. There is nothing about these

concepts because, save quite incidentally, they found hardly

any place among the ideas of these Socialist schools, though

they had, of course, been prominent in Babeuf’s movement

and were soon to become so again in the social struggles of

the 1830s and 1840s. Neither Saint-Simon nor Fourier nor

Robert Owen thought at all in terms of a class-struggle between

capitalists and workers as rival economic classes, or envisaged

the putting of their schemes into effect as involving a grand

contest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. They

all agreed that, as things were, the workers were victims of

exploitation ; they all stood forth as advocates of the claims

of what Saint-Simon termed ‘ la classe la plus nombreuse et la

plus pauvre ’ ; they all attacked the undue inequality of pro¬

perty and income and demanded the regulation and limitation

of property rights. But they thought of the abuses of the

property system as arising rather from the overweening claims

of les oisifs — again Saint-Simon’s phrase — than from the

exploitation of the worker by his direct employer; which

latter they regarded as in the main a secondary consequence

of the system of oligarchical privilege. Nor must it be for¬

gotten that ‘la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre ’ still

consisted, in every country, mainly of peasants and not of

industrial workers. Saint-Simon expected les industriels,

employers and workers together, to join hands in the struggle

■1 gainst the old privileged classes and the old States which

upheld their power. He wished men to be rewarded strictly

m accordance with their real services — a doctrine from

which his followers drew the logical deduction that inherit

mire should be done away with. He was quite prepared

lor les grands industriels to draw large incomes in return for

large services to the public. Fourier wished to limit the

shares of capital-providers and managers to fixed proportions




of the total product, and also, in effect, to impose a steeply-

graduated tax on incomes from property; but he did

not propose to take away the rights of property or to im¬

pose equality of incomes. Owen wanted capital to receive

only a fixed or maximum dividend, all surplus profit being

devoted to the development of social services for the general

benefit; and he also believed that, in course of time, as the

institutions of the new society developed, the desire to be

richer than others would die out and the capital-owners would

voluntarily renounce their share. Neither he nor Fourier, any

more than Saint-Simon, conceived their plans as calling for a

massed struggle between the employing and the working classes.




Thus, Fourier sat, day after day and year after year, waiting

in vain for responses to his advertisements for capitalists who

would be prepared to finance his proposed communities ; while

Owen threw his own and his friends’ money into his ‘Villages

of Co-operation’, and was always looking for rich men capable

of understanding the beauty of his ideas. Saint-Simon too

dreamed of rich backers ; and his successors sometimes found

them. Indeed, his best-known disciple, Enfantin, became a

railway director, and other Saint-Simonians, such as the

Pereire brothers, came to play leading parts in the financial

world. Socialism, in its early days and as the term was then

understood, was emphatically not a doctrine of class-war

between Capital and Labour.




The class-war doctrine, however, not only existed long before

the word ‘socialist’ came into use, but had its own schools and

variations of opinion, which were regarded as distinct from

those of ‘Socialism’. The principal exponents of the class-

war in the 1820s and 1830s were those on the extreme left of

Radicalism who looked back for their inspiration to Gracchus

Babeuf and the Conspiration des Egaux of 1796. The words

‘babouvisme’ and 'babouviste' were in frequent use in France,

especially after the Revolution of 1830 ; and the word ‘ prole¬

tarian ’ was particularly associated with the babouviste tradition.

The followers of Babeuf, fully as much as the Owenites, the

Fourierists, and the Saint-Simonians, gave prominence to ‘ la

question sociale ’ ; and they were sometimes lumped in with

these groups under the general name of ‘Socialists’. But

until well after 1830 it was more usual to draw a distinction,




the more so because, whereas the Saint-Simonians and the

I'ourierists were organised and recognised groups (as were the

Owenites in Great Britain), babouvisme was rather a tendency

than a sect, and its exponents were found among the members

of democratic and revolutionary clubs and societies which did

not collectively profess it as a doctrine, but treated it rather

as an outstanding expression of left-wing Jacobinism, and as a

lirst attempt to carry the Revolution of 1789 right through to

its logical conclusion.




‘Communism’ was another word which came into use in

I' ranee during the social ferment that followed the Revolution

of 1830. How and when it originated cannot be exactly said ;

hut we hear of it first in connection with some of the secret

revolutionary societies of Paris during the ’thirties, and we

Imow that it came into common use in the 1840s mainly as a

designation of the theories of Etienne Cabet. It seems to have

carried with it, right from the beginning, something of a

tlbuble entendre. As used by Frenchmen, it conjured up the

idea of the commune, as the basic unit of neighbourhood and

clf-government, and suggested a form of social organisation

testing on a federation of free communes. But at the same

time it suggested the notion of communaute — of having things

m common and of common ownership ; and it was in this

aspect that it was developed by Cabet and his followers,

whereas the other clement connected it rather with the under¬

ground clubs of the extreme left, and,-through them, with the

clubs of exiled revolutionaries through which it passed on to

la- employed in the name of the Communist League of 1847

ind of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In Great Britain

the word ‘communist’ seems to have been first used in 1840




imported from France by the Owenite John Goodwyn

llsirmby, in his letters from Paris published in The New Moral

W orld. He used it chiefly with reference to the followers of

< abet, who had been much influenced by Owenism. In the

1 S.|os it was often used in connection with ‘Socialism’, but

iinially as distinct from it, and as carrying a more militant

implication. It was chosen deliberately by the group for

»liich Marx and Engels prepared the Communist Manifesto

bnause it carried with it more than ‘Socialist’ the idea of

u volutionary struggle, and had, at the same time, a clearer







connection with the notion of common ownership and enjoy¬

ment. It was, Engels has explained, less ‘utopian’ : it lent

itself better to association with the idea of the class-struggle

and with the Materialist Conception of History.




So far, we have been speaking in terms of words and of the

ideas and schools of thought and action they were first used to

designate. But, of course, many of the ideas had existed long

before the schools in question came into being. There was

nothing novel in stressing the claims of society as against those

of the individual ; nothing new in denouncing social inequali¬

ties or in accusing the rich of exploiting the poor ; nothing

new in asserting the need for an education of all citizens in the

principles of social morality ; nothing new in proposing com¬

munity of goods. Assuredly, there was nothing new in writing

social utopias, or in claiming for all men economic as well as

civil and political rights. Accordingly it was quite natural

that the words which had come into use to denote the Fourier-

ists, the Saint-Simonians, the Owenites, the Icarians (fol¬

lowers of Cabet), and the other sects of the early nineteenth

century should be applied before long to earlier thinkers and

projectors whose ideas in some measure seemed to resemble

theirs. The labels ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ (and, later, ‘anar¬

chist’) came to be used with reference to all manner of past

doctrines in which emphasis had been put on living in common,

on collective ownership, on education in social morality, or on

collective social planning and control of the environment of

habits and institutions which shaped men’s lives.




In France, where so much of Socialist theory had its birth,

men’s thoughts naturally turned back first of all to the immedi¬

ate precursors of Saint-Simon and of Fourier -— to those who,

as philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, had

put forward, often in the form of utopias, the most trenchant

criticisms of contemporary society. They found anticipations

of Socialism and of Communism in the works of Morelly

{Code de la nature , 1755, at one time attributed to Diderot),

of the Abbe Bonnot de Mably {Entretiens de Phocion sur les

rapports de la morale avec la politique, 1763, and other works),

and, earlier still, in the Testament of the Cure Meslier (died

c. 1730), then known only in an incomplete version edited

by Voltaire. They found elements of Socialist doctrine in







Rousseau’s Discours sur Vorigine de Vinegalite (1755), with its

passionate denunciations of the evils arising out of private

property, and even in the etatisme of Du contrat social (1762).

'I'hey went back to Condorcet’s pleas for education as a human

right, as well as to his prophetic Esquisse of the progress of

the spirit of man.




These Teachings back into the eighteenth century neces¬

sarily led them to look much further into the past. Mably

had built consciously on Plato’s Republic ; and he, Rousseau,

and many others had harked back to Plutarch’s account of the

constitution of ancient Sparta. Through these intermediaries

I he ancestry of Socialism and Communism was traced back

lo the classical world ; while others rediscovered the Peasants’

Revolt of 1381, or other peasant uprisings, or harked back to

llie ‘Communism’ of the early Christian Church and the

communistic elements in the monastic life of the Middle Ages.

Vet others traced Socialism back to More’s Utopia (1516),

Campanella’s City of the Sim (1623), and other writings of the

Renaissance. In Great Britain, Robert Owen had his atten¬

tion drawn by Francis Place to the late seventeenth-century

tract of Colledges of Industry, by the Quaker, John Bellers, in

which Owen found an anticipation of some of his own ideas

lor dealing with the problems of poverty and unemployment;

.md it was not a far cry from Bellers to Peter Chamberlen, or

to the more radical groups among the Puritans of the Civil

War and Commonwealth periods — to Levellers and Diggers,

though this quest was not much followed till a good deal later. 1

The Anabaptists of Munster, also, were called into requisition,

by both foes and friends, to contribute to the pedigree of

Socialist and Communist doctrines.




In this volume I do not propose to retell the story of these

anticipations, real or fancied, of the Socialist and Communist

movements of the nineteenth century. I put them aside, not as

unimportant, but as falling outside the subject on which I am

.11 present setting out to write. I propose, however, to go back

io a date some forty years before the names ‘Socialism’ and

’ socialist ’ came into common use, because the history of the




1 The revival of interest in Gerrard Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652),




” itli its remarkable anticipations of modern Socialist ideas and its advocacy

•■I UKrarian Communism, is quite recent.













movements of the period after the Napoleonic Wars cannot

be understood at all except against the background of the

great French Revolution and of the political, economic, and

social changes which the Revolution let loose. It is now a

commonplace to say that from 1789 onwards Europe was in

the throes of three kinds of revolutionary change — political

and social, symbolised by the events in France and their

repercussions in other countries, industrial, marked by the

advent of steam power and the extended application of scientific

techniques in manufacture and in civil and mechanical engineer¬

ing, and agrarian, involving vast changes in methods of land-

cultivation and stock-breeding, and in the character of rural

life. These three linked revolutions did not, of course, all

begin in 1789. The industrial and agrarian revolutions cannot

be pinned down to a single year or event : the steam-engine,

as Watt left it, was the outcome of a long chain of inventions

and improvements, and the new husbandry developed gradu¬

ally, with no one outstanding event to mark its onset. Only

the political Revolution can be assigned to a particular year in

which it began ; and its social content was being prepared

long before the Fall of the Bastille proclaimed to the world the

ending of the ancien regime.




1789, then, is not, and cannot be, an exact starting-

point ; but it will in general serve my purpose well enough

because I am concerned in this book primarily with ideas and

only secondarily with events and movements. In the realm

of ideas, 1789 is the dividing line, because men felt it to be

so, and shaped their ideas and projects thereafter in a different

frame of mind, as adventurers faring forth into a new world

in the making.







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