I.

Introduction

Socialism, concept and party-based political movement, originally based in the organized working class, generally antagonistic towards capitalism. While the final aim of socialists was a communist or classless society (see Communism), they increasingly concentrated on social reforms within capitalism. As the movement developed, the concept itself acquired different meanings in different times and places.

The term began to be used in the first half of the 19th century by radical intellectuals who considered themselves to be the true heirs to the Enlightenment. The principal early theorists were Robert Owen, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels later dubbed them “utopian socialists”, regarding them as the forerunners of their own conception of “scientific socialism”. The term “utopian socialism” came to designate those thinkers who expressed discontent with the social and economic institutions that arose out of the triumphant bourgeois order, but were unable to provide a theoretical explanation of its operations (see Economics). Inevitably, the utopian socialists appeared in history as if their tasks had been to pave the way for their modern socialist successors, hence the terminology often employed: early socialism, proto-socialism, Frühsozialismus, pre-Marxian socialists, and so on.