II.

Early Socialism

Like their followers and successors, the utopian socialists objected to capitalism on ethical and practical grounds. Capitalism, they claimed, was unjust: it exploited workers, degraded them, transformed them into beasts or machines, and enabled the rich to get richer while the workers faced misery. They also maintained that capitalism was an inefficient and irrational mechanism for the development of society’s productive forces. It underwent cyclical crises caused by overproduction or under-consumption, did not provide work for all, allowing human resources to be unused or under-utilized, and produced luxuries instead of necessities.

At this early stage socialism could be seen as a reaction against the alleged emphasis of liberalism on individual achievements and private rights at the expense of collective welfare. Nevertheless, socialism was also a direct descendant of liberalism. In common with liberals, socialists were committed to the idea of progress and the abolition of aristocratic privileges; unlike them they denounced liberalism as a façade behind which capitalist greed could flourish unimpeded.

Nevertheless, the early socialists did more than set out utopian plans. They were the first to assemble a critique of industrialization from the perspective of modernity rather than from a longing for the society of yesterday. Industrial society, they claimed, was here to stay and could, if regulated according to certain principles, be a true civilization, that is a system of artificial (in the sense of non-natural or man-made) rules for associated civil life. They recognized that there was something deeply unjust in contemporary society: the existence of a new type of poverty amid considerable wealth, the ever-increasing isolation of individuals, and the unceasing and heartless competition prevailing among them. However, such moral outrage at poverty, individualism, and competition was not the prerogative of socialists. It was embraced with equal or even greater energy by writers and thinkers as diverse as Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli. What distinguished the early socialists from these and other conservative or “reactionary” thinkers, or from anarchist radicals who harked back to the primitive communism of idyllic agrarian society, was an optimistic and positive view of industrialization. The question was not to return to a pre-industrial order, or seek to protect and alleviate the sufferings of the “losers” thrown onto the scrap heap by economic progress. The point was to understand the need for a new organization of society.