Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/223

 SOCIALISM 207 modified German legislation. Its influence is rapidly growing among the lower and also among the most ad- vanced classes in almost every country dominated by European culture, following as a destroying negation the development of capitalism. (3) In its doctrinal aspects socialism is most interesting as a criticism of the present economic order, of what socialists call the capitalistic system, with which the existing land system is connected. Under the present economic order land and capital (the material and instruments without which industry is impossible) are the property of a class, employing a class of wage- labourers handicapped by their exclusion from land and capital. Competition is the general rule by which the share of the members of those classes in the fruits of pro- duction is determined. Against this system critical social- ism is a reasoned protest ; and it is at issue also with the prevailing political economy, in so far as it assumes or maintains the permanence or righteousness of this eco- nomic order. Of the economic optimism implied in the historic doctrine of laissez-faire socialism is an uncom- promising rejection. (4) Socialism is usually regarded as a phase of the struggle for the emancipation of labour, for the complete participation of the working classes in the material, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance of the human race. This is certainly the most substantial and most prominent part of the socialist programme, the working classes being the most numerous and the worst sufferers from the present regime. This view, however, is rather one-sided, for socialism claims not less to be in the interest of the small capitalist gradually crushed by the competition of the larger, and in the interest also of the large capitalist, whose position is endangered by the huge unmanageableness of his success, and by the world-wide economic anarchy from which even the greatest are not secure. Still it is the deliverance of the working class that stands in the front of every socialistic theory ; and, though the initiative in socialist speculation and action has usually come from the middle and upper classes, yet it is to the working men that they generally appeal. While recognizing the great confusion in the use of the word " socialism," we have treated it as properly a pheno- menon of the 19th century, beginning in France with Saint-Simon and Fourier, in England with Robert Owen, and most powerfully represented at the present day by the school of Karl Marx. As we have seen, however, there are definitions of the word which would give it a wider range of meaning and a more ancient beginning, com- pared with which capitalism is but of yesterday, which would, in fact, make it as old as human society itself. In the early stages of human development, when the tribe or the village community was the social unit, the subordina- tion of the individual to the society in which he dwelt was the rule, and common property was the prevalent form. In the development of the idea of property, especially as re- gards land, three successive historical stages are broadly re- cognized, common property and common enjoyment of it, common property and private enjoyment, private property and private enjoyment. The last form did not attain to full expression till the end of the 1 8th century, when the principle of individual freedom, which was really a reaction against privileged restriction, was proclaimed as a positive axiom of government and of economics. The free individual struggle for wealth and for the social advantages dependent on wealth is a comparatively recent thing. In all periods of history the state reserved to itself the right to interpose in the arrangements of property, sometimes in favour of the poor, as in the case of the English poor law, which may thus be regarded as a socialistic measure. Moreover, all through history revolts in favour of a rearrangement of property have been very frequent. And in the societies of the Catholic Church w r e have a permanent example of common property and a common enjoyment of it. How are we to distinguish the socialism of the 19th century from these old-world phenomena, and especially from the communism l which has played sa great a part in history 1 To this query socialists, especially of the school of Marx, have a clear and precise answer. Socialism is a stage in the evolution of society which could not arrive till the conditions necessary to it had been established. The first and most essential of these was the development Genesis of the great industrialism which after a long period of pre- ? f socinl - paration and gradual growth began to reach its culminating lsm< point with the inventions and technical improvements, with the application of steam and the rise of the factory system, in England towards the end of the 18th century. Under this system industry was organized into a vast social operation, and was thus already socialized ; but it was a system that was exploited by the individual owner of the capital at his own pleasure and for his own behoof. Under the pressure of the competition of the large industry, the small capitalist is gradually crushed out, and the working pro- ducers become wage -labourers organized and drilled in immense factories and workshops. The development of this system still continues and is enveloping the whole world. Such is the industrial revolution. Parallel with this a revolution in the world of ideas equally great and equally necessary to the rise of socialism has taken place. This change of thought which made its world-historic announcement in the French Revolution made reason the supreme judge and had freedom for its great practical watchword. It was represented in the economic sphere by the school of Adam Smith. Socialism was an outcome of it too, and first of all in Saint-Simon and his school Saint- professed to give the positive and constructive corrective to Simon, a negative movement which did not see that it was merely Owen> negative and therefore temporary. In other words, Saint- Simon may be said to aim at nothing less than the com- pletion of the work of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Thus socialism professes to be the legitimate child of two great revolutions, of the industrial revolution which began to establish itself in England towards the end of the 18th century, and of the parallel revolution in thought which about the same time found most prominent expression in France. Robert Owen worked chiefly under the influence of the former ; Saint-Simon and Fourier grew up under the latter. The conspiracy of Babeuf is properly to be regarded as a crude revolutionary communism not essen- tially different from the rude efforts in communism made in earlier periods of history. With Saint-Simon and Owen historic socialism really begins, and is no longer an isolated fact, but has had a continuous and widening development, the succession of socialistic teaching and propaganda being taken up by one country after another throughout the civilized world. We have seen, then, that the rise of socialism as a new and reasoned theory of society was relative to the industrial revolution and to the ideas proclaimed in the French Revolution, prominent among which, besides the much emphasized idea of freedom and the less easily realized ideals of equality and fraternity, was the conception of the worth and dignity of labour. Though Owen was most largely influenced by the former and Saint-Simon and Fourier by the latter, it is certain that all three were 1 As used in current speech, and also in economics, no very definite line of distinction between communism and socialism can be drawn. Generally speaking communism is a term for a system of common property, and this should be accepted as the reasonably correct usage of the word ; but even by socialists it is frequently used as practically synonymous with socialism. Collectivism is a word which has recently come into vogue to express the economic basis of socialism as above explained.