Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/382

 THE DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM THERE are many meth.od.s of investigating a movement in public thought or of examining a change in social aspirations. When Mr. Leonard Courtney undertook to set forth in the first number of the Economic Journal the ' Difficulties of Socialism,' he elected to study the subject neither in the historical or economic investigations of its scientific adherents nor in those of its serious critics, neither in the aspirations of its millions of votaries nor in the objections of its political opponents. He ignored the long history of the Socialist movement in England, France, and Germany; he shut his eyes to its marked and grow- ing influence on economists and statesmen; he sought for an explanation of its aims neither from the professors nor from the popular leaders. He passed over the voluminous and varied international literature of the movement itself, and, after briefly referring to various Utopias of the past, took as its represen- tative exponent a popular'novelette'by a middle class Boston journalist and Sunday-school teacher, who was not a member of any Socialist organization, who was admittedly unacquainted either with its methods or its aims, and who displays, almost on every page of his unscientific Utopia, traces of the influence of what is perhaps the least socialized community in the world. The wide circulation of Looking Backward (mainly among non-Socialists) appears, in Mr. Courtney's eyes, to make it more worthy of examination in the scientific pages of the Ecoomic Journal than the suggestive writings of Owen or Comte, the subtle and pregnant analysis of the facts of the Industrial Revolution by Karl Marx, or the researches into economic history by whole schools of German Socialist economists. And it is highly significant of Mr. Courtney's general misapprehension of the Socialist movement that he describes at some length (apparently under the impression that he is criticizing Socialism) the insignificant attempts of a tiny band of philanthropic