Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Gregory Claeys

units of work. The production of unnecessary surpluses would be regulated

by denying labour-credits to their producers until stocks were depleted.

An industrial army, modelled on the military, would be the main unit of

labour organisation, by which means large-scale projects could be com-

pleted. Money and private property, the bane of modern existence, were

to be eliminated, and the system of exchange instead based upon labour-

time. Against Owen and Fourier, Weitling placed greater stress on family

life, while recognising the need for easier divorce and the extension of

employment rights to women. Like Marx he agreed that socialism could

be introduced by revolutionary means, and proposed that popular dicta-

torship would follow the revolution and precede the ultimate creation of

communism. Like many early socialists, however, Weitling also sought to

found his views on a radical interpretation of Christianity which included

a millenarian component, as explained in The Poor Sinner’s Gospel (English

translation, 1969).

Other German socialists of note include Karl Schapper and Auguste

Willich, who were linked with the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui

in the League of the Just, which after 1847 became the Communist League.

The Young Hegelian Moses Hess (1812–75) was a theoretician of minor

inﬂuence, and author of The European Triarchy and other works (Berlin 1959;

We i s s 1960). Other ‘True Socialists’, mostly now remembered through

Marx and Engels’ caustic dismissal of their views in 1845–6 in The German

Ideology, included Karl Gr

un and Georg Kuhlmann. Another German, John-

Adolphus Etzler (1796–c.1860), wrote a number of works, notably The

Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833), proposing a technologically

innovative form of socialist society (Etzler 1977).

7 The revolutions of 1848

During the upheavals of 1848 it was chieﬂy Louis Blanc (1811–82)who

popularised the principle that a democratic state could introduce social-

ist reforms rather than relying on local initiatives funded by capitalists or

workers on the lines of the Owenite and Fourierist communities. Blanc’s

Organisation du Travail (1839) can be seen as blending Fourierist and Saint-

Simonian ideas. It proposed that the state fund co-operative workshops to

compete with private capitalists, and eventually supersede them by universal

association. Workers might also group together once they became aware of

‘the evident economy and indisputable excellence of living in common’, on

the basis of a ‘voluntary association of wants and enjoyments’ (Blanc 1848,

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p. 137, 1982). Government would regulate industry for the ﬁrst year of an

interim period, but thereafter popular elections would introduce new lead-

ers. Political reform was thus to be the means of social change, rather than

the working classes acting independently of or with hostility towards the

state. The state once reformed would act not despotically, as Blanc feared

a Saint-Simonian regime would. Instead its functions were to be limited

to a general super vision of the rules of production, with each branch of

industry electing its own managers. Capitalists would also join the new

associations, receiving the existing rate of interest on investment rather than

being partners with the working classes, and gradually being won over to the

associative principle. Eventually competition would be superseded entirely.

Blanc dismissed Fourier’s and Consid

erant’s reliance on any conception of

a cosmic ‘natural order’ as ‘a mere mimicry of omnipotence’ (Blanc 1848,

p. 131). He also ridiculed the Saint-Simonians’ efforts to abolish the family.

Blanc’s scheme enjoyed some success, but of some ﬁfty-six state-funded

associations established, only one remained by 1875.

8 Christian Socialism and the problem of religion

Most forms of nineteenth-century non-Marxian socialism saw themselves

as supplanting or extending Christianity, either, like Owen, by proposing a

‘new religion’, a paradise on earth based upon harmony rather than com-

petition; or, like Fourier and Comte, a metaphysical substitute. For some,

it was a spirit of duty and self-sacriﬁce which bridged socialism and Chris-

tianity (e.g. Tuckwell 1889,p.15). To other s, the essence of socialism, ‘the

expression of the feeling of the brotherhood of all men among each other’

(Neale 1851,p.32), could only result from the acknowledgement of a com-

mon parent, God. Medieval Christianity could be combed for illustrations

of an ‘original’ communistic spirit. More recent Christian communalism

of the Shaker type could also furnish a useful precedent (Noyes 1870).

Socialism, indeed, could be seen as the religion of the future, as writers like

Guyau, Wells and Le Bon predicted (Kaufmann 1906,pp.179–80). By the

early twentieth century this search for a reviviﬁed secular faith had come to

be seen by some as an essential psychological motive force underlying the

socialist movement, where an intense desire for social equality compensated

for existing inequality and distress (e.g. de Man 1928). To some, notably

Le Bon, thus, it was the psychology of the mass or crowd as such, inviting

manipulation by its leaders, which predominated in socialism (Le Bon 1895,

1899, 1913). For Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the great goal and motivating

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factor would be the quasi-mythical ideal (based on a Bergsonian concept of

instinct) of the general syndicalist strike, which Sorel hoped would replace

the Marxian ideal of catastrophist revolution. ‘Myths’ were any conception

that had inspired great social movements, or could be manipulated to secure

their ends, including primitive Christianity, the Reformation, Marx’s the-

ory of revolution, the French Revolution, and Mazzinian nationalism; to

Le Bon, ‘the reason why socialism is so powerful to-day is that it constitutes

the last illusion that is still vital’ (Le Bon 1895,p.109).

The fact that religion could be construed as both the epitome of ‘false

consciousness’ and an essential bond of communal unity meant that it

remained a deeply divisive issue among later nineteenth-century socialists.

Many were agnostic, and the more Marxist, like Ernest Belfort Bax (The

Religion of Socialism, 1887) were usually overtly anti-Christian, though Bax

had Positivist leanings. Some, however, preferred to ignore the issue. Robert

Blatchford, the leader of the Clarion movement, proclaimed that ‘Socialism

does not touch religion at any point. It deals with laws, and with industrial

and political government’ (Blatchford 1902,p.78). But others, probably in

a majority, took an opposing view. George Bernard Shaw insisted that it was

only by religion that socialism could be brought about. Prominent working-

class socialists like James Keir Hardie could declare that ‘the impetus which

drove me ﬁrst of all into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which

has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus

of Nazareth, than from all other sources combined’ (Hardie n.d., p. 140).

In Britain, between 1848 and 1854, F. D. Maurice, Thomas Hughes and

Charles Kingsley promoted various co-operative and educational schemes,

and were vehemently opposed to the Manchester Free Trade School of John

Bright and Richard Cobden. Later the Guild of St Matthew was active

in England (see Binyon 1931; Jones 1968; Kaufmann 1888;Raven1920;

Woodworth 1903). In the last third of the century, despite the inﬂuence of

the secularist movement led by Bradlaugh, Holyoake and others, religion

thus continued to exert a strong inﬂuence in Britain and elsewhere. Various

schemes, led by Stewart Headlam and others, were introduced between 1875

and 1900, which were of substantial inﬂuence on the labour movement.

Most European nations possessed organised Christian Socialist movements

in this period. Germany had Catholic and Protestant Christian Socialist

movements, favouring a paternal state socialism, and men like Christoph

Moufang and William Immanuel, Baron von Ketteler, promoted a variety of

legislative measures to protect the working classes, and to regulate capitalist

speculation. In France a Christian critique of competition was popularised

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

by F

elicit

e de Lammenais (1782–1854), while Italy produced writers like

Rafaele Mariano and Francesco Nitti (Nitti 1911).

Despite the secularist emphasis in Owenism in particular, the dividing

line between socialism and Christian Socialism was never as great as secularly

minded historians have tended to presume. ‘Scientiﬁc socialism’ rarely pro-

vided the sense of spiritual bond or community which such attempted sub-

stitutes for religion patently offered, particularly where its claims of scientiﬁc

predictability based on biology and history were regarded as mere ‘supposi-

tions concerning the probabilities of human action or events’ (Glasier 1919,

p. vii). As the British socialist Philip Snowden suggested, thus, socialism was

not for most a proﬁt-and-loss, ‘materialistic’ calculation, but rather ‘like a

religion – the promise of a full spiritual life’ (Snowden 1934, i,p.81). Hence

many non-Marxian socialists emphasised the moral aspects of socialist the-

ory, particularly in so far as they contributed to discussions of changes in

‘character’ to be anticipated under socialism, resting sometimes on a quasi-

Comtean moral or religious solidarity in society, or possibly embodied in the

ideal of the state as such. For some indeed such considerations had primacy;

to Sidney Ball the ‘mere substitution of public for private administration is

the shadow and not the substance. The forces required to work Collectivist

machinery are nothing if not moral’ (Ball 1896,p.14). This was particularly

important where, as was often presumed, large-scale private employment

was to be replaced by public service ‘with the stimulus of duty and esteem,

instead of that of fortune-making’. Such was Sidney Webb’s formulation,

referring to Comte, but with Ruskin’s Unto This Last as a principal model,

underpinned by Carlyle’s quasi-religious duty to labour (Webb n.d., p. 16).

9 Leading trends 1875–1914

Much continental socialism after the 1860s was Marxist, with the Ger-

man Social Democratic Party eventually dominating the movement. But in

Germany, besides Christian Socialism, there was also an academic socialist

movement, the Katheder Sozialisten, or Socialists of the Chair, including

Professors Schmoller and Held, who promoted various ameliorationist and

associative schemes based upon state intervention to ensure fair wages, reg-

ulate trades unions, inspect factories, etc. (see Laveleye 1885,pp.81–145;

Rae 1891,pp.195–217). Another branch of the socialist movement was

associated with Bismarck’s nationalisation and welfare programmes, which

included schemes for accident, sickness and old age insurance. These com-

menced after 1878, when the Social Democratic par ty was suppressed. Most

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Gregory Claeys

French socialism from the 1860s onwards was also Marxist (Moss 1976). Fol-

lowing the failure of the Commune, no substantial meeting of socialists took

place until 1880 at Havre, when the movement split into three strands, of

which the opposite wings were termed Co-operationists, who opted for

gradual improvement through the existing political process, and Anarchists.

The third section became the Socialist Revolutionary Party, committed to

considerable reforms, but not large-scale nationalisation. But the party split

again two years later into groups led by Paul Brousse and Jules Guesde, the

former favouring decentralised municipal control over industry, the latter a

more centralised Marxist approach. (Another revolutionary grouping, the

Blanquists, are assessed elsewhere in this volume.) In 1889 there were thirty

members of the so-called Socialist Group in the legislature, supporting

a programme of progressive nationalisation of industrial monopolies, com-

munal autonomy, international arbitration, the abolition of standing armies,

sexual equality, and a variety of other measures. Jean Jaur

es (1859–1914),

who was ﬁrst elected as a Radical in 1885, stood successfully as a Socialist in

1893, and was the most important French Socialist leader at the turn of the

twentieth century. Italian and Spanish socialism in this period tended also to

be much inﬂuenced by anarchism, especially Bakunin, as was a substantial

minority of Belgian socialists. An Italian Socialist party ﬁrst emerged as a

distinctive group in 1892.

The International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864,repre-

sented the trade unions, Proudhonists, Blanquists and Bakuninists, as well as

Marx’s followers. At Congresses held in 1866, 1867 and 1868, it agreed that

the land, mines, forests, the means of transport and communication should

become public property, but might be managed by workers’ associations,

with co-operative societies and mutual credit organisations (the Proudhon-

ist plan) proposed to supervise industrial production. In 1869 a measure to

abolish inheritance was rejected, but the growing strength of Bakuninism

engendered tensions with Marx which eventually resulted in the organi-

sation splitting in 1872. In the most prescient of the anarchist critiques of

Marxism, Statism and Anarchy (1873), Bakunin would later accuse Marx of

wishing to impose an intellectual dictatorship over the working classes. The

Paris Commune, which arose at the end of France’s defeat by Germany in

the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, was clearly an attempt to reassert the

principle of the local, workers’ self-organising unit against excessive central-

isation. Various later socialists, including Marx, would claim its organisation

to be paradigmatic for socialist democratic theory; Bax and others argued

that ‘from the Political point of view, the Revolution of Paris established

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in France a new form of administration – Federalist Administration’ (Bax

et al. 1886,p.60). The socialism of the Second International, from 1889

onwards, is discussed elsewhere in this series (Geary 2003).

10 Later non-Marxian socialism

Following Kropotkin (1899, ii,p.213), we may distinguish three main

strands of non-Marxian socialism emerging in the later nineteenth century.

With its statist emphasis, Saint-Simonism tended to develop into social

democracy, while Fourierism encouraged anarchism. Owenism in turn lent

assistance to trade unionism, co-operation and municipal socialism, and was

less sympathetic to social democratic state socialism. The social democratic

state with a mixed economy, the model which predominated in Europe

after 1945, was hence indebted primarily to the more statist strands of

later nineteenth-century socialism. The most important development in

the theory of socialist organisation to occur after 1848,thus,wasthemove

towards collectivism and statism and away from communitarianism of the

Owenite, Fourierist or Cabetist variety. This resulted from the widespread

perception that communitarianism had failed, and was in any case ill-suited

to harnessing large-scale mechanical production. Marxian socialism was

based upon the critique of political economy, the theory of surplus value

and a historical account of the development of capitalism.

But not only did many late nineteenth-century forms of socialism con-

tinue to urge both a moral and religious appeal: they also developed anti-

centralist, even romantic and individualist themes in many respects alien

to Marxism. Some did so in reaction to critics of socialism who suggested

that collectivism would enforce uniformity of character and curtail indi-

vidual liberty, for instance in Herbert Spencer’s Man versus the State (1884)

(e.g. Blatchford 1908,pp.178–87). Some advocated an individualist point

of depar ture linked to a romantic ideal of creativity as the core of human

identity and personality. By 1900 a few, notably in Britain, emphasised that a

love of liberty springing from ‘a reverence for parliamentary institutions’ was

‘a condition of socialist success’ (Macdonald 1909, i, pp. xxi–xxv). Other

socialists were sympathetic to anarchist demands for a society which max-

imised human liberty, even if they rejected the possibility that an anarchist

society as such could ever function. Dutch socialism at the turn of the cen-

tury, for example, was dominated by the personality of the ex-clergyman

Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846–1919). He entered Parliament in 1888,and

founded a Social Democratic League in 1889, before rejecting political

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involvement and opting for an anarchistical communism. But despite this

trend most forms of socialism nonetheless either ignored or were hostile to

the language of liberal rights, preferring to promote an intensiﬁed sense of

public duty. Given the twentieth-century degeneration of Marxian social-

ism into totalitarianism, which occurred at least in part because of its weak

theorisation of democracy, authority and leadership, such emphases repay

study.

In Europe the most inﬂuential developments of this type, favouring a

greater emphasis on individual liberty, were in Britain, where Marxism was

weakest. Although the most inﬂuential British socialist organisation from

the early 1880s onwards was H. M. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation,

founded in 1881, which, reincarnated as the Social Democratic Federation

in 1884, became avowedly Marxist, there were many other strands of socialist

thought evident in the period.

William Morris

Though sometimes claimed as a Marxist, William Morris is as easily afﬁli-

ated with the anarchist or individualist wing of non-Marxian socialism (e.g.

Kirkup 1913,p.276). He began as a member of Hyndman’s Social Demo-

cratic Federation, but in 1884 left to form a new organisation, the Socialist

League, from which Morris seceded again in 1890 with his following to

the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Morris wedded Ruskinian aesthetics

to a socialist programme. Extraordinarily active as a lecturer and journalist,

Morris remains best known today for his great ‘utopian romance’, News

from Nowhere (1890). This was a response to Edward Bellamy’s immensely

popular ‘cockney utopia’ (as Morris termed it), Looking Backward,pub-

lished in 1889, which envisioned the future in terms of greatly advanced

mechanisation and centralisation. By contrast, Morris proposed consider-

able decentralisation, the dispersion of large urban populations to smaller

towns, preservation of the environment, and cultivation of the arts and crafts

in order to maximise individual creativity and fulﬁlment in work. Politics

was to be primarily a local affair conducted at ‘Mote’ meetings (the term

echoing Saxon and Icelandic institutions). Differences of opinion would no

longer ‘crystallise people into parties permanently hostile to one another,

with different theories as to the build of the universe and the progress of

time’ (Morris 1899,p.95). In determining public policy, minority opinion,

when substantial, would be respected so far as to prevent majority opinion

overriding it until opinion had shifted markedly towards any majority. Most

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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914

causes of crime having disappeared with the abolition of private property,

criminals were to be treated not as habitual offenders, but errant friends, and

none but the mad and ill restrained. Toleration for individual differences of

dress and personal style would be encouraged.

Like Morris, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) also took up the theme of

the ‘simpliﬁcation’ of life, attacking the vaunted claims of ‘civilisation’ as

such. Though his plea for ‘non-governmental society’ places him closer

to anarchism than socialism in some respects (Carpenter 1890), Carpen-

ter’s description of gerontocratic rule in non-governmental society closely

parallels Owen’s proposals, but was based even more directly on the idea

of primitive society (Carpenter 1917,pp.77–8; see Tsuzuki 1980). Other

prominent English socialists, like J. Morrison Davidson, also gave greater

support to anarchist by contrast to statist socialism (Davidson n.d., pp. 7–8).

Fabianism

Commencing in 1883, Thomas Davidson’s Fellowship of the New Life

proposed a small-scale community of like-minded adherents to the reﬁned

principles of the ‘Vita Nuova’. Some of its members formed the Fabian

Society in Januar y 1884, naming it after a Roman general famous for

wearing his opponents down. After German Social Democracy, Fabianism

was to remain one of the most long-lived of socialist groupings of the period.

The Society’s members included Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas,

Sydney Olivier, Frank Podmore, Annie Besant and George Bernard Shaw.

Its agenda included a commitment to gradualist, evolutionary socialism

through a process of permeating the existing political system; an emphasis

upon municipal rather than centralised control; and the belief that rule by

bureaucratic expertise and the intellectual class generally was both inevitable

and preferable. Its most important document is the Fabian Essays in Socialism

(1889) (see Cole 1943, 1962; Mackenzie and Mackenzie 1979;McBriar

1962;Wolfe1975). Some of its ideas were extended in Guild Socialism (e.g.

Goldwell, 1918).

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was also a member of the Fabian Society. In

New Worlds for Old (1908) he described his aims in explicitly socialist terms

(Wells 1908,p.1), while later terming his goal the ‘Great State’ (Wells

et al. 1912). In A Modern Utopia (1905) Wells put forward a scheme for

a voluntary leadership body of devotees to the public good, called the

‘Samurai’, which is indicative of crucial problems in socialist theorisation of

democratic mechanisms and organisations through this period and into the

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Gregory Claeys

twentieth century. Wells soon became disillusioned with the Samurai ideal,

fearing an inevitable decline into oligarchy of all such elitist organisations,

and with Orwell and others would promote the thesis of the ‘treason of

the intellectuals’ in twentieth-century socialist politics. Captains of industry,

Hegelian bureaucrats, the enlightened tyranny of mandarin socialist intel-

lectuals, Saint-Simonians and Comtists, had, in this view, all failed to replace

traditional leadership.

The Fabians rejected Marx’s theory of value, his revolutionism and his

antagonism towards the state, and substituted an ideal of the exploited com-

munity for Marx’s proletarian class war. They were enormously successful as

a propaganda organisation, circulating 175 pamphlets before 1914, in some

millions of copies. The Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893,was

much indebted to Fabian ideas. Its most important theoretician was the later

Labour Party leader James Ramsay MacDonald, author of Socialism and Soci-

ety, Socialism and Government and other works. The miners’ leader, James

Keir Hardie (1856–1915), popularised socialist ideals amongst the trade

unions. Also inﬂuential was Robert Blatchford’s Clarion movement, whose

ideals were expressed in the immensely successful Merrie England (1894),

which proposed nationalisation of the land and other productive assets, a

system of agricultural self-subsistence, reduced industrialisation, an increase

in working class leisure and education, the introduction of communal laun-

dries and kitchens in working-class districts, and a general curtailment of

drudgery and waste. Of the accusation that the regulation of work by the

government would be despotic, Blatchford was utterly dismissive; no despo-

tism could be worse than the existing system (Blatchford 1908,p.184;but

contrast Blatchford 1909).

11 Extra-European socialism: Australasia and the USA

Two extra-European developments in socialist thought and activity merit

special mention: Australasia and the United States. In Australia and New

Zealand, as in many colonies, the advantages of collective organisation and

enterprise in developing a relatively primitive economy and infrastructure

where limited private capital was available (as in railway construction) were

readily apparent. In Australia the Canadian-born journalist William Lane

(1861–1917) gave impetus in the early 1880s to a movement that spawned

initiatives to nationalise railways and introduce the eight-hour day. Old age

pensions were ﬁrst introduced in New Zealand in 1898, Minimum Wages

Boards in Victoria in 1896, and compulsory arbitration of labour disputes in

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New Zealand and South Australia in 1894, besides a variety of acts respecting

land tenure, compulsory primary education and the extension of the vote

to women (ﬁrst in New Zealand, in 1893). (For Australia see Ledger 1909.

For New Zealand, Le Rossignol 1911;Lee1938;Reeves1902; Siegfried

1914.)

American socialism in the early nineteenth century was dominated by an

Owenite period (1824–30) (see Bestor 1950;Harris1966), and a Fourierist

phase (1840–50; see Guarneri 1991), in which over thirty mostly shor t-

lived communities were founded, themselves indebted to earlier traditions

of Shaker, Rappite and other forms of Christian communalism (Nordhoff

1966;Noyes1870). The advantages of mutual assistance on the frontier

assisted the socialist communities, which declined as private land settle-

ment extended. The more long-lived included John Humphrey Noyes’

Oneida community (1847–81), which promoted a scheme of group mar-

riage on quasi-eugenic grounds. Leading critics of inequality of property

included Thomas Skidmore, Langton Byllesby and Cornelius Blatchly. In

various writers, such as Parke Godwin, socialism and anti-slavery ideals

were united. By the late 1870s German Social Democracy, anarchism and

a variety of domestic socialist groups also began to inﬂuence American

thought, culminating in the formation of the Socialist Labor Party, whose

programme was laid down in 1889. Amongst the more popular works of

socialist thought, Laurence Gronlund’s highly successful The Co-operative

Commonwealth (1886) described a scheme for electing managers from the

bottom up through the entire industrial ediﬁce (Gronlund 1886,pp.151–

79.) Here ‘government’, as in Saint-Simon, would largely be supplanted

by ‘administration’. (On the origins of later American socialism, see Ely

1894; Hillquit 1903; Hughan 1912;Obermann1947; Quint 1953; Sotheran

1892.)

Thereafter two leading ﬁgures, Henry George (1839–97)andEdward

Bellamy (1850–98), emerged in the United States. A journalist born in

Philadelphia, George expanded a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Pol-

icy (1871) into an enormously successful book, Progress and Poverty (1879),

which contended that all forms of taxation except that on land should

be abolished, since land ownership was invariably a function of monopoly

power. While George did not call himself a socialist, many of his follow-

ers identiﬁed with the term and his ideas, and especially the view that

poverty could be prevented by state activity, were extraordinarily inﬂuential

in Britain and the US in particular (see Andelson 1979). Bellamy pub-

lished an extremely inﬂuential utopia, Looking Backward (

1888),

which gave

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