Pioneers of the Left

...His intention was to make society fit the true nature of man, rather than remaking or repressing human nature to suit the requirements of a rational social order...

...We find, for instance, a wide and perceptive acquaintance with the facts of economic injustice in Fourier's work, his critique developed alongside those fantastic utopian schemes many have heard of but few had the patience to read...

...Since he minimizes or ignores Proudhon's positive achievements, this loaded presentation gives us only a caricature—with the result that his often penetrating points are thereby rendered useless...

...But SaintSimonism also became wary of the dangers of leaving social direction to expert administrators and scientists...

...Lichtheim surveys his subject without caring to learn much from it and without offering any strikingly new insights or information...

...This, however, was not recognized at first by the originators of socialism...

...The great dream of a world made happy through industrialization under a planned economy and total social management originated with the first major socialist, Saint-Simon...

...Later applications of ideas to practice and the definition of doctrines made identification convenient—but at heart socialism remains a matter of temper and relative emphasis, with the identity of "true" socialism as uncertain as ever...

...ONE OF THE MOST INTELLIGENT and prolific among contemporary historians of socialism, George Lichtheim displays in almost all of his work two sides: he is often annoyingly facile and cocksure, yet illuminating to a degree more restrained authors rarely are...

...WHEN SOCIALISM AROSE, in the early nineteenth century, men were just beginning to attain the means and hope of reducing or ending afflictions that most had always been forced to endure...

...His naively prophetic vision poses an ironic contrast to the reality of present-day technocracy...

...When the term "socialism" gained currency in the 1830s and 40s, this was about all it signified...

...302 pp...

...Some matters, like the origin of the anarchist's notorious phrase, "property is theft," or his attitude toward Louis Bonaparte, are the subjects of old controversies long settled and best not argued again, though on others one can grant Lichtheim his particular opinion...

...If the latter welcomed basic changes in social relationships—many did not —they expected them to follow from a reconstitution of the political system and from the natural evolution of the economy, which such change and an application of science would promote...

...Only in his later works and in those of his followers did Saint-Simonism develop a profound concern for the class of the "most numerous and most poor...

...The dream became one of universal moral regeneration as well as of rational organization...

...His predetermined perspective is apparent when he writes, in reference to Tom Paine, "A socialist doctrine could not be formulated until industrial capitalism had revealed its secret...

...There are the elements of a libertarian tradition, which was emphasized in anarchism and syndicalism but could never be squeezed out of the more authoritarian areas of socialist development...

...Socialism originated in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789-94, and in response to its experience and tradition—much more than to the yet nascent industrial revolution...

...Proudhon may have been the bad economist Marx said he was, but he did rip away liberal political BOOKS economy's cloak of complacent ethical neutrality and undermined the claims of bourgeois values to universal justification...

...politics and government had little place in the vision of many of them...

...Now all this is too imprecise to make convenient historical distinctions...

...Historical conditions were such that establishing a republic would establish the bourgeoisie as the preeminent segment of society, while promising little benefit to the poor and propertyless...

...The chief legacy of the French Revolution for social radicalism was that of left Jacobin republicanism, and it was to distinguish themselves from the essentially political orientation of the Jacobin tradition that early socialists identified themselves as those who focused on the "social problem...

...the modern tragedy has been to suppose the latter would suffice or that it would by itself produce the former...

...Where they fit the Marxian system they were superseded and where they were not, the ideas have usually been disregarded or scorned by most socialists...

...Socialists separated themselves from other believers in progress by their conviction that the liberation of human potential could come about only through major reconstruction of the social system...

...Much was unforeseen or slighted by him, and much more so by his followers...

...Socialists" focused on the "social problem"—this was for them a way of consciously distinguishing themselves from those who expected that all problems could be resolved through essentially political reform or revolution and who concentrated on these political changes...

...The book, which concludes with a chapter on "the Marxian synthesis," treats earlier socialist thought as a dull prelude to a grand finale...

...hence the evolution of schemes for control of the technical elite by others with a highly developed moral and aesthetic sense...

...In an important but restricted sense, the origins of socialism are just a prelude to Marx's synthesis, since there is so much that he grasped and explained far better than his predecessors...

...In one way or another those whom we often label socialists concluded, "Most men are forced to live in severe material deprivation and spiritual degradation...

...Other utopian plans—self-sufficient small communist societies, producers' and consumers' cooperatives, state-initiated enterprises operated by workers—either proved impractical or could be put to use only in modified forms...

...That which does not prefigure Marx, Lichtheim either excludes or treats with a disdain ranging from the gently patronizing to open hostility...

...the ideas and attitudes of BOOKS real men do not fit into distinct categories except when rigidly doctrinaire—and that came only in socialism's later history...

...But Marx could scarcely include in his vision or explain adequately with his science all that concerns the left today...

...In consequence, the early theory is "utopian" in the usual pejorative sense but is also often illuminating at just those points where traditional Marxism shrouds the things we need to see...

...Jacobin republicanism was essentially bourgeois, though not because it appealed to the bourgeoisie only, for a major part of the lower classes in France actively supported Jacobinism both during and long after the Revolution...

...All this and much more belongs to that version of Western humanism which is socialism...

...This perfectly Marxist statement is at best a half-truth, for the experience of the century following the appearance of Das Kapital has given ample cause to the belief that there should be more to socialism than response to and attack on industrial capitalism...

...And only after this recognition did socialism become closely associated with movements of laboring men struggling in opposition to rather than in subordinate alliance with bourgeois groups striving to reshape the world into a form whose principal beneficiaries would be the middle class...

...Such attacks, divorced as they are from the constrictive framework of Marxist economic science, are the sort of fresh versions of the familiar that can provide stimulus for new thought...

...No longer does it have to be so...

...Pre-Marxist socialists were weakest in economics, evolving no sound substitute for the analytic structure of liberal economic theory...

...One of the most striking examples is the work of Fourier, whose endlessly detailed and frequently bizarre schemes contain countless remarkable perceptions of the fundamental social and psychic needs of men...

...but the sympathetic understanding of distant points of perspective that is vital to good intellectual history seems doubly difficult to attain here because Marx has so altered our vision...

...Like many others before him, Lichtheim takes great pains to identify what really was "socialism," and to distinguish it from radical democracy, utilitarianism, anarchism, and other "isms...

...I think he also has been hasty, even careless, in his selection and organization of material for discussion and in many of his conclusions, but this leads to the consequences of a far more serious shortcoming: Lichtheim has little sympathy or feeling for those unfortunate enough not to have benefited from Marx's discoveries...

...The frequent brilliance and fecundity of early socialist thought can nevertheless be astonishing, even though it consists of partial insights only...

...it is fitting that in writing of his vision he first addressed himself to bourgeois entrepreneurs and scientists...

...The matter would be minor, were it not that Lichtheim uses this and other gratuitous deprecatory observations to strengthen his more substantive criticisms...

...The rest of the figures in this book fare a little better...

...He even calls up charges from old polemics, principally with respect to Proudhon...

...But how can he say Proudhon "extolled war" (in La guerre et la paix), when it should be obvious that the book actually praises war in its first half only the better to condemn it in the second...

...It is rather like a psychoanalyst dashing off a history of philosophy taken as a series of glimpses of what Freud would finally discover...

...One's major impression is that the book, the first part of a larger history of socialism, was written in a hurry to get on to matters more interesting to Lichtheim than the antecedents of Marxism...

...But that this is so they can hardly learn from Lichtheim's latest book...

...The so-called utopians who came before Marx have much to tell us...

...The plans themselves are no more practical now than when first conceived, but many of the concerns and insights that went into their formulation remain important...

...Socialists" were differentiated from others by temperament, direction of concerns, and areas of emphasis...

...They did not think political changes such as their contemporaries envisaged were likely to do much to accomplish this task...

...Society as now constituted makes man miserable: we will reconstitute the social order to change this, making it possible for man to become all that he is capable of...

...His most recent book, The Origins of Socialism, seems to me, however, a failure...

...Lichtheim, whose own perspective derives from Marxism, has not left its exclusiveness far enough behind to accept Marx's predecessors on their own merits and terms...

...They did, however, develop sharply effective criticisms of the monstrosities of social and economic inequality and of the frequent absurdity of liberal assumptions...

...Then there are among early socialists varying notions of the "natural" community and of the social relationships appropriate to it, and ideas about the essentials of true equality...

...Socialists are discovering that this humanist core is as important to them as the science and struggle embodied in the Marxist legacy, and they can find it elsewhere in the movement's origins than in the early works of Marx...

...both the diversity of their views and their frequent closeness to others who denied themselves the label made the identity of socialism uncertain...

...Most of the elements characteristic of later socialist thought can be found in the early stages, although there they are neither contained and ordered by the systematic theses of Marxism nor adapted to the requirements of actual mass movements...

...The last he displays toward Proudhon...

...Such a procedure is neither valid nor enlightening...