The Early Socialists

Abstract

To treat the early socialists as a homogeneous group would be highly misleading. A wide gulf separates Fourier, for example, from Thompson and Hodgskin, or Saint-Simon and the Babouvists. What unites these different strands is their opposition to the individualist liberalism of the day and their critique of laissez faire, of the notion that competitive capitalism could be left to regulate itself without conscious intervention, planning and the development of cooperative institutions to counteract the anarchism and egoism of market society.¹⁰³ Another commonality also needs emphasis, though it is of a different kind for it serves to distinguish the early socialists from the Marxist tradition: very rarely do their writings contain the argument that the establishment of socialism required the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie, or that the main actor in this drama would be the mass of propertyless factory labourers or proletariat. Suggestions of this kind were hinted at but did not become the core doctrine of any socialist school until the industrial working class began to emerge as a significant political and economic force in Britain and France in the 1830s.