Socialism - History
HISTORY
The Origins of Socialism: Early Utopian Socialism
In nineteenth–century England, then the world's most–developed state, just as liberalism was being reshaped to converge with the increasing social power and demands of the working class, socialism was also being reshaped to make it not just an idealist, but a real political movement. There was already a tradition of utopian, idealist thought running through the popular philosophy of the country on which to base socialist doctrines.
The roots of socialist thought, whether they be traced to Plato's Republic, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), to Rousseau's Discourses on the Origins of Inequality Among Mankind (1755), or Morelly's Code of Nature (1755), are invariably idealist. What all these works also have in common is a belief in the fundamental wrongness of private property. In the case of Plato (428–348 B.C.) that wrongness is seen as the...
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