The origins of socialism are particularly slippery and, in variant forms, can be traced back to any number of sources: to Plato's Republic, to the spiritual equality proclaimed by the Old Testament prophet Micah, the brotherly love preached by Jesus of Nazareth, the Utopianism of Sir Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, or to the radical levelling of the Putney Debates.39 But in its modern form socialism emerges out of the religious and ideological anarchy of the French Revolution. In the 1790s and early 1800s the search for a new pouvoir spirituel, after the fall of the Roman Catholic Church and extensive de-Christianization across France, led to the development of a number of identifiably socialist sects.
One of the first was founded by Count Claude Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, the aristocratic French war hero turned revolutionary partisan turned property speculator turned scourge of the idle rich. Saint-Simon was a descendant of the court chronicler of Louis XIV's Versailles, and his starting point was his belief that society was entering a new, critical phase of science and industry which required new forms of governance and worship. He called for a ‘science of mankind’ which would understand societies as ‘bodies organised… like physiological phenomena’.40 This rational approach to the management of human affairs would avoid precisely the kind of anarchy France had experienced during the 1790s, but for it to succeed power had to be transferred from the hapless, nepotistic elites of the ancien régime to a hierarchy of industrialists, scientists, engineers and artists (a kind of technological version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's vision of a ruling clerisy). They alone would be able to plan a society ‘in which all individuals will be classed according to their capacities and remunerated according to their work’. As such, politics would become an exact discipline, changing ‘from the conjectured to the positive, from metaphysics to physics’.41 The political act of ‘governing’ would give way to the objective process of ‘administering’ society so every individual could realize his potential. As Saint-Simon put it, in a phrase that Marx would later so successfully adapt, ‘From each according to his abilities, from each ability according to his work.
At the core of Saint-Simon's ideal society was an ethic of industry. Saint-Simon's heroes were the ‘industrial class’ (les industriels), producers not parasites. His enemies were the traditional rulers of France – the aristocracy, clergy, government officials (those he termed les oisifs) – as well as the ‘idlers’ or ‘consumers’ of the new bourgeoisie who inherited wealth or leeched off the workers. In the coming scientific era man would stop exploiting man and, instead, unite to exploit nature. Existing patterns of private property, inheritance and competition would be abolished as society collectively, harmoniously put its shoulder to the wheel. ‘All men will work; they will regard themselves as labourers attached to one workshop whose efforts will be directed to guide human intelligence according to my divine foresight. The Supreme Council of Newton will direct their works.’42
And what was this Supreme Council of Newton? Clearly indebted to Robespierre's secular theology of the Supreme Being, this was to be the governing body of the new society on which would sit savants – ‘men of genius’ who would act as ‘torches illuminating mankind’. The Saint-Simonian system offered a sacerdocy of science in which a modern, rational society would be seamlessly organized by an elite technocracy which would preside over a chambre d'invention (manned by 200 engineers and 100 artists), a chambre d'examination (100 biologists; 100 physicists; 100 chemists) and a chambre d'exécu-tion (the leading industrialists and entrepreneurs of the day). Just as Isaac Newton had reordered the universe around the principle of gravitational attraction, so the Supreme Council, chaired by a mathematician, would ensure society's smooth running along equally applicable universal laws.
In his 1825 work, The New Christianity, Saint-Simon took these ideas further to urge a secular religion of humanity. From the efficient governance of society would spring a new spirit of human harmony, immediately transcending the guilt and alienation of Christianity. Society could then return to the fundamental ‘principle of Christian morality’: brotherly love. From this followed the mission to ‘improve the moral and physical existence of the poorest class’, a goal which could never be achieved under the iniquitous, wasteful and inhuman system of competition that underpinned modern capitalism.43 It was this promise of moral regeneration and spiritual growth through collective action that led to the Saint-Simonian sects and their popular gospel of fraternity. Some altogether more risqué ideas about the sanctification of the body, as opposed to the Christian renunciation of the flesh, also played a part in attracting adherents. If only mankind united together, Saint-Simon was convinced that its productive energies could be channelled into creating a ‘New Harmony’ here on earth.
Saint-Simon's vision of a post-capitalist, post-Christian Utopia was shared by the other leading French socialist of the early nineteenth century, Charles Fourier. One of the more likeable characters within the progressive pantheon, he was born in 1772 to a prosperous cloth merchant and spent his life as a silk broker and commercial salesman in southern France – notably in the silk-weaving districts of Lyons. ‘I am a child of the marketplace,’ he explained, ‘born and brought up in mercantile establishments. I have witnessed the infamies of commerce with my own eyes.’44 However, Fourier's socialism was not simply the product of experience. Describing himself as a new Columbus, after a year spent studying natural sciences at the Biblio-théque Nationale in 1799 he claimed to have discovered the true science of mankind which would, at a stroke, end the misery, exploitation and unhappiness of modern civilization. He recounted it all in his bizarre 1808 opus, The Theory of the Four Movements.
Between accounts of lemonade seas and mating planets, Fourier offered a simple proposition: men and women were governed by their natural, God-given passions. In fact, each individual could be slotted into one of precisely 810 different personality types, drawn from twelve passions, and lived in a world governed by the four movements of social, animal, organic and material which constituted the General System of Nature (as something of a sociological Linnaeus, Fourier was very good at lists). To attempt to repress any of these passions on the altar of an edified ideal of human conduct was the terrible mistake of contemporary society. ‘Nature driven out through the door comes back through the window.’ But this was exactly what nineteenth-century bourgeois France was doing with its artificial constructs, like monogamous marriage, which in true Newtonian fashion produced unwarranted counter-passions ‘as malignant as the natural passions would have been benign’. The equal and opposite reaction to Church-sanctioned monogamy, for example, could be seen in the thirty-two different types of adultery evident in France. In Fourier's harmonious society, citizens would be allowed full sexual freedom, starting and ending relationships as they desired. Women would have control over reproduction and children would be given the opportunity to choose between real or adoptive fathers.45 It was the same with economics as with sex. The subversion of benign passions had turned ambition into avarice, leeched work of all joy and allowed the exploitative, parasitic middlemen to flourish. Revolted by the unemployment, poverty and hunger of 1790s Marseilles, Fourier time and again revealed his detestation of the deadly vice of capitalism. ‘It is falsehood with all of its paraphernalia, bankruptcy, speculation, usury and cheating of every kind.’46 He especially despised the merchant class who neither toiled nor span, but walked away with vast, paper-money profits.
Capitalism's greatest crime, though, was that it sullied the soul of man by denying him pleasure. In the mangled ethic of modern civilization, it was monetary wealth that secured such luxuries as food, love and art. Only the rich could revel in the kind of sensuous gastronomic and amorous delights which might, in fact, have appealed to the passions of numerous others (such as, for example, Fourier).47 This iniquitous state of affairs was bolstered by the Roman Catholic Church's hypocritical creed of chastity and holy poverty. Fourier, the frustrated, lonely travelling salesman, saw little virtue in impecunio
usness or the banality of a monogamous married life.
Traditional politics had no answer to these human sufferings. There was no programme of reform or economic adjustment that addressed the unnatural repressions of modern society. So the answer was to leave the rotting corpse of nineteenth-century Europe behind and reorganize humanity in a series of autonomous communities to be known as ‘phalansteries’. In contrast to the individual anarchy of revolutionary France, the phalanstery was to be efficiently run on the science of ‘passionate attraction’. Working from how human nature was, rather than moralists' projections of how it should be, the phalanstery was organized to cater for each different personality type, passion and unity. As such, its ideal size would number 1,620. The guarantee of a ‘sexual minimum’ for all residents would remove the medley of frustrations and desires that distorted ‘amorous’ relationships in patriarchal, bourgeois society. Fourier delighted in describing the kind of highly choreographed orgies – modelled on a sensuous inversion of the Catholic Mass – which would take place in the phalanstery, catering to every form of sexual inclination (including incest).
Alongside a ‘sexual minimum’ came a ‘social minimum’. Just as Fourier would restore respect to sexual love, so his system would revive the dignity of work. The problem of modern employment was that it, too, denied man the fulfilment of his natural passions – assigning him to tasks that were both monotonous and ill-suited to particular capacities. In the phalanstery, by contrast, residents would be able to work at up to eight different jobs a day in spontaneously formed groups of friends and lovers. This unleashing of abilities would produce an outpouring of talent as men and women marched out to the fields, factories, workshops, studios and kitchens eager to fulfil their industrious enthusiasms. Fourier, contra the Catholic Church, did not think human beings were born to suffer. Instead, all that was needed was the creation of new communities to allow man to flourish in accordance with his innate passions.
Nowhere in Saint-Simon and Fourier are there demands for radical equality (‘a social poison’ in Fourier's words) or calls for the violent seizure of power in the name of ‘the people’. Their socialism was a noble, frequently eccentric but fundamentally inspiring vision of human fulfilment. Indeed, given their experience of and attitude towards the blood and horror of the French Revolution, both thinkers displayed very little interest in violently challenging existing social systems. Instead, they urged a programme of gradual moral reform which would be inspired by the example of harmonious communities separated off from the iniquities of existing society. As Engels put it, ‘Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments.’48 America witnessed the most practical achievement of the Fourierist vision with the establishment from the 1840s of a series of communities at Brook Farm, Massachusetts; La Reunion in Dallas County, Texas; and Raritan Bay Union in New Jersey. However, these phalansteries fell rather short when it came to converting the rest of American society to the Fourierist project. Such failings would allow Engels to belittle Saint-Simon and Fourier (along with Robert Owen) as ‘Utopian socialists’ in contrast to his and Marx's rigorous, practical ‘scientific socialism’. Whilst Engels would later reveal a profound indebtedness to Fourier's analysis of bourgeois marriage and greatly admired his social criticism (‘Fourier inexorably exposes the hypocrisy of respectable society, the contradiction between its theory and its practice, the dullness of its entire mode of life’),49 he criticized the Utopians’ failure to understand the function of the proletariat or the revolutionary ratchet of history. ‘These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.’50
Early nineteenth-century France harboured other ideologues equally impatient with this rarefied nonsense of movements and phalansteries. These were the communists. Led by the likes of Etienne Cabet and Louis-Auguste Blanqui, these outlawed Parisian sects, active during the 1830s, concerned themselves much more with direct political change than social analysis. While Cabet advocated the path of peaceful transition to ‘a society founded on the basis of the most perfect equality’, Blanqui urged a revolution and lionized the martyrdom of ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf who, in the name of the people, had organized a doomed rebellion in 1796 against the inequality and poverty of post-revolutionary France. Their communism or ‘Babouvism’ was a radical, violent creed inspired by the pure, pre-industrial egalitarianism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They wanted to reshape existing society, not retreat to phalansteries and communes. Supported by sections of the disgruntled Parisian working class, the communists (a term which first gained its wider currency in the early 1840s) constituted a revival of the revolutionary republican tradition: they demanded an end to inheritance, the abolition of private property and ‘a great national community of goods’ forced on the people in the aftermath of revolution. A botched attempt by Blanqui and his supporters in 1839 to usher in the new Jerusalem by force ended up with a term of life imprisonment – from which he was intermittently released. Marx and Engels, enjoying their boozy evenings in Berlin and Bonn debating Hegelian philosophy, had little to do with these earnest, early communists. But one German who did was the so-called communist rabbi, or, as Engels would describe him, the ‘first Communist of the party’, Moses Hess.
*
Like Marx and Engels, Hess, too, was a child of the Rhineland, born in Bonn in 1812 when the city was under Napoleonic occupation and, as Isaiah Berlin puts it, ‘the gates of the Jewish ghetto were flung wide open, and its inmates, after centuries of being driven in upon themselves, were permitted to emerge into the light of day’.51 He shared with Marx an impressive Semitic heritage, with rabbis on both parents’ sides. His father, however, had sought a life outside the synagogue as a sugar refiner in Cologne, and Hess was left in the care of his ‘extremely orthodox’ maternal grandfather, who brought him up on stories of the Jews’ expulsion from Israel. ‘The strict old man's snow-white beard would be drenched with tears at this reading; we children, too, of course, could not prevent ourselves from weeping and sobbing.’52
While Hess never fully freed himself from this over-emotional inheritance, he did lose his faith. ‘My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [i.e. Judaism]. It collapsed… Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist. The world became a burden and a curse to me. I looked at it as a cadaver.’53 Just as Engels pére had little patience for Friedrich's Romanticism, so Hess's father had no use for his son's melancholic introspection and pressured him to join the family refining business. But Hess was reluctant to participate in what he saw as the moral compromises of commerce and he fled for a year of European travel. Isaiah Berlin affectionately describes him at this time as ‘a generous, high-minded, kindly, touchingly pure-hearted, enthusiastic, not over-astute young man, ready, indeed eager, to suffer for his ideas, filled with love of humanity, optimism, a passion for abstractions, and aversion from the world of practical affairs towards which the more hard-headed members of his family were trying to steer him’.54
It was in Paris, in the early 1830s, that he discovered a cure for his atheism amongst the communist secret societies and increasingly outlandish Saint-Simonians. Like Engels before him, and many thousands after him, Hess filled the gap left by his abandoned religious heritage with the new socialist creed of humanity. He recounted his intellectual conversion in The Sacred History of Mankind (1837), which highlighted the growing social disparity between ‘pauperism’ and an ‘aristocracy of wealth’ and posited a Babouvist-inspired community of goods as the answer. The book was one of the earliest expressions of communist thought in Germany and enjoyed a favourable reception in liber
al Rhineland circles. Long before Marx and Engels had codified their views, Hess and, following him, the artisan communist Wilhelm Weitling, were introducing German audiences to the idea of a radical, egalitarian communist future in which the spiritual and social crises of the day would be resolved. Hess's real breakthrough came when he attached these communist ideas to Young Hegelian thinking.
The final link in this intellectual chain was provided by the entrancing figure of August von Cieszkowski. Described by his biographer as ‘a sort of Polish Alexander Herzen’, Cieszkowski was a wealthy, cultivated aristocrat, educated at Cracow and then Berlin – where he participated in the Young Hegelian struggle against Schelling.55 His military background inspired in Cieszkowski a demand for action and he soon lost interest in the endlessly arcane nature of Hegelian philosophizing. In 1838 he published Prolegomena to Historiosophy, which sought to turn Hegel's work from an analytical tool into a socially oriented plan for change. The dialectic, he suggested, was entering a new age of synthesis where thought would have to be combined with action. What Europe needed was ‘a philosophy of practical activity, of “praxis”, exercising a direct influence on social life and developing the future in the realm of concrete activity’.56 The futile, beer-soaked discussion so beloved by the Young Hegelians had to be rechannelled into a programme of practical reform.
Hess was immediately taken by Cieszkowski's writings. ‘The time has come for the philosophy of spirit to become a philosophy of action,’ he proclaimed. In his book The European Triarchy (1841), Hess spelled out precisely what such a communist strategy would entail. In doing so, he returned to Ludwig Feuerbach's stress on the need to end religious alienation and developed his thinking a stage further. Of course, Hess agreed, man could regain his essence only by ending his subservience towards a Christian deity, but such a radical shift should not be attempted on an individual basis; what was needed was a broader, communal process of associational conversion. ‘Theology is anthropology. That is true, but it is not the whole truth. The being of man, it must be added, is social, the co-operation of the various individuals towards a common aim… and the true doctrine of man, the true humanism, is the theory of human sociability. That is to say, anthropology is socialism.57 For what socialism or communism promised (and Hess, like Marx and Engels, used the terms interchangeably) was heaven on earth: everything that in Christianity had been represented prophetically would come to pass in a truly humane society founded upon the eternal laws of love and reason.58
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