Socialism, a second radical doctrine after 1815, began in France. Early French socialists shared a sense of disappointment that political revolution in France had ended with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. They were also alarmed by the rise of laissez faire and the emergence of modern industry, which they saw as fostering inequality and selfish individualism. There was, they believed, an urgent need for a further reorganization of society to establish cooperation and a new sense of community.

Early French socialists felt an intense desire to help the poor, whose conditions had not been improved by industrial advances, and they preached greater economic equality between the rich and the poor. Inspired by the economic planning implemented in revolutionary France (see Chapter 22), they argued that the government should rationally organize the economy to control prices and prevent unemployment. Socialists also believed that government should regulate private property or that private property should be abolished and replaced by state or community ownership.

One of the most influential early socialist thinkers was Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Saint-Simon optimistically proclaimed the tremendous possibilities of industrial development: “The age of gold is before us!” In his view the key to progress was proper social organization that required the “parasites” — the royal court, the aristocracy, lawyers, churchmen — to give way, once and for all, to the “doers” — the leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists. The doers would carefully plan the economy, guide it forward, and improve conditions for the poor.

Charles Fourier (1772–1837), another influential French thinker, envisaged a socialist utopia of self-sufficient communities. An early proponent of the total emancipation of women, Fourier also called for the abolition of marriage, free unions based only on love, and sexual freedom. Some socialist thinkers embraced the even more radical ideas of anarchism. In his 1840 pamphlet What Is Property? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a self-educated printer, famously argued that “property is theft!” Property, he claimed, was profit that was stolen from the worker, who actually produced all wealth.

Up to the 1840s France was the center of socialism, as it had been the center of revolution in Europe, but in the following decades the German intellectual Karl Marx (1818–1883) would weave the diffuse strands of social thought into a distinctly modern ideology. Marx had studied philosophy at the University of Berlin before turning to journalism and economics. In 1848 the thirty-year-old Karl Marx and the twenty-eight-year-old Friedrich Engels (see “Responses to Industrialization” in Chapter 23) published The Communist Manifesto, which became the guiding text of socialism.

Marx’s work united sociology, economics, philosophy, and history in an impressive synthesis. He learned from British political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo to apply social-scientific analysis to economic problems, though he pushed their ideas in radical directions. Deeply influenced by the French socialists, Marx dismissed their appeals to the middle class and the state to help the poor as naïve. Instead he argued that middle-class interests and those of the industrial working class were inevitably opposed to each other. According to the Manifesto, the “history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles.” In Marx’s view, one class had always exploited the other, and, with the advent of modern industry, society was split more clearly than ever before: between the middle class — the bourgeoisie — and the modern working class — the proletariat.

Just as the bourgeoisie had triumphed over the feudal aristocracy in the French Revolution, Marx predicted that the proletariat would conquer the bourgeoisie in a new revolution. While a tiny majority owned the means of production and grew richer, the ever-poorer proletariat was constantly growing in size and in class-consciousness. Marx believed that the critical moment when class conflict would result in revolution was very near, as the last lines of The Communist Manifesto make clear:

Germany . . . is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, that is bound to be . . . the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. . . .

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Marx drew on the arguments of Smith and Ricardo, who taught that labor was the source of all value. He went on to argue that profits were really wages stolen from the workers. Moreover, Marx incorporated Friedrich Engels’s account of the terrible oppression of the new class of factory workers in England. Thus Marx pulled together powerful ideas and insights to create one of the great secular religions out of the intellectual ferment of the early nineteenth century.