Socialism in Thought And Action

it leads to an unjust distribution of wealth, and that it fails to afford an opportunity to the masses for the proper development of personality. While the socialist criticism of present conditions differs from that of other students of social problems, their conception of the future industrial state 1 and their theory of social evolution constitute their chief points of departure from other schools of social thought. A school with which modern socialists have often been confused, but from which they sharply separate themselves, is that of the utopian socialists. Social prophets have written their versions of their ideal state from time immemorial ? Plato, Campanella, Sir Thomas More are but a few of the social dreamers of past centuries. That school of thought, however, which is usually referred to as the utopian socialists, a school composed of such writersas St. Simon (1760-1825), Fourier (1772-1837), Louis Blanc (1811-1882), Proudhon (1809-1865), Cabet (1788-1856), and Robert Owen (1771-1858),2 did not arise until the latter part of the eighteenth century. These utopians portrayed in minutest detail the workings, as they conceived them, of a future cooperative state, wherein liberty, equality and fraternity would prevail, and inspired their followers to organize communities in Europe and America for the purpose of demonstrating the practicability of their dreams. In the United States the most spectacular of these communities was the Brook Farm exp...