| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 24-Apr-02 09:16 AM
The death of socialism
by Roger Kimball
Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual … into a part of a much greater whole, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762
We are all socialists nowadays.
—Edward, Prince of Wales, 1895
The most important political event of the twentieth century is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.
—Irving Kristol, 1976
What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers. Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself. The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.” That heart-stopping conundrum—too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience—is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”
We owe the term “socialism” to some followers of Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century British industrialist who founded New Harmony, a short-lived utopian community on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. Owen’s initial reception in America was impressive. In an 1825 address to Congress, Joshua Muravchik reports in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism,[1] Owen’s audience included not only congressmen but also Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, President Monroe, and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Owen described to this august assemblage how his efforts to replace the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system would bring forth a “new man” who was free from the grasping imperatives that had marred human nature from time immemorial. (And not only human nature: the utopian socialist Charles Fourier expected selfishness and cruelty to be obliterated from the animal kingdom as well: one day, he thought, even lions and whales would be domesticated.)
for more read the April issue of http://www.newcriterion.com/
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