6.7 Ideologies of Change and Reform Movements

In the 1800s, liberalism meant something different from its everyday American meaning today. Classical liberals wanted written constitutions, protection of individual rights such as free speech and religion, representative parliaments, and economic freedom with little government interference (laissez-faire).

Economic liberals built on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that population tends to grow faster than the food supply, and David Ricardo argued that wages would tend to stay near the level needed to survive. Both ideas made reformers doubtful that helping the poor could work.

Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism judged every law by one test: does it produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number? That practical standard pushed reforms of prisons, courts and government. John Stuart Mill later defended individual freedom in On Liberty (1859), arguing that the state should restrict a person only to prevent harm to others, and argued for women's equality in The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill also accepted that government could act to fix some social problems, a sign of liberalism slowly moving away from strict laissez-faire.

Liberals argued among themselves about how far political participation should extend, and most early liberals wanted the vote limited to men with property and education. Liberal campaigns such as Britain's Anti-Corn Law League pushed for free trade. More radical voices went further. British radicals and continental republicans wanted every adult man to vote and to count as a full citizen whether or not he owned property, and a few said women should have the same rights.

Socialists argued that free-market capitalism made a few people rich and most people poor, and that the means of production should be owned or run collectively. The first socialists, later called utopian by Marx, believed that a better society could be built by example and persuasion.

• Robert Owen, a Welsh-born factory owner, ran the New Lanark mills in Scotland with shorter hours, schools and decent housing, then founded a cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana (1825), which soon failed.
• Charles Fourier proposed planned communities called phalansteries where work would be shared and made enjoyable.
• Henri de Saint-Simon wanted society run by scientists, engineers and industrialists for the good of all.
• Louis Blanc called for state-funded workshops guaranteeing the right to work, an idea briefly tried in Paris in 1848.
• Flora Tristan linked workers' rights and women's rights and called for an international workers' union (1843).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, and Marx's major work, Capital, appeared in 1867. Marx called his ideas scientific socialism, because he claimed history moved by fixed laws toward a predictable outcome, a deterministic view. Its core claims:

• History is driven by class struggle between those who own the means of production and those who work for them.
• Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat by paying workers less than the value their labor creates.
• Competition will concentrate wealth in fewer hands and push more people into the working class, until workers become conscious of their shared interest and overthrow capitalism.
• After the revolution, a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat would end private property; eventually a classless society would make the state unnecessary.

By the 1890s some socialists, led by the German Eduard Bernstein, argued for revisionism: since workers' lives were improving and they could vote, socialism could come gradually through elections and reforms rather than revolution. Orthodox Marxists rejected this. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg insisted on revolution, and Clara Zetkin linked Marxism to the cause of working women. In practice, though, most western socialist parties worked within parliaments.

Anarchists rejected the state entirely, including a workers' state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon attacked private property in What Is Property? (1840) and favored small cooperative communities. The Russian Mikhail Bakunin clashed with Marx inside the First International (1864–1876) and was expelled in 1872. Some anarchists turned to assassination as “propaganda of the deed,” killing figures such as French President Sadi Carnot (1894) and Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898). The French thinker Georges Sorel, associated with revolutionary syndicalism, argued that a general strike and the myth of violent struggle could destroy the existing order.