"..the more one gets to know the important works of the old socialist writers, the more one realises just how much so called scientific socialism owes to the "utopians" who were, for so long, forgotten on account of the colossal "renown" of the marxist school and of other factors which relegated to oblivion the socialist literature from the earliest period. One of Marx's most important teachers and the one who laid the foundations for his subsequent development was none other than Proudhon, the anarchist so libelled and misunderstood by the legalistic socialists. [Rudolph Rocker, 'Jacobin Traditions And Socialism']
EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY (Franz Oppenheimer)
1.community
2.society
3.economy
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EVOLUTION OF HIERARCHY (Oppenheimer)
1st estate - nobility
2nd estate - clergy
3rd estate - capitalist/merchant
EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT
1. clergy (Thomas More)
2. philosophers (Voltaire)
3. technocrats (Bentham)
EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN NATION-STATE
"...In France, the league of the capitalists with the Crown against the then armed and active nobility had succeeded in subjecting the Frondeurs under the absolute power of the King. From this time on, this new estate represented itself as the Nation, and the term "National Economy" takes the place of the older term "Political Economy." -(Oppenheimer)
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Development of POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (socialist) in Western Europe 1700-1900
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romanticism - 1800-1825 (approx)
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Montesquieu (1689-1755) separation of powers
Voltaire (1694-1778) 'Dictionnaire Philosophique'
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Gabriel de Mably (1709-1785) early state communist
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) 'The Social Contract'
Denis Diderot -(1713-1784) philosophical liberal/anarchist
Immanual Kant (1724-1804 ) 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Morelly - (1755) communist 'Code Of Nature '
Graachus Babeuf (1760-1797) synthesist [Rousseau+Mably+Morelly.]
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) UTILITARIAN minimal govt-laissezfair
Paul d'Holbach (1750- ) (historical materialism) precursor to Marx
William Godwin (1756-1836) stateless society movement
Ambrose Cuddon (Godwin offshoot)
Claud Saint-Simon* (1760-1825) utopian-technotheocracy
Johann Fichte (1762-1814) precursor to Hegel
Lois de Saint-Just (1767-1794) early anarchist "A people has but one enemy, the government."
Georg HEGEL (1770-1831) "The State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth."
Robert Owen (1771-1858) (communist) utopian small centralist
Charles Fourier (1772-1837) utopian socialist
Etienne CABET (1788-1856) state-communist 'Voyage in Icaria'
Enfantin - the "Industrial Pope" (1796-1864) (Saint-Simonian offshoot) industrial/mystical/theocratic
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)- (Saint-Simonian offshoot) positivist technocratic- scientific/industrial elite.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788�1860) Subjective Idealism (precursor to postmodernism)
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804�1872)
Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) state communist
Max Stirner (1806-1856) individualist 'egoist'
Victor Considerant (1808-1893) (Fourierist offshoot) 'Manifesto of Democracy'
Lois Blanc (1811-1882) state communist
Withelm Weitling(1808-1871)Mankind as it is and as it should be'
Pierre Proudhon * (1809-1865) mutualist-anarchist 'What is Property?'
Bruno Bauer (1809-1882)
S�REN KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855)
Mikhail Bakunin* (1814-76) 'founder' of political anarchism
KARL MARX* (1818-1883)- state communist synthesist [Rousseau+ Considerant+Babeuf+Hegel+Lassale+Proudhon]
Frederik Engels (1820�1895)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) 'Culture and Anarchy'
Ferdinand Lassale* (1825-1864) synthesist [Hegel+Blanc]
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) anarchist-communist
Gumplowicz (1838-1909) professor at Graz (precursor to Oppenheimer)
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) (birth of modernism)
Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) socialdemocrat
Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943) 'The State'
Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919)
Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958) libertarian socialist/syndicalist - 'Nationalism & Culture'
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* Comte; described by Proudhon as "...the apostle of property and the eulogist of labor."
* Victor Considerant was one of the finest socialist writers with whom Marx was acquainted: he referred to him even in the days before he became a socialist. In 1842 the Allgemeine Zeitung attacked the Rheinische Zeitung of which Marx was the editorinchief, charging it with being favourable to communism. Marx then replied in an editorial in which he stated as follows: "Works like those by Leroux, Considerant and above all the penetrating book by Proudhon cannot be criticised in any superficial sense; they require long and careful study before one begins to criticise them." [Rocker]
* When Babeuf and Darthey set up the conspiracy of "The Equals", they aimed to turn France, by means of dictatorship. into an agrarian communist state and, as communists. they appreciated that they would have to set about solving the economic question if they were ever to attain the ideal of the Great Revolution. [Rocker]
* In 1816, he (Saint-Simon) declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. [Engels; Socialism-Utopian & Scientific]
* Proudhon epitomized the new negative attitude of a growing segment of the Left toward that "fictitious being, without intelligence, without passion, without morality, that we call the State." Thus by 1851 the polarisation of nineteenth century European radicalism was already well underway. [Richard Adamiak - The Withering Away Of The State; A Reconsideration.]
* "the theory of the State communists... enmeshes and entangles its adherents, under the pretext of political tactics, in endless accommodations with governments and the various bourgeois political parties - that is, it thrusts them directly into reaction." [Bakunin]
* Lassalle's powerful activity in Germany had smoothed the way for this new (state capitalist) phase of the movement. Lassalle was all his life a passionate worshipper of the idea of the state in the sense of Fichte and Hegel, and had, moreover, appropriated the views of the French state-socialist Louis Blanc, concerning the social functions of government.
* For almost a century the marxists have not ceased to propound the view that Marx and Engels were the discoverers of so called scientific socialism; an artificial distinction was invented between so called utopian socialists and the scientific socialism of the marxists, a distinction that existed only in the imaginations of the latter. In the germanic countries socialist literature has been monopolised by marxist theory, which every social democrat regards as the pure and utterly original product of the scientific discoveries of Marx and Engels. [Rocker]