How the French Revolution Shaped Socialist Thought

Welcome to season eight of Origin Story. This season we’re trying something different: one big narrative across multiple topics. It’s the story of socialism, from the earliest blueprints to the present day, Lenin to Labour, Marx to Mao, Gramsci to Gorbachev and Proudhon to Piketty. We’re talking about the evolution of a powerful idea in all its manifestations and exploring how it came to encompass both Soviet communism and European social democracy. It’s arguably the most earth-shaking political concept of the last 200 years.

H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature.

The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe.

Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die. 

What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism.

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Reading list

• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007)

• James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912)

• Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839)

• G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959)

• G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

• Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020)

• John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870)

• Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

• Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908)

• Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

• Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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