Best Books on the History of Socialism: Utopia to Revolution

Socialism is one of the most argued-over words in political vocabulary. It has been used to describe everything from Scandinavian welfare states to Stalinist gulags, from cooperative bakeries to the nationalization of entire economies. Before you can evaluate any of those uses, it helps to understand where the idea came from and what its proponents actually believed. ## The Utopian Phase The earliest socialists, writing in the early nineteenth century, were called "utopian" by Marx and Engels, a label intended as a criticism. Robert Owen in Britain, Charles Fourier in France, Henri de Saint-Simon: these thinkers believed that industrial capitalism was producing unnecessary misery and that rational planning could create communities of mutual benefit. Owen actually built one, a model factory town in New Lanark, Scotland, and then an experimental community in Indiana called New Harmony. New Harmony failed, but the intellectual tradition Owen contributed to did not. What the utopians shared was a conviction that competition was not a natural law but a social choice, and that cooperation could organize production more efficiently and humanely. They were short on political theory and long on blueprint-making, which is why Marx dismissed them. But their influence on the cooperative movement, on early trade unionism, and on later socialist thought was real. ## Marx and the Turn to Science Karl Marx argued that socialism needed to be scientific rather than utopian. Rather than designing ideal communities, socialists should analyze capitalism's actual mechanisms and identify the contradictions that would eventually produce its crisis. The result was a body of work, *Capital* above all, that influenced politics, economics, sociology, and philosophy across the next century and a half. Gareth Stedman Jones's *Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion* (2016) is one of the best recent biographies of Marx. Stedman Jones situates Marx firmly in his intellectual context, the German philosophical tradition, the French socialist politics of 1848, the British political economy of Ricardo and Mill, and argues that much of what later Marxism attributed to Marx was actually the product of Engels's editorializing. It is a revisionist account in the best sense: carefully argued and based on close reading of the primary texts. ## The Revolutionary Tradition The period from 1848 to 1917 saw socialism move from an intellectual current to a mass political movement. The Paris Commune of 1871, the founding of the Second International, the split between social democrats and revolutionary socialists: these events shaped the political landscape of the twentieth century. *The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin* by Alexander Gray (1946) is a classic survey that covers the full sweep from early communal thought through to Bolshevism. It is critical of its subject but fair-minded and well-written. Eric Hobsbawm's *The Age of Revolution* and *The Age of Capital*, though broader in scope, place socialist politics in the economic and social context that produced it. ## The Twentieth Century: Success and Catastrophe Socialism in the twentieth century produced the most ambitious social experiments in history and some of the worst atrocities. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, and their satellites industrialized rapidly and built states that provided universal literacy and healthcare while also murdering millions and suppressing all political opposition. Social democratic parties in Western Europe achieved full employment, welfare states, and labor rights without mass terror, but also without the radical transformation of capitalism their founders had envisioned. Tony Judt's *Ill Fares the Land* (2010) is a short, passionate argument for taking social democratic ideas seriously again, written in the last year of Judt's life. It covers the intellectual history of postwar social democracy and argues that the market fundamentalism of the 1980s and 1990s was a political choice, not an economic inevitability. It is a good entry point into the history of the moderate socialist tradition. ## Further Reading For more books on political history and ideology, browse the collection at [/category/history](/category/history).