it seemed rather surprising that the account should have been accepted, practically without challenge, for so long. Finally the conclusion was reached that an anonymous writer in an English paper was the first to use the word in print, the date being August 24, 1833.[5] Since that time an investigation of a commendably thorough nature has been made by three students of the University of Wisconsin,[6] with the result that they have been unable to find any earlier use of the word. It is somewhat disappointing that after thus tracing the word back to what may well be its first appearance in print, it should be impossible to identify its creator.
The letter in which the term is first used is signed "A Socialist," and it is quite evident that the writer uses it as a synonym for the commonly used term "Owenite," by which the disciples of Robert Owen were known. It is most probable that Owen himself had used the word, and, to some extent, made it popular; and that the writer of the letter had heard "our dear social father," as Owen was called, use it, either in some of his speeches or in conversation. This is the more likely as Owen was fond of inventing new words. At any rate, one of Owen's associates, now dead, told the present writer that Owen often specifically claimed to have used the word at least ten years before it was adopted by any other writer.
The word gradually became more familiar in England. Throughout the years 1835–1836, in the pages of Owen's paper, The New Moral World, there are many instances of the word occurring. The French writer, Reybaud, in his "Reformateurs Modernes," published in 1840, made the term equally familiar to the reading public of Continental Europe. By him it was used to designate the teachings not merely of Owen and his followers, but those of all social reformers and visionaries—Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others. By an easy transition, it soon came into general use as designating all altruistic visions, theories, and experiments, from the "Republic" of Plato onward through the centuries.
In this way much confusion arose. The word became too vague and indefinite to be distinctive. It was applied—frequently as an epithet—indiscriminately to persons of widely differing, and often conflicting, views. Every one who complained of social inequalities, every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper, who would extol Law, and spread the net of government over the whole of life, and the iconoclastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, by their friends no less than by their opponents.
The confusion thus introduced has had the effect of seriously complicating the study of Socialism from the historical point of view. Much that one finds bearing the name of Socialism in the literature of the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, is not at all related to Socialism as that term is understood to-day. Thus the Socialists of the present day, who do not advocate Communism, regard as a classic presentation of their views the famous pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. They have circulated it by millions of copies in practically all the languages of the civilized world. Yet throughout it speaks of "Socialists" with ill-concealed disdain, and always in favor of Communism and the Communist Party. The reason for this is clearly explained by Engels himself in the preface written by him for the English edition, but that has not prevented many an unscrupulous opponent of Socialism from quoting the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels against the Socialists of the Marx-Engels school.[7] In like manner, the utterances and ideas of many of those who formerly called themselves Socialists have been quoted against the Socialists of to-day, notwithstanding that it was precisely on account of their desire to repudiate all connection with, and responsibility for, such ideas that the founders of the modern Socialist movement took the name "Communists."
Nothing could be clearer than the language in which Engels explains why the name Communist was chosen, and the name Socialist discarded. He says: "Yet, when it (the Manifesto) was written, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of these already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside of the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolution and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France, of Cabet, and in Germany, of Weitling. Thus Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement; Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, 'respectable'; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that the 'emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself,' there could be no doubt as to which of the names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since been far from regretting it."[8]
There is still, unfortunately, much misuse of the word "Socialism," even by some accredited Socialist exponents. Writers like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and many others, are constantly referred to as Socialists, when, in fact, they are nothing of the sort. Still, the word is now pretty generally understood as defined by the Socialists—not the "Socialists" of sixty years ago, who were mostly Communists, but the Socialists of to-day, whose principles find classic expression in the Communist Manifesto, and to the attainment of which they have directed their political parties and programmes. In the words of Professor Thorstein Veblen: "The Socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called Socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of 'Socialists.'"[9]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Republican National Platform, 1908.
[2] I quote the English translation from the London Clarion, December 18, 1905.
[3] William Morris.
[4] Isaiah ii. 4.
[5] See Socialism and Social Democracy, by John Spargo. The Comrade, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1903.
[6] In The International Socialist Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, July, 1905.
[7] As an instance of this I note the following example: "No severer critic of Socialists ever lived than Karl Marx. No one more bitterly attacked them and their policy toward the trade unions than he. … And yet Socialists regard him as their patron saint." Mr. Samuel Gompers, in The American Federationist, August, 1905.
[8] Preface to The Communist Manifesto, by F. Engels, Kerr edition, page 7.