Authors: Lipset
Summary: This long entry of approximately 3700 words defines socialism, chronicles its political development, details the late twentieth century antipathy between socialism and democracy, and discusses issues significant for contemporary socialists.
The entry defines socialism as an alternative to capitalism, and as a system in which government controls economic inequalities, industrial production and labor markets in order to achieve substantial social equality and participation. Socialism originated in the early nineteenth century among followers of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, both of whom advocated social reform and much greater distributional equality. These two, as well as other early socialists, shared a great belief in reform through education.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly every European country had a socialist party or coalition. A number of international labor organizations formed, including London's First International Workingman's Association and Paris' Second International. During this time period and up until the 1960s there were three distinct socialist perspectives that informed and reacted to each other: reformist, marxist-revolutionary and anarchist. The entry effectively details each of these perspectives in turn.
Beginning in the 1960s, socialist theories and ideologies have been forced to reorient their focuses in the of face unexpected democratic uprisings both in the form of social movements and the collapse of communist governments. Democratic socialism has emerged as a late twentieth century paradigm offering an alternative to communist authoritarianism and social democratic capitalist accommodation. Democratic socialism marks the entry of pluralist principles into socialist theory.