As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, disconnecting
ordinary people from the ability to produce and the resulting loss of power had
serious repercussions throughout the social order in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. Traditional
institutions no longer seemed able to fill human wants and needs, whether material,
moral, or spiritual, and were increasingly seen as irrelevant or, worse,
opposed to human development.
While this had been building up for some time, the French
Revolution provided a trigger in a way that the American Revolution never could
have.
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| Not perfect, but still the only game in town. |
To oversimplify, the goal of the American Revolution was
to restore and reform the old principles (that actually had never been implemented, but that's another story). In
so doing the Founding Fathers hoped to create a “more perfect union” under the
direction of a sovereign people exercising the natural rights they believed had
been denied them by the British Crown.
Human chattel slavery very nearly derailed the effort and would
eventually almost destroy the vision of the Union, but at least the idea was
there and could be implemented.
On the other hand, the goal of the French Revolution,
while superficially similar to the American Revolution, was not to reform the old order. Rather, the goal
was to destroy l’Ancien Regime and
everything associated with it. The
abstraction of the collective was sovereign, not actual human beings.
Thus, in a broad sense and up to a point, in America everything
stayed pretty much the same following the revolution, while in France
everything was different. And the
institutions of Church, State, and Family in their traditional forms in Europe were
under pressure to change and change fast to accommodate the growing demand for
reform . . . that easily slipped into more revolution — and revolution meant
socialism.
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| Pierre Leroux |
Not that it was called socialism. The term did not even exist prior to the
early 1830s when the French socialist (yes, we realize the anachronistic use of
the label) Pierre Leroux coined the term — as a pejorative! A decade later, however, it was being used in
a positive way to describe all forms of “the democratic religion.”
Yes, religion, for that was how socialism was promoted
when it first appeared. A number of
people put forth various schemes for the complete reformation of society,
virtually all of which called for a merger of Church and State, the suppression
of the State in favor of or absorption of the State by organized religion, or
the suppression of organized religion in favor of or absorption of organized
religion by the State. Some of the more
radical proposals were for the abolition of marriage and family with the community
taking over the traditional functions of parents.
The one common strain throughout all socialist thought of
every kind was that the "collective," an abstraction created by human beings for
human beings, has rights that actual human beings created by God do not
have. (Keep in mind, of course, that a "collective," like any other social institution, is not a human person created by God, but an "artifact" created by human beings. To emphasize this difference, one should recognize that all institutions are not natural persons. They are "social tools" that in a just society should promote the freedom, power, and development of every child, woman, and man.) Inevitably the one right that all
socialism focused on was private property — the chief support of both life and
liberty.
Not that the idea of Christian or religious socialism was
really anything new. During the Middle
Ages the Franciscan “Spirituals” who evolved into the “Fraticelli” did a little
editing of the natural law as well as of the Rule established by their founder,
Saint Francis of Assisi. They decided
that private property was not a natural right, but a manmade invention.
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| Chesterton was not a socialist, democratic or otherwise. |
G.K. Chesterton addressed this in the book on Il Poverello (“the Little Poor Man”) he
wrote in 1923 soon after his own conversion to Catholicism in 1922. This suggests that Chesterton, in common with
Newman and other noted converts from the Church of England, might have felt himself
forced to “swim the Tiber” by the institutionalization of socialism, modernism,
and New Age influence in the Church of England.
As he wrote, after noting that a Franciscan friar was as free as anyone
else to decide not to own anything as a personal choice,
Nobody . . . proposed to interfere with his negation of
private property. But some Franciscans,
invoking the authority of Francis on their side, went further than this and
further I think than anybody else has ever gone. They proposed to abolish not only private
property but property. (G.K. Chesterton,
Saint Francis of Assisi. London: Saint
Francis of Assisi, London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1923, 173.)
Closer to modern times, the experience of “the Diggers” in
1649 illustrates the lengths to which some people were prepared to go in an
effort to realize their new visions of a society in which private property was
abolished and everyone’s material needs were met. Possibly the original democratic socialists,
the Diggers (a pejorative term for “True Levelers”) seized some unoccupied commons
in the name of “the People.”
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| Gerrard Winstanley |
The idea was that the group would raise crops and
distribute the food free to the poor.
After struggling along for a year (during which time it does not appear
to be recorded that they actually distributed any food to the poor or anyone
else), they were driven off by threats and violence from the villagers they had
dispossessed and legal action by the local landlords.
The only lasting results of the experiment were a few
pamphlets by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676), a businessman who blamed his
financial ruin on the crass materialism and greed of ungodly worldlings,
especially lawyers and the clergy.
Taking refuge in religious mysticism, Winstanley based his philosophy on
faith alone and
declared, “Jesus Christ is the head Leveler.”
Socialism in its modern phase appears to have begun
sometime around 1820 in France. In the
wake of the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, numerous
cults sprang up, mostly in opposition to the Catholic Church and to the
government. At first these were all
lumped together under the term l’démocratie
religieuse (“the democratic religion”). By
1847 the term “socialism” had come to be applied as the generic term. (Julian
Strube, “Socialism and Esotericism in July Monarchy France,” History of Religions, July 2016,
(postprint), 7.)
Today the socialist influence on the Revolutions of 1848
is often downplayed or ignored altogether.
Part of this may be due to the fact that it was in that year that Karl
Marx published what was to become possibly the single most influential
socialist book ever published, The
Communist Manifesto, in which religious and democratic socialism — the same
thing, really — were shown to be inferior to communism . . . or so Marx
claimed.
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| Marx rejected even socialism when religious. |
Utterly disgusted with the religious trappings that masked
virtually all forms of socialism up to that time, Marx proposed getting rid of
God altogether, whether His adherents belonged to traditional organized
religions or to the socialist democratic religious cults. All religion, according to Marx, is “the
opiate of the masses,” and it must be replaced with the most advanced form of
socialism, scientific socialism, to which he appropriated the term “communism.”
Prior to Marx, the terms communism and socialism were used
interchangeably, causing massive confusion among some modern scholars. Afterwards, although there continued to be
some ambiguity, communism and Marxism were generally considered synonyms, and
an effort was made to distance socialism from Marxism/communism.
The problem with Marx’s atheistic communism was, however,
obvious as far as the authorities of Church and State were concerned. Marx’s program stated explicitly those things
at which other forms of socialism only hinted, viz., the abolition of private property, the destruction of
traditional religion, and the overthrow of the State — and the cornerstone of
the program could, according to Marx in The Communist Manifesto (1848), be summed up in the single sentence, the
abolition of private property in capital. And what is "property?" It is not the thing owned, but the unlimited and absolute natural right to be an owner inherent in every human being, and the socially determined and necessarily limited bundle of rights that define how an owner may use what is owned. Beware: the right to be an owner and the rights of ownership are almost always confused these days, making people think that the discussion of the rights OF private property in, e.g., Catholic social teaching is a limitation of the right TO private property, and thus effectively socialism. No, the distinction between the natural right to be an owner and the rights of ownership must be kept clearly in mind.
Nor did the ideas that were born in France stay in
France. They soon made their way across
the channel to England, where they found a ready reception with a people
largely alienated from both Church and State.
The ideas rapidly seeped into the popular consciousness.
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| Edmund Burke |
Socialist religious ideas combined with radical political
ideas from the French Revolution that promised much that they simply could not
deliver or that went contrary to truth, as commentators like Edmund Burke (1730-1797) were
quick to point out. These religious or
democratic socialist ideas, too, quickly found a home among people whose
allegiance to the Established Church was often limited to paying the
government-imposed tithe to support a church whose services they rarely if ever
attended, and whose clergy they almost never saw.
Governments, of course, could use their coercive power to
suppress socialist activity, at least up to a point. Organized religion, even in an established
church like the Church of England, had a more serious problem.
Technically, of course, anyone not a member of the
Established Church was officially a second class (or even third class) citizen. Most professions were closed to non-Anglicans
and they had few if any civil rights.
Realistically, of course, relatively few members even of the
Church of England had the wherewithal to enter any profession at all, and few
qualified to vote in any event. With
increasing numbers of people stripped of economic power, however, something had
to be done to give people at least the illusion of political power, and the
franchise gradually began to be extended.
Dissenters got civil rights in 1828, Catholics in 1829, and the decades-long
process of Jewish Emancipation began soon after that.
It was not enough, however. Many people seemed to have an inherent
appreciation of the fact that political democracy without economic democracy is
an empty shell. Even if you sold your
vote (as many did), it could not possibly make up for the income lost as wage
income replaced ownership income for the many, and even wage income disappeared as human
labor was displaced by ownership income for the few from their private property in advancing technology.
To people saddled with what they saw as a do-nothing
church and an indifferent government, socialism sounded very good, indeed.
#30#
