Socialism is a coherent philosophical doctrine, but more than that it is a political program to be achieved. Its philosophical roots, identifiable in their own right, must be distinguished from its social and cultural aspirations and, further, from its political programs. It cannot be viewed as merely an alternative to a capitalist free-market economy. Its revolt goes much deeper, challenging not only the economic but the moral and cultural traditions of peoples wherever it has gained ascendancy. Initially a Western movement (the term itself appears to have come into use in the early part of the nineteenth century), it has penetrated every part of the globe.¹Given the socialists’ ascendancy in Europe and American propensities to imitate Europe, it behooves us to look carefully at the origins of socialism for the ideas which the socialist mind takes for granted, commonplace ideas we find among our intellectual elite.

Not all socialist programs are as radical as those of Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, yet socialism is universally marked by certain features. Its creed, like other belief systems, may be imperfectly understood by its political adherents, but its power to motivate to determinate ends cannot be doubted. Those who subscribe to it do not have to communicate to know which cause to advance, which to oppose. They act in unison out of a shared conviction.

Like much of Enlightenment thought socialism may be characterized by what it repudiates as well as by its utopian goals. To focus on the West alone, the socialist creed is based on a denial of the existence of God and the transcendent end of human existence, features that until the eighteenth century characterized the Western mind since antiquity. Implicitly socialism denies a natural moral order to which man is accountable. Denying that man is self-directing, it affirms that individual choice is determined by psychological and social forces over which man has little or no control. Denying the reality of a universal and timeless human nature, it places no value on the lessons to be gained from the study of history, repudiating in effect the value of the Western literary canon. From its codification in eighteenth century France it has sanctioned sexual license. This seems to be if not an essential feature, one that is nevertheless always a part of its social agenda. Socialist governments wherever they come to power sanction pornography, divorce, abortion, and in recent decades assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The socialist has long recognized that the success of his revolutionary agenda depends on control of information, primarily education; hence, his efforts to suppress parental rights in education. Control of the media is likewise a desirable objective because the socialist recognizes that in free and open debate, socialist ideas are not likely to prevail, given that many of its tenets fly in the face of the common perception of the good. In both Europe and North America, and wherever the socialist mind prevails, obstacles are thrown up to prevent religious education, and throughout the West major media outlets in the hands of the left are grossly biased in a socialist direction, preventing a fair treatment or a hearing for alternative views.

That socialism in its purest form can only be maintained through coercion is evident from events of the past century. We have notorious examples in the police states created by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the Eastern bloc nations under Soviet control, Cuba, China, and North Korea, to name only the most obvious. In the democracies of the West coercion is subtle where socialist objectives are advanced through state control of education and through a sympathetic media. Media bias itself needs to be explained. The history of how the socialist mind-set captured the quasi-educated class which determines the outlook of the media has yet to be written. That history may be identical with the history of the secularization of modern culture, as Christopher Dawson has suggested. The mind of the secular majority, writes Dawson, has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner.²Without doubt the roots of socialism are deep in Enlightenment soil, nourished by Rousseau, Feuêrbach, and Marx.

In his Origin of Inequality (1753), Rousseau attributes all the ills of man not to man’s own sin or to ignorance but to social injustice and the corruptions of an artificial civilization. Rousseau in this and subsequent works pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, the common man against the privileged classes, the cause of love against convention, and the intuition of the religious mind against the orthodox philosopher and ecclesiastical authority.

Rousseau fired the minds of his generation with the ideal of democracy not merely as a system of government but as a new way of life, a vision of social justice and fraternity. With boundless optimism he preached a social idealism, a religion of humanity, with a defined though simple body of dogma, designed to take the place of Christianity as the creed of a new age. His call for the complete reorganization of the social order became the creed of the French intelligentsia, a rationalized, humanitarian version of Christianity. Marx picked up the theme.