Ideas Have Consequences
by Charles A. Burris
Previously by Charles A. Burris: The Manichean Battle Over Sonia Sotomayor
I would like to call your attention to a virtually unknown little book, The Lost Literature of Socialism, by George Watson, Fellow in English at St. John’s College, Cambridge and editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.
As the publishers explain on the back of this book: “In this hard-hitting and controversial new book, the author examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say… and the result is blasphemy against its canon of saints. This study, the first review of socialist literature since 1945, reveals how closely socialism was linked to conservative, racist, and genocidal ideas. As a literary critic the author’s concern is to pay a due respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say rather than to what their modern disciples wish they had said. The book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought, enabling a genuine debate to be revived.”
In this brilliant work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and to Kolima, Vorkuta and Karaganda.
What distinguishes “socialism,” the political/economic ideology, and its ideological twin, “sociology,” the social science, are their common inheritance and origins from backward, reactionary ideas (anti-individualism, collectivism, anti-capitalism) and thinkers (Hegel, Comte, de Bonald, de Maistre, Southey, Saint-Simon). Scholars such the sociologist Leon Branson, The Political Context of Sociology, and Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, have thoroughly traced and documented this non-liberal lineage. These horrific ideas were explicitly formulated and conceived against those of classical liberalism, individualism, and free market (laissez-faire) capitalism. But today, according to established authorities in academia and the media, they are the height of “progressive” thought. How did this all come about? Here is how Murray Rothbard put it in his magnificent For a New Liberty:
“(W)e must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests – the ruling classes – who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated by the liberals – the English of the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth – victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty. It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as “conservatives.”
