Work in Progress

G. D. H. Cole has undertaken the exceptionally difficult task of preparing a general history of socialist thought as distinguished from a history of the socialist movement. This work, to run to four volumes when complete, is presently at the half-way mark and it is therefore impossible to evaluate it as a whole or even to indicate its general trend or conclusions.

The first volume, covering the period since the great French Revolution to 1850, deals with the development of socialist ideas, particularly its utopian phase and early socialist economies. Professor Cole treats the individual thinkers (Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Owen, Proudhon, etc.) separately, justifying this by the absence of organized movements. The second volume, describing the socialist movement from the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions up to the emergence of the Marxian Social Democracy of the 1890’s, contains a central theme of the struggle between Marxism and Anarchism. Some of the most informative ...