Since the beginning of time, man has tried to replace God’s authority with his own machinations, always with bad results. Socialism is man’s prideful error on a gigantic scale.
It was political philosopher Thomas Hobbes who pioneered the idea of the social contract in which people gave up many freedoms in return for security from the ruling authority. His book “Leviathan,” 1651, made the case that without a strong central authority backed by the people themselves, life in a state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
John Locke, on the other hand, whom many of our Founding Fathers used as a source of ideas, applied the theory of rights secured through a social contract but tempered with a Christian understanding that man, created in the image of God, had a moral sense and thus certain God given rights. His concept of government with the consent of the governed was a driving force behind America’s Declaration of Independence, rooted in unalienable rights created by “nature and nature’s God.”
During the 18th century in Europe, political philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau began reassessing assumptions about God, knowledge, truth and social and economic structures. Kant argued, among other things, that knowledge was subjective. Hegel pronounced that “the rational alone is real” and described a “dialectic” in which history unfolds as a process.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his classic treatises, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” (1754) and the “Social Contract,” (1762) argued that man was once virtuous and free in a state of nature, but society and property ownership corrupted him. According to Rousseau, the only solution was a powerful state that owned all property and enforced “absolute equality.”
Marx incorporated Hegel’s dialectic and expanded it into “dialectical materialism,” a philosophical system based on Hegel’s appropriation of the Greek philosopher Socrates’ dialogues, in which a thesis is countered by an anti-thesis, resulting in a synthesis. Marx recast history as a series of every evolving syntheses of economic class warfare with capitalism as the final major stage before “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and communism.
As the debate of socialist doctrines simmered in Europe, two revolutions occurred that had far-reaching and quite different outcomes.
The American Revolution (1776-1781) was fought to restore the rights of the colonists as free Englishmen under English Common Law. The U.S. Constitution deliberately created a separation of powers, checks and balances within a national government and between the states and the federal government that guaranteed property rights, freedoms of religion, speech, assembly and redress, and the right to bear arms. John Quincy Adams once observed that “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
Unfortunately, our Founders ignored an essential element in freedom by allowing slavery to flourish which eventually tore the nation apart. Slavery was abolished after the Civil War but it took another hundred years and the civil rights movement to secure full rights for black Americans. While not perfect, and despite the flaws, America became the world leader in wealth, military power and influence.
Across the pond, the Rousseau vision of man as only being perfected in a collective state took hold. The 1789 French Revolution was a revolt not only against capitalism and royalty, but against Christianity, that soon turned on its own, with guillotines dispatching first the privileged elite and then anyone that didn’t tow the line. Instead of ushering in an Age of Reason, the Revolution ushered in utter chaos that eventually allowed Napoleon to take ultimate power and to plunge Europe into war.
Karl Marx popped up in 1847 co-authoring “The Communist Manifesto” that condemned the free market, capitalism, and inequality. He predicted that the “masses” would eventually overthrow all governments and create a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx joined forces with Friedrich Engels in 1867 to co-author “Das Kapital.” Yet, despite the socialist leaning in Europe, it was only after decades of rapid industrial growth and stability that the monarchial oligarchies were shattered in WWI.
The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 allowed Communism, the enforcement arm of socialism, led by Vladimir Lenin the opportunity to demonstrate the “superiority” of their socialist utopian philosophy. Much to Lenin’s surprise, the “masses” did not take kindly to the crackdown on the church, on their civil rights or the seizure and redistribution of their property. Inevitably as it is in all dictatorships, the prisons and graveyards of the new Socialist regimes were filled with dissenters, paving the way for Stalin who made up his own brand of socialism in which millions more were murdered in the name of equality.
Adolf Hitler wrote his own manifesto, the two-volume “Mein Kamp.” While picking up the pieces of a war-torn, defeated Germany, Hitler built a National Socialist German Workers Party, and took control in 1933. He targeted the Jews for extinction and created a massive military machine that plunged the world into WWII. In Italy, Benito Mussolini rose to power on his version of socialism, Fascism.
A common myth perpetuated in American academia and the media is that a straight line axis would put the Nazis on the far right and the communists on the far left with American somewhere in between. But in reality, communists and the socialist Nazis are both, in fact, on the far left of the axis. To the right would be anarchists who believe in no government.
The 20th century became the bloodiest century in history, as socialism in all its ugly forms perpetrated genocide and unspeakable horrors upon their own people and other nations. Marxist philosophies spread to China, where Mao Tse-Tung’s regime murdered tens of millions and to Cambodia’s killing fields.
John Quincy Adams once observed that “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
Source: Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, by Joshua Muravhik and The Road to Serfdom by Bruce Caldwell
