Socialism

Abstract

The antagonism between liberalism and socialism can be misunderstood. As a doctrine socialism is not so much a call to reject the principles of liberalism as a claim that it alone can fulfil them. What they have in common has sometimes been more important than what divides them. Both originated as responses to the bourgeois revolution — the rise of the modern state, the expansion of civil society, and the development of scientific rationalism. Both had their roots in the period when a capitalist order that was not yet industrial began to emerge, and both endorsed aspects of the new industrial society wholeheartedly as it took shape. If liberals and socialists have often taken up opposed positions, these are positions within a common framework of values and assumptions, a fact sometimes more obvious to those outside the Western experience than those immersed within it.