Socialist Humanism

Extract

Less than ten years ago the ‘exhaustion of political ideas’ was widely proclaimed. At least in the Western World the differences dividing parties of the left and right seemed to be getting less and changes of government only made for a little more or a little less emphasis on economic planning and welfare. One of the most renowned of American political scientists wrote at the end of the 1950s:

. . . the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship, the Conservatives have accepted the Welfare State, and the democratic Left has recognized that an increase in overall state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems. This very triumph of the democratic social revolution in the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate them to political action.

In the space of a few years, however, the atmosphere has changed. The collection of essays edited by Erich Fromm under the title Socialist Humanism well summarizes the change in outlook; here are thirty-six articles, most of them written specially for the book, affirming unequivocally that men can and should create their own world, that elitism is not inevitable and that work can be a creative activity. Of course, a book written by so many hands and claiming, at least on the dustjacket, to cover Marxism, Gandhi, Renaissance humanism, existentialism, Utopia, history, science, dialectic, psychoanalysis, freedom, alienation, justice, labour, welfare, ethics, law, Christianity, technology, and revolution, must at times be exasperating.