Socialism
This entry is concerned with "socialism" from the time at which, so far as anyone knows, the word was first used in print to describe a view of what human society should be like. This was in 1827, in the English Co-operative Magazine, a periodical aimed at expounding and furthering the views of Robert Owen of New Lanark, generally regarded as the father and founder of the cooperative movement. (Owenite cooperation, incidentally, was an institution different from, and far more idealistic than, the distributive stores which in the Victorian age took over the name.) Some historians have traced the ancestry of socialism much further back: For example, to primitive communist societies, to the Jesuits of Paraguay, to the ideal communities described by Thomas More and others, to the Diggers of Cromwell's army, and even to Plato's Republic. Although there are elements of socialism to be found in all these, particularly in More's Utopia, the scope of this article is limited to socialism in modern times and to the sense in which the word is normally used, omitting both distant possible origins and, of course, bastard movements such as the National Socialism (Nazism) of twentieth-century Germany and Austria which, save for the bare fact that they enforced central control of social policy, had nothing of socialism in them.
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