Radicalism

29 Pages 7288 Words

Trace the history of Radicalism and the causes of its rise. What are its major ideas and movements?

Radicalism is a rejection of liberal democracy and industrialization. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union it is still a vital force in the world. The middle class was aware of the social problems they were creating as they developed an industrial society. As a result, they had to reconcile their own affluence with the poverty of the workers. They used the theories of a number of thinkers to rationalize their ascendancy. Adam Smith sustained individual enterprise and Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo gave a rationale for economic individualism. Jeremy Bentham argued that every institution must be measured against its social utility – the greatest good for the greatest number. The fact that society was benefiting justified the change that brought the industrial world into being. There were those who disagreed with this.

Radical theories began to develop in the 1840’s. Louis Blanc argued against competition and for a system of workshops governed by the workers. Pierre Proudnon proposed that the price of items be based on the amount of labor used to produce them. The ideas of Blanc and Proudnon received their clearest and most forceful expression in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels.

Marx and Engels worked to produce a theory that would explain how society had come to its present state and propose a means of altering it. The theory was published by Marx in 1848 and was titled “The Communist Manifesto.” Society, he argued, was no more than a reflection of a hierarchy dictated by those who own the means of production. As history progressed, so the means have changed. Feudalism was defeated by capitalism and capitalism would be defeated by communism. The process would involve the concentration of economic power into fewer and fewer hands and the consequent opposition of an ever-increasing working class. Once the wor...