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Scientific socialism is a term which was coined in 1840 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his book What is Property?[1] to mean a society ruled by a scientific government, i.e., one whose sovereignty rests upon reason, rather than sheer will:[2]
Thus, in a given society, the authority of man over man is inversely proportional to the stage of intellectual development which that society has reached; and the probable duration of that authority can be calculated from the more or less general desire for a true government,—that is, for a scientific government. And just as the right of force and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and must at last be lost in scientific socialism.
In the 1844 book The Holy Family, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the writings of the socialist, communist writers Théodore Dézamy and Jules Gay as truly "scientific".[3] Later in 1880, Engels used the term "scientific socialism" to describe Marx's social-political-economic theory.[4]
Although the term socialism has come to mean specifically a combination of political and economic science, it is also applicable to a broader area of science encompassing what is now considered sociology and the humanities. The distinction between Utopian and scientific socialism originated with Marx, who criticized the Utopian characteristics of French socialism and English and Scottish political economy. Engels later argued that Utopian socialists failed to recognize why it was that socialism arose in the historical context that it did, that it arose as a response to new social contradictions of a new mode of production, i.e. capitalism. In recognizing the nature of socialism as the resolution of this contradiction and applying a thorough scientific understanding of capitalism, Engels asserted that socialism had broken free from a primitive state and become a science.[4]
- ^ Peddle, Francis K.; Peirce, William S. (2022-01-15). The Annotated Works of Henry George: The Science of Political Economy. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 269. ISBN 978-1-68393-339-7. Archived from the original on 2023-07-01. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
- ^ Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1994). Proudhon: What is Property?. Cambridge University Press. p. 208. ISBN 9780521405560. Archived from the original on 2023-07-01. Retrieved 2021-12-04.
- ^ Marx, K.; Engels, F. (1845). "Critical Battle Against French Materialism". The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Chapter VI 3). Archived from the original on 2021-05-13.
- ^ a b Engels, Friedrich (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 7 February 2021. Retrieved 10 February 2016 – via marxists.org.