Socialism

Unfinished drafts, printed six years after Mill's death, in which he lets the socialists make their strongest case and then tests it.

by John Stuart Mill94 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1879(published posthumously)
Original language: English

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Overview

The Reform Act of 1867 gave the vote to a large body of men who lived on weekly wages, and Mill, who had sat in the Parliament that passed it, drew a consequence that others avoided. Electors without property had no private reason to defend the laws of property. Those laws would now have to be justified in open argument by the good they did, against socialist critics who were finding an audience among working people across Europe. In 1869 he planned a book that would examine the socialists' case as fairly as he could. He died in May 1873 with only rough drafts of its opening chapters written. His stepdaughter Helen Taylor printed them in the Fortnightly Review in February, March and April 1879 as "Chapters on Socialism", and a Chicago publisher reissued them the same year as a book under the single word Socialism. The drafts give the socialists the first word. Mill quotes at length from Louis Blanc, the French socialist politician, from Victor Considerant, who led the followers of the French theorist Charles Fourier, and from the Welsh-born reformer Robert Owen. They describe poverty, wages that bear no relation to merit, and the waste and fraud of competition, and Mill calls the case they make against the existing order a terrible one. He then examines it, and finds parts of it overstated: wages on the whole were not falling, competition lowers the prices that workers pay as well as the wages they earn, and much of profit is payment for risk and management. He separates two kinds of socialist. Those who want to found co-operative communities by consent should be free to try, because only an experiment on a small scale can show whether people will work as hard for a common stock as for themselves. Those who want to take over the whole economy of a country at once he rejects, since a failure on that scale could not be undone. The last chapter argues that property is no fixed thing: each society defines by law the rights that property includes, and may redefine them for the public good if it compensates the owners. There the drafts stop. Sigmund Freud, then a young man in Vienna, translated them into German.

Key concepts

What does Mill mean by Communism in these chapters?

Communism here is the simplest form of Socialism: the members of a community own everything in common and divide the produce equally, or, on Louis Blanc's higher standard, according to need. Mill treats it as the hardest test of socialist ideas, because it removes every difference of reward between one kind of work and another. His doubts concern motive, namely what will make managers careful and workers diligent when neither gains by it.

What is Fourierism?

Fourierism is the plan of the French theorist Charles Fourier for communities that live and work together while keeping unequal rewards. Everyone receives a minimum, and the rest of the produce is divided in fixed proportions among labour, capital and talent. Work is done in groups that people join by choice, and a group whose work is avoided is paid more. Mill thinks it deals with the question of motive more skilfully than Communism does.

What is revolutionary socialism, in Mill's sense?

Revolutionary socialism is Mill's name for the plan to place all the productive resources of a country under one central authority, the general government, beginning with the seizure of existing property. He contrasts it with the socialism of Owen and Fourier, which founds communities and can be brought in step by step. His objection is to the stake: an idea never tested would be imposed on everyone at once, at the risk of bloodshed and misery.

What does profit consist of, on Mill's analysis?

Profit, as Mill breaks it down, has three parts: interest on the capital, compensation for the risk of losing it, and payment for the skill and labour of directing the business, which he calls superintendence. Only the first is income from mere ownership, and he puts it at about three per cent. The division is his reply to socialists who count the whole of an employer's gain as taken from the workers.

Why does Mill call the idea of property variable?

He calls it variable because the word 'property' names no single fixed set of rights. It means whatever powers of exclusive use and control the law or custom of a society grants, and these have differed widely. Early property belonged to the family and carried no right of bequest; under Jewish law land returned to the common stock in the Sabbatical year. A proposal to alter such rights is therefore no attack on property as such.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The socialist charge, stated and tested

Is the existing order of property and competition as unjust as the socialists say? Mill lets them speak at length before he answers, because working men with votes will take nothing about property for granted.

The socialists Mill quotes charge the existing order with two evils. Reward stands almost in inverse ratio to labour, so that those who receive least work hardest, and the comfortable are those who drew prizes in the lottery of life. Competition is a private war that forces wages down and fills the shops with adulterated goods. Mill grants the first charge much of its force. To the second he replies with facts: wages are not declining, competition lowers the prices workers pay, and most of what is called profit pays for risk and for the labour of management. Fraud he admits, and expects co-operative stores to overcome it.

socialism
competition
poverty
wages
commercial ethics
economic inequality
commerce
labor
working class
consumer welfare
consumer protection
prices
monopoly
distribution
interest
political economy

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Trial on a small scale, and property redefined

Would people work as hard for a common stock as they do for themselves? Mill thinks only a trial can tell, and the size of the trial separates the socialism he welcomes from the one he fears.

Under Communism, Mill argues, a manager gains nothing by managing well and a worker little by extra effort, so everything hangs on public spirit, which present education has not made strong enough. Sharing out unequal kinds of work fairly would be hard, and rivalry for reputation and power would remain. He wants the communities of Owen and Fourier to have their trial, since they can begin small. The revolutionary socialists, who would take over a whole country's production at a stroke, show a confidence he compares to Robespierre's. Property, he concludes, has meant different things in different ages, and its rights may be changed for the public advantage, with compensation.

collective ownership
private property
property
property rights
economic incentives
management
risk
social experimentation
social reform
social change
education
land ownership
capital
population

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Within this work

passages held: 94
distinct concepts: 204
by passages held, corpus-wide: #512

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “competition” and “labor”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
competition	labor	5
competition	socialism	5
commercial ethics	competition	4
competition	wages	4
labor	wages	4
poverty	socialism	4
property	socialism	4
economic incentives	socialism	3
socialism	wages	3
commercial ethics	labor	2
labor	poverty	2
labor	socialism	2
poverty	property	2
competition	property	1
economic incentives	labor	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.
EN
1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)
Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.
EN
1848 Principles of Political Economy
Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.
EN
1859 On Liberty
One of the two books Mill expected to outlast the rest, the other being the System of Logic. Its defence of individuality against majority opinion runs on into Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.
EN
1861 Considerations on Representative Government
Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.
EN
1861 Utilitarianism
A defence of the ethics he inherited from Bentham and from his father, assembled from papers of the 1850s. Short as it is, it supplies the standard of right and wrong that his political books take for granted.
EN
1862 The Contest in America
Occasional journalism from Fraser's Magazine, written in haste before a journey to Greece. It shows Mill as a polemicist, arguing against the prevailing opinion of his own class.
EN
1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism
Two essays from the Westminster Review of 1865, written eight years after Comte's death. They close a relationship that began with admiring letters in 1841 and left its mark on the System of Logic.
EN
1869 The Subjection of Women
The most contested of his books in its day, published in 1869 after his one term in Parliament. It carries the reasoning of On Liberty into marriage and the household.
EN
1879 Socialism you are here EN

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