View Of Liberalism And Socialism example essay topic

The contemporary political and social debate, at least from the time of the beginning of the 19th century, arose out of two most important conceptual models of how society should be organized. They go under the name of liberalism and socialism. It is essential to state at once that they were not contrasting views; the latter (socialism) must be seen as the radicalization and extension to everybody of the premises included in the former (liberalism). Actually, the most vital and reliable socialist thinking, that of Marx and Engels, emerges from the development, to its great consequences, of their liberal ideas. A scholastic work on Marx and Engels' early period bears specifically the title "Marx and Engels from democratic liberalism to communism".

(Auguste Cornu 1957). Individual rights cannot be defended without some form of governmental structures that defend them against both other people and governmental structures themselves. The liberal political thinker is committed to the idea that one cannot do with the state. Liberalism operates with a vision of human nature that admits that some political structures are needed to prevent humans from mistreating each other. This is not the only role the state can play, but it is a basic one. Liberalism thus must refuse anarchic theories and utopian Marxist theories that advocate an overthrowing or withering away of the state.

Liberals instead work with a firm conviction that some political structure is a need in any well-ordered society. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills highlighted the exacting relationship between socialism and liberalism when he said: "What is most precious in classic liberalism is most cogently and most productively incorporated in classic Marxism. Karl Marx remains the thinker who has articulated most clearly - and most perilously - the basic tenets which liberalism shares". (Wright Mills 1962) Besides a common theoretical background, both share the same principal goals.

Liberalism and socialism are both in favor of: - Internationalism. The elimination of feudal obstacles to the free circulation of people and goods is to be ascribed to liberal thinking and acting. This approach was taken up by socialism and encapsulated in influential statements such as "The working men have no country" or in vigorous exhortations like "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848) in which national or educational oppositions are disposed of as pre-historical remnants. - Pacifism. The development of free exchanges at a global level meant, in the mind of liberal thinkers, that war was almost unworkable given the amplitude of ordinary interests shared by people all over the earth.

For the socialists, the idea that workers of different regions would fight each other was merely inconceivable. Already in the middle of the 19th century it was remarked that "national dissimilarities and antagonisms are daily more and more disappearing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to autonomy of business, to the world-market, to similarity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life resultant thereto". (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848) - Civil Society. The wide-ranging view of liberalism and socialism is based on the dominance of civil society composed of individuals who had liberated or were realizing themselves of the bondage and limitations imposed by political and economic masters belonging to a previous and fast decaying order.