 | This articlerelies excessively onreferences toprimary sources. Please improve this article by addingsecondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Scientific socialism" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| Part ofa series on | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Marxism | ||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Outline | ||||||||||||||||||||
Foundations | ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Related topics
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Scientific socialism inMarxism is the application ofhistorical materialism to the development of socialism, as not just a practical and achievable outcome of historical processes, but the only possible outcome. It contrasts withutopian socialism by basing itself uponmaterial conditions instead of concoctions and ideas, where "the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in thephilosophy, but in theeconomics of each particular epoch."[1]
Fredrich Engels, who developed it alongsideKarl Marx, described:
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation [proletarian revolution and communism] is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.[1]
The term's modern meaning is based almost totally on Engels's bookSocialism, Utopian and Scientific.
The term was originally coined in 1840 byPierre-Joseph Proudhon in his bookWhat is Property?[2] to mean asociety ruled by a scientific government, i.e., one whose sovereignty rests uponreason, rather than sheer will:[3]
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 bookThe Holy Family,Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels described the writings of the socialist, communist writersThéodore Dézamy andJules Gay as truly "scientific".[4] But the term "scientific socialism" took on its modern meaning by 1880 with the publishing ofSocialism, Utopian and Scientific, where Engels used the term "scientific socialism" to describe Marx's social-political-economic theory of historical materialism.[1]
Although the termsocialism has come to mean specifically a combination ofpolitical andeconomic science, it is also applicable to abroader area of science encompassing what is now consideredsociology and thehumanities. The distinction between Utopian and scientific socialism originated with Marx, who criticized the Utopian characteristics ofFrench socialism andEnglish 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.[1]
Scientific socialism is a method for understanding and predicting social, economic and material phenomena by examining their historical trends through the use of the scientific method in order to derive probable outcomes and probable future developments. It is in contrast to what later socialists referred to asutopian socialism—a method based on establishing seemingly rational propositions for organizing society and convincing others of their rationality and/or desirability. It also contrasts withclassical liberal notions ofnatural law, which are grounded in metaphysical notions of morality rather than a dynamicmaterialist orphysicalist conception of the world.[5]
Scientific socialists view social and political developments as being largely determined by economic conditions, in contrast to the ideas of Utopian socialists and classical liberals, and thus believe that social relations and notions of morality are context-based relative to their specific stage of economic development. They believe that as economic systems, socialism and capitalism are not social constructs that can be established at any time based on the subjective will and desires of the population, but instead are the products of social evolution. An example of this was the advent of agriculture which enabled human communities to produce a surplus—this change in material and economic development led to a change in the social relations and rendered the old form of social organization based on subsistence-living obsolete and a hindrance to further material progress. The changing economic conditions necessitated a change in social organization.[1]
In his collection of texts,In Defence of Marxism,Leon Trotsky defended thedialectical method of scientific socialism during the factional schisms within the American Trotskyist movement during 1939-40. Trotsky viewed dialectics as an essential method of analysis to discern the class nature of the Soviet Union. Specifically, he described scientific socialism as the "conscious expression of the unconscious historical process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings".[6]
