ABSTRACT
Socialism was the most influential emancipatory ideal to emerge throughout the world after the mid-nineteenth century. Even though Communism disintegrated without wars and revolution during the 1980s, both the idea and the remnants of what was once a great international political movement still continue today – in part because of nostalgia but also because there is as yet no alternative to socialism’s former inspiration. Socialism’s global importance persisted long after 1914, when its fatal errors began, largely because Lenin’s triumph in Russia made socialism as a world system crucial for about a half-century. Marxism was its principal but certainly not its exclusive expression, for socialism descends from a utopian-millenarian tradition which began long before Marx, who merely systematized it in a typical nineteenth-century positivist fashion.
