ABSTRACT
World-wide industrial competition between the European powers, coupled with their race for the colonies, was among the basic causes of the First World War. The feudal mode of production had been officially abolished only with the liberation of the serfs in the 1860s. Trade-union activity and socialist agitation were prohibited by law and police persecution was severe. Working-class organizations were thus forced to work clandestinely, and many of their leaders were in exile. The creation of the Soviet Union meant that, for the first time, the idea of socialism was used to justify an existing social system rather than as a basis for a more or less determinate critique of capitalism. Socialist conceptions were virtually excluded from social science and social philosophy as well. The philosophical basis of post-war liberal social philosophy, by contrast, has mainly been the claim that no argument from objective premises can ever lead to conclusions about how society ought to be organized.
