ABSTRACT
Socialism was indeed as obviously necessary, once steam machinery came in, as the replacement of private armies by a single armed force of the State, when gunpowder came in. Socialism, it is a question of depriving a limited number of men of a 'freedom' based on a bloated power over the community's economic life, in order to liberate the growth of countless others, both as individuals and as members of a meaningful community. Socialism as an alternative had been a compound of many remnants of social life. The European religion was to be the parent or foster parent of socialism, if a reluctant and even unnatural one. Unleashed individualism could not be held in check by any prophetic images of socialism drawn on the clouds; it was something cruder and earthy that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to impose limits and keep social conflict within bounds.
