ABSTRACT
Socialism as a term for a social-economic philosophy was used for the first time by Pierre Leroux, who edited the Globe as the journal of the Saint-Simonians from 1831 onwards. 1 But the views basic to socialist philosophy are of more ancient origin. As Humanism in its sources is traced back to Plato, so Socialism can also be said to derive its main ideas from him. His two dialogues the Republic and the Laws for the first time clearly described the socialist economy of the State and its application in the State system of education. The founder of modern socialism, Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia was directly influenced by Plato and openly confessed the source of his ideas. The whole school of the early nineteenth-century socialist writers are known as “Utopian,” by which their connection with More is generally recognised. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by their Communist Manifesto of 1847 founded the “scientific socialism” of today, the term was already in use, and the main works of the Utopian socialists had all been published. Thus we have to start with Plato. He was the first philosopher to recognise that property as the basis of the economic structure of the State inevitably results in the concentration of civil and legal power in the hands of the property-owning class and leads in the end to the division of the people into the owners of the means of production, who do not work, and the workers, who produce but do not own anything. The famous saying about the “two nations” is not an invention of Carlyle or Disraeli, but is as old as Plato. He also declared that when the State is divided economically into two nations with opposite interests, both groups are consolidated into hostile camps, which are in a state of permanent war with each other. We have here the fundamental ideas of socialism about the exploitation of labour by capital and the resulting class war clearly expressed. Plato also recognised that the criminal minority is essentially the result of the existing social order and not solely of the guilt of the individual transgressors of the law. Reform of legislation without radical reform of the social-economic structure of the State is only a palliative which ultimately leads to the recurrence of the evil. Plato quite definitely advocated the nationalisation of the means of production (in the Laws but not in the Republic) as the only way to save the State from the evils of a class war and eventual ruin. In his last work, the Laws, Plato says: “First of all the land and the soil and the buildings must be divided amongst all…. Each citizen must look upon his allotment as the national property of the State and because his bit of soil is part of his fatherland he has to nurse it better than children care for their mothers.” Such a radical change of economic structure can be achieved either in consequence of or side by side with a radical reform of education. This task can only be entrusted to a State with full control of administration and curriculum. The individual citizen must be trained by the State, for the State and in State institutions. All the details of the curriculum have to be decided by State authorities. The necessary division of labour leads to the functional training of citizens, who are selected for future occupations irrespective of their origin, but in accordance with their abilities. Both sexes are treated in the same way without any difference. Plato introduced the principle of State censorship in order to wean the rising generation from the religious superstitions of his time. He also emphasised the necessity of compulsory military training for both sexes. In his last work he even pointed out the principle of compulsory labour training as part of national education. Scientific training, so far as it was represented in his time by the mathematical branches, plays an important role in his curriculum. We find in Plato's works all the ideas of the present socialist system of education: State monopoly, scientific training, secularism, actual work, military training and sex equality.
