ABSTRACT

Socialist doctrines, in some of their roots presumably as old as articulate thought, were dreams, beautiful or hateful-impotent longings out of contact with social realities-so long as they lacked the means to convince anybody that the social process worked for the realization of socialism. Socialist effort amounted to preaching in the desert so long as it had no established contact with an existing or potential source of social power-to preaching of the Platonic type about which no politician need bother and which no observer of social processes need list among operative factors.