Introduction

Societies sharply divided by class privilege during the eighteenth century changed into societies in which effective public values for population majorities were much more egalitarian. A liberal democratic paradigm was thus bound to emerge more or less strongly in Anglo-American, Scandinavian, and continental European countries deeply influenced by the French Revolution. Marxism has been through so many historical vicissitudes that it defies any simple, noncontroversial rendition as a political and social science paradigm. The elitist paradigm's originators substituted a contention about the outer limits of political and social change for the Marxist paradigm's open-ended assumption that in a socialist society of the future people could be free and equal. The elitist paradigm differs from the Marxist paradigm in this basic respect. The Marxist paradigm locates the control of societies in the entire membership of a ruling social class, such as the bourgeoisie.