ABSTRACT
If one were to write a history of socialism in a hundred words or less, it might well read like this: “Socialism” first appeared as a demand of justice on men’s free will—and nothing came of it. Then the idea became a claim of history on history: a claim of historical laws, acting through the political movement of an oppressed social class, on history as a flow of events. Marx starts the conceptual construction of the new society with the bare bones of its institutions, with the social ownership of the means of production and ex ante planning of economic activities. He is also keenly aware of the necessity to concretize these abstract universals with a view to this or that historical situation. Marx’s identification of the universal and the particular—that is, his treatment of the latter as an absence of differentiation, rather than an expression of it—was certainly not a sufficient condition for that gigantic turn of the screw.
