Progress pill
Political families under the microscope

The socialists

What's your Political Leaning?

The socialists

  • Freedoms: quite strong in the societal sphere, but weak in the economic sphere.
  • Cardinal values: equality, progress, social justice, solidarity.
  • Philosophy and principles: Primacy of collective organization. Socialism is a practice based on society as a whole (holism) and expressed through the state. The socialist state aims to take charge of and direct human activity to the maximum. Socialists have almost unlimited faith in the possibility of building a new social order based on reason.
  • Politics: Socialists advocate health programs, tax increases and subsidies to guarantee equity. This implies economic and social state direction, planning (organization of production upstream). Hayek speaks of constructivism, i.e., the idea that it is up to the state to build society and give it a certain form, in contrast to the liberal order where society builds itself (spontaneous order). The most radical and successful socialism is totalitarian, as the state takes charge of all human activity.
  • Economics: Socialism implies strong state control of the economy, in favor of equity (allowing everyone to provide for themselves). Socialists are suspicious of free markets, which they see as a system that allows the strong to prey on the vulnerable. They favor wealth redistribution and centralized social programs financed by high taxes and revenues.
Types of socialists:
The concept of socialism is a neologism that was first used systematically and with a precise meaning by the Frenchman Pierre Leroux in 1833. Within modern socialism, two traditions can be distinguished:
  1. Revolutionary socialists are opposed to property rights, and want to destroy capitalist bourgeois society. They follow in the footsteps of 19th-century anarchists such as Bakunin. This anarchism later gave rise to Marxist communism.
  2. Reformist socialists are not prone to violence. They have not abandoned their goal of social justice, but this goal is pursued through democratic elections and taxation, using the resources generated by the market economy. Such was the case of Jean Jaurès, Leon Blum, Olof Palme (Sweden), Willy Brandt (Germany) and François Mitterrand (France).
Franklin Delano Rossevelt's New Deal played a role in the formation of American democratic socialism (Bernie Sanders).
  • Creation of Social Security
  • Introduction of the federal minimum wage
  • Setting up unemployment insurance
  • Federal public employment programs
According to Bernie Sanders, these reforms, have become the social fabric of the nation and the foundation of the American middle class.
Socialism is the method that replaces individual ownership of the means of production and exchange with social ownership. - Léon Blum, "On a Human Scale", 1945.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to Hayek's analysis, what distinguishes socialist constructivism from liberal social organization?