(2 of 4)
A Beautiful World. In their way, the Socialists, when they first appeared on the scene, were as optimistic as Smith. But, unlike Smith, they put their real faith not primarily in the free, but in the organized, good life—with varying degrees of forcible encouragement. Robert Owen, a rich Manchester factory owner, thought that men ought to form collectives and go back to working with the spade instead of the plow. Charles Fourier, who loved cats and flowers, was probably mildly insane, but in a pleasant, do-goodish way. His community centers, called phalanxes, were once a minor fad in the U.S. Count Claude Henri de Roudvroy de Saint-Simon, a democratically minded aristocrat, used to get up every morning as a boy to his valet's cry: "Arise, Monsieur le Comte, you have great things to do today!" In a vision, Charlemagne told him the great thing was to be a philosopher, and, trying to become one, Saint-Simon spent his fortune hiring all the savants he could find so that they might teach him "everything there was to know."
The world dismissed these early Socialists—perhaps hastily—as "Utopian"; yet the difference between them and later, more practical Socialists is perhaps not as deep as used to be thought. At any rate, as Author Heilbroner shows, they put Socialism on the intellectual map.
An Inexorable World. If Adam Smith was the first economist to know the importance of capitalism. Karl Marx was the first major economist to sense the importance of the modern machine. Before his eyes, the Industrial Revolution was creating more wealth and, by contrast, more poverty than ever before. Scribbling day after day in the library of the British Museum and dabbling in the petty politics of European refugees, Marx raised an apocalyptic vision against Smith's: the capitalists' quest for gain would destroy them; the machine must be shackled by the state; the men who work the machine must become the new rulers, to replace the old bourgeoisie.
Author Heilbroner gives an adequate summary of Marx's theories, and a lively account of his fairly familiar life—how the rabbi's grandson married a beautiful German aristocrat, how he was forced to leave first Germany and then France because of his radical ideas, how he lived in abject poverty in London, dreaming of power without suspecting even in his dreams the staggering consequences his unreadable tomes and hate-filled fulminations would have for hundreds of millions of men. Carbuncles added to his other miseries. "I hope," he said one night prophetically, "the bourgeoisie as long as they live will have cause to remember my carbuncles."