Concept

Socialism

Overview

socio-economic system based on social ownership of the means of production; also the ideology that aims to implement it

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Socialism is discussed.

The distinctive feature of Socialism is not that all things are in common, but that production is only carried on upon the common account, and that the instruments of production are held as common property.
John Stuart Mill, Socialism
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SOCIALISM, like everything else that is vital, is rather a tendency than a strictly definable body of doctrine. A definition of Socialism is sure either to include some views which many would regard as not Socialistic, or to exclude others which claim to be included. But I think we shall come nearest to the essence of Socialism by defining it as the advocacy of communal ownership of land and capital.
Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom
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They have been already translated. The well known pamphlet "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific" contains both of them. The second has also been translated by R.C.K. Ensor and published in his "Modern Socialism." _Production._ For him (Herr Duehring) socialism is by no means a necessary product of economic development, and, still less, a development of the purely economic conditions of the present day. He knows better…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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If Socialism should attempt to create a new human nature within the limits of the old world, it would be only a new edition of the old moralistic Utopias. The task of Socialism is not to create a Socialist psychology as a prerequisite to Socialism, but to create Socialist conditions of human life as a prerequisite to a Socialist psychology.
Leon Trotsky, Our Revolution
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In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian…
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
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Philosophers who discussed Socialism

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