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Conservativism vs. Socialism: A question of human nature
By sage of monticello | August 1, 2007
According to the dictionary, socialism can be defined three ways:
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.
The definition of socialism has important implications because of what it assumes of human nature.
The philosophy behind socialism was defined by Karl Marx in the 19th Century. Marx saw the “freeing of the state” from various traditional western political principles or rights, such as the right to practice religion or own property, and the vesting of those rights in the individual as preventing the progression of the human race by “pitting man against himself” and degrading the idea of “rights”.
To Marx, man could never “collapse into himself” and “come into community with his fellow man” because Western political principles made man individualistic — a perversion of the “true” nature of man. Marx thought that history taught us that if man was placed within a political scheme that viewed man best as free individuals that man would constantly choose not to be “free” by consistently preferring to utilize freedoms that the state had “freed itself from.” The principles of freedom and individuality as understood by the West were the cause of social misery to Marx.
The solution Marx outlined in his Communist Manifesto was to make man “free” through forced wealth redistribution implemented by the political community. The underlying premise of Marx’s means of achieving the “correct” human nature is of course that people can’t create nor can own wealth, only government can create and own wealth.
So, liberals promote wealth redistribution policies and thus the belief that freedom and individuality should not be the core principles at the heart of our political system.
Diametrically opposed to the free slavery of Marx are Conservative philosophers such as Emanuel Kant, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill.
In his writings Kant espoused what has become the heart of the conservative philosophy, namely that the best way to progress the human race was for man to be the most free to engage in competitive activities as compelled for him to do by nature.
Kant theorized that man’s “unsocial sociability” compels him to “competition among his peers” and that the greatest gain in the perfecting of the race comes when men are most free to engage in such competition. At heart of the conservative political philosophy is man as free and man as individualistic.
Then there are the “Johns”. The philosophies of Locke and Mill supported and extended Kant’s theory on human nature to society (Mill) and more specifically, government (Locke).
Mill argued are radically a radically limited government upon the premise that freedom was the best principle for society to endorse. The framework in which Mill’s radically limited government would operate was through what he termed the harm principle. The harm principle stipulated that government and society can only legitimately exercise its power over the individual when the actions of the individual encroach upon, and therefore limit, the rightful liberty of another.
Locke argued much of the same only 150 years earlier and without as much emphasis on the idea of freedom. Locke argued that the civil magistrate (government) and the citizen each could only operate legitimately within the its own sphere of delegated powers and when acting outside of that sphere the actor, be it government or citizen, harms society by upsetting the balance.
In short, the difference between the conservative philosophers and Marx is this: the conservative philosophers recognize man as self-interested and seek to separate government from man and man from government - to do this conservatives make man free; whereas Marx’s conception of human nature is that man is not self-interested but destined to come in community with his “brethren” with no ideas of self or individuality and that such should be through force if necessary.
So I leave the question to you. Is man self-interested, individual and best free or is man made self-interested by the perverse political traditions of the west, meaning that the “true” nature of man lies in his destiny to be in “community” with other men?
And by community, I don’t mean the suburbs…
Topics: conservativism, socialism |
