8–1906), and William E. H. Lecky (1838–1903)—condemned socialism with unsparing severity and prophetic insight.
“We object that the organization of all industry under State control must paralyze industrial energy and discourage and neutralize individual effort,” wrote Bradlaugh in 1884 (A Selection of the Political Pamphlets of Charles Bradlaugh, 1970). Lecky agreed with him. “The desire of each man to improve his circumstances, to reap the full reward of superior talent, or energy, or thrift,” he wrote in 1896, “is the very mainspring of the production of the world. Take these motives away . . . cut off all the hopes that stimulate, among ordinary men, ambition, enterprise, invention, and self-sacrifice, and the whole level of production will rapidly and inevitably sink” (Democracy and Liberty).
And so it has proved in the twentieth century, as anyone who reads David Osterfeld’s “Socialism and Incentives” (The Freeman, November 1986) or Kevin Williamson’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (2011) can see.
Bradlaugh’s and Lecky’s objections to socialism were of course not confined to its material destructiveness. They, too, like their classical-liberal predecessors, perceived its hostility to freedom and the family. Bradlaugh even predicted that the imposition of socialism would require the ideological reconditioning of the entire population—a phenomenon that has proved characteristic of all communist regimes, notably China before and during the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea today.
Herbert Spencer and Auberon Herbert showed equal foresight in their wide-ranging critiques of socialism. They not only underlined its incompatibility with liberty as eloquently as all their other comrades-in-arms; they also anticipated the terrible violence and cruelty to which it would give rise. In a passage horribly vindicated by the seemingly endless pattern of socialist revolution, dictatorship, and civil war in so much of the post-colonial Third World, Herbert declared in 1885: “In presence of unlimited power lodged in the hands of those who govern . . . the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents” (The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State).
With similar prescience, Spencer wrote in 1891: “The fanatical adherents of a social theory are capable of taking any measures, no matter how extreme, for carrying out their views: holding, like the merciless priesthoods of past times, that the end justifies the means. And when a general socialistic organization has been established, the vast, ramified, and consolidated body of those who direct its activities, using without check whatever coercion seems to them needful . . . [will exercise] a tyranny more gigantic and more terrible than any which the world has seen” (The Man versus the State).
It is a historic tragedy that all these warnings fell on deaf ears. Will they be heeded by those pressing for world government in the 21st century?