Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... the antithesis between individualism and socialism philosophically considered. 1 The purpose which I have set before myself this evening is a very humble and limited one. I have not come here to instruct skilled economists and statisticians in political economy and the use of statistics; I have not come here to attempt an analysis of the probable working of Economic Socialism. I am not going to deny, so far as 1 am aware, any of the fundamental principles which are really involved in the Socialist contention. What I want to be 1 A Paper read by invitation at a meeting of the Fabian Society on February 21, 1890. allowed to attempt is simply to state a question, to emphasise a distinction. And the good which I should hope to effect, if I had the power to effect it, would be to help in refocussing the Socialist picture of social phenomena, not obliterating its details, but perhaps taking in a little more at both sides, and altering the light and shade, and putting some things in the foreground that are now in the background, and vice versa. Or, to change the metaphor, the Socialist express seems to me to be at present approaching a junction. I do not want it to shut off steam, but I wish I could be pointsman when it comes up; for I think that one line of rails will take it to a very barren country, and the other to a very fruitful country. I think it only fair to myself to say that I suppose I was asked to come here on purpose to try and criticise, and I mean to do so. But if I had before me an audience of plutocratic sympathies, then I should have the pleasure of speaking much more than I shall to-night in the language of the Fabian Essays. (a) Individualism and Socialism may be considered as names which designate different conditions or...