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Principles of Socialism: A Manifesto of 19th Century Socialism

Victor Considerant

Translated from French by Joan Roelofs

Library of Congress Catalog Number HX704.C7M53

120 pages

Illustrations

Publication date May 1, 2006

Paperback $14.95 ISBN 0-944624-47-2 or ISBN-13 9780944624470

Victor Considerant was a leading disciple of Charles Fourier, a utopian socialist in early 19th France. Considerant disseminated and moderated Fourier’s theories and attempted to found a socialist community near Dallas, Texas. The Principles of Socialism was first published in 1843 as an introduction to Considerant’s new journal, Peaceful Democracy, and later in 1847 as a pamphlet.

A predecessor and important resource for Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Victor Considerant’s 1847 treatise sought to utilize social science for the organization of peaceful societies, the productive development of resources, and fair worker’s rights. Reeling from the chaotic economic and social aftermath of the French Revolution, and the “new feudalism” of the large capitalists, this text offered a non-revolutionary approach to socialism, calling for balance between the right to property and the right to an adequate standard of living, and a gradual increase in political participation in proportion to increases in the educational level. Highly influential in formulating 19th century economic and political thought, this modern translation brings these seminal ideas to contemporary English readers.

Joan Roelofs is professor emerita of political science at Keene State College. She is the author of Greening Cities: Building Just and Sustainable Communities and Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism. She lives in Keene, New Hampshire.

“Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of 19th Democracy is one of the key texts of nineteenth-century French socialism. It is good to have it available to English speakers in Joan Roelofs’ clear, careful translation.”

— Jonathan Beecher, Professor of History, UC Santa Cruz, author of Charles Fourier: The Visionary and his World (1987) and Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (2001)

“Considerant was one of the most important of those who formulated the socialist critique of “bourgeois” society in the 1840s. It is more than likely that his Manifesto of 19th Century Democracy helped to inspire Marx’s portrayal in his Manifesto. Professor Roelofs has done a great service to the general reader in at last making available Considerant’s work.”

― Gareth Stedman Jones, editor with Ian Patterson of Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (1996).

“If ‘democracy’ is ever going to mean more than whoever is the current occupant of the White House wants it to mean for his own political purposes, then we all need to know more about what the great political thinkers have said on this subject over the years. Of these, few have said more interesting things than Victor Considerant. He is also one of the least known. Thus, it is with great pleasure that I greet Joan Roelofs’ fine translation of Considerant’s most important work on democracy. It remains as stimulating and provocative as ever, and Roelofs’ Introduction does an excellent job in contextualizing both Considerant and his ideas. Highly recommended.”

— Bertell Ollman, Professor Department of Politics, NYU. Author of Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method.

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