A history of socialism

HISTORY OF SOCIALISM
THOMAS KIRKUP
FOURTH EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1909
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The aim of the present book is twofold: to set forth the leading phases of the historic socialism, and to attempt a criticism and interpretation of the movement as a whole. In this edition the changes in the history are concerned chiefly with the revival of the International, which, since the Stuttgart Congress in 1907, may be regarded as an accomplished fact.
I have made it no part of my plan to dwell on details. The interest and significance of the history of socialism will be found, not in its details and accidents, but in the development of its cardinal principles, which I have endeavoured to trace. Readers desirous of detail must be referred to the writings of the various socialists, or to works that treat of special phases of the movement. Yet I hope that the statement of the leading theories is sufficiently clear and adequate to enable the reader to form his own judgment of the highly controversial matters involved in the history of socialism. I may add that in every case my account is drawn from an extensive study of the sources. These sources I have given both in the text and in footnotes. For the more recent development of the subject, however, the material is derived from such a multitude of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and journals, as well as from personal inquiry and observation, that it has not been found practicable to indicate them.
But the purely historical part of such a work is far from being the most difficult. The real difficulty begins when we attempt to form a clear conception of the meaning and significance of the socialistic movement, to indicate its place in history, and the issues to which it is tending. In the concluding chapters I have made such an attempt. The good reader who takes the trouble to go so far through my book can accept my contribution to a hard problem for what it is worth. He may at least feel assured that it is no hasty and ill-considered effort which is placed before him. The present volume grew out of the articles on socialism published in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The views advocated there were first set forth in my Inquiry into Socialism, published in 1887. In this edition of the History they have in some points received such expansion and modification as time and repeated, self-criticism have suggested. I beg particularly to invite the attention of the reader to the last two chapters, in which the present position of socialism and its relation to some contemporary questions, such as those of Empire, are set forth.