WHY IS THERE NO SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES?
Why is there no Socialism in the United States?
Werner Sombart
Translated by
Patricia M. Hocking
Head of German, Lockleaze Comprehensive School, Bristol
and
C. T. Husbands
Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bristol
Edited and with an Introductory Essay by C. T. Husbands and with a Foreword by Michael Harrington
First published 1976 in United Kingdom by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD and published in United States by International Arts and Sciences, Inc.
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1976 by Taylor & Francis
This work was originally published in 1906 by the Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) of Tbingen under the title Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? It was slightly revised from a series of articles that had appeared in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik [ Works in Social Science and Social Policy ], xxi (1905)
English translation Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands 1976
Editors introductory essay and editorial material C. T. Husbands 1976
Michael Harringtons foreword The Macmillan Press Ltd 1976
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 76381106
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-04530-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-04531-6 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-17201-9 (ebk)
The studies of the workers' movement and of Socialism in the United States of America published in this book first appeared in more or less identical form in Volume XXI of the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik . I have departed from the original text only by introducing some new numerical data and a small amount of additional illustrative material.
I decided upon a special edition of the work only after I had become certain that the principal points of my argument were correct. The verdict of American experts on the subject assured me of this, and not only have my middle-class American friends told me that they agree with me, but the leaders of the Socialist parties have also recognised the correctness of my interpretation something that seems to me to be even more conclusive. The International Socialist Review , the official scholarly journal of the Socialist Party, has even reproduced my articles for its readers, mostly in the full text.
This study can serve as a supplement to the chapters of my book, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, where I have already attempted (in the last edition) to present a concise sketch of Socialism in the U.S.A.
W.S.
Breslau , 14 August 1906
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
The questions raised by Werner Sombart in 1906 about the absence of Socialism in the United States are relevant to American politics in the 1970s.
A number of factors and events are converging and it is clear that this decade will be a period of political realignment or political disintegration. The energy crisis, the great recession-inflation of the seventies, a growing sense of ethical and spiritual malaise, and many other trends all point to such a development. It can be argued, I think, that the nation is at one of those turning points which then fix the outlines of an entire era to come. In the past, there were the rise of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s, the Civil War and the triumph of Northern capitalism, the emergence of the corporate and imperial structure under the direction of the Republican Party in the 1890s, Roosevelt's welfare-state politics of the thirties. Now it seems that another moment of change is on the agenda.
In Europe, Socialism became a mass movement during the transition from laissez - faire to organised, imperial capitalism (that is to say, between the 1890s and the First World War), although England, as the Editor points out in the introductory essay, is something of a special case. In America, the Socialists failed. The ongoing relevance of the fact in the seventies and of Sombart's attempt to account for it is that its explanation requires one to understand social forces and structures which are at work to this very moment and which will profoundly influence the realignments of the seventies and eighties. Thus, Why is there no Socialism in the United States? is not a scholarly curiosity, but a book which poses the issue of American 'exceptionalism', an issue which is quite pertinent in the present crisis.
I will not for a moment attempt to survey the literature on the subject. That is well done in the introductory essay (even though, as will be seen in a moment, I have my interpretive differences with it). Rather, I will concentrate on a few of the themes raised by Sombart, and stressed by the Editor, which are important to the present and future as well as to the American past.
First of all, I think that the notion of the 'civic integration' of the American working class is extremely important. Sombart treats it, of course; but I would place even more of a stress upon it than he does. The continental-European Socialist movement, it must be remembered, began around a civil-rights, rather than an economic, question: the exclusion, or systematic undercounting, of the workers in the political process. In almost every instance, the psychological, emotional basis of the anti-bourgeois struggle was the demand for bourgeois equality. Even in the case of the partial exception in England, there is a striking fact that the first politically organised workers' movement, Chartism, had the same characteristic, even though it did not lay the groundwork for a mass Socialist party.
In the United States there was universal manhood suffrage almost from the very beginning. This led to the phenomenon, first brilliantly formulated by Leon Samson, of 'Americanism' as a substitute for Socialism. American capitalism, Samson argued, is the Socialist form of capitalism, i.e., it preaches an egalitarianism, a denial of the reality of class society, which is unlike anything one would have found in France or Britain. Therefore a worker in America could express his drive for equality in terms of, not in counterposition to, the prevailing ideology.
