Preface to the 1967 Edition

This, essay was written in 1949-1950 and published in 1952 in the Princeton compendium, Socialism and American Life, edited by Donald Egbert and Stow Persons. Since then about a half-dozen published studies on American socialism have appeared (as well as a dozen unpublished Ph.D. theses), and on American communism ten scholarly volumes have been published in the series edited by Clinton Rossiter for the Fund for the Republic, while a score of other books, historical, analytical, and sensational (see the Bibliographical Essay, pp. 194-201), have increased the bulk of writing on this subject. This essay is being reprinted unchanged, and the reasons for this are twofold. First, despite the number of books on the Marxian movements in the United States, there is still not a single volume which encompasses, as this sketch does, the history of all the Marxian parties-the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party-as well as the various splinter and sectarian groups and personalities; and while many details have been added by the more specialized studies, the historical outline as presented in this monograph remains untouched. Second, and perhaps more important, the theoretical and interpretative framework presented in this essay has influenced many of the subsequent studies in the field, and this may be its enduring contribution. The basic question confronting all the students of American Marxism is the one posed in 1906 by Werner Sombart: "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" In the most advanced capitalist country of the world, there has been no Labor Party, little corporate class consciousness, and feeble intellectual leadership from the Left-though clearly the ideas of Marxism and the political proposals of the American Socialist Party are now the common coin of American intellectual life and its polity. Most of the explanations-one thinks here of those given two generations ago by Sombart or by Selig Perlman, or of the analyses made by such contemporary theorists as Sidney Hook, Louis Hartz, or S. M. Lipset-have stressed the distinctive conditions of American life, which made a barren ground for a socialist movement: the idea of equality, the opportunities for social mobility, the commitment to liberalism, the constraints of a two-party structure, the rising standard of living, the opportunity for labor to realize its demands through economic bargaining, and the like. The one question which all such explanations eschewed, and the one this essay attempted to answer was: Why did the socialist movement, as an organized political body, fail to adapt to the distinctive conditions of American life and find a place in the society as did, say, the British Labour Party in England (though not the Social Democratic Federation,