Happy people

This chapter traces the development of humanist socialism as a secular, life-affirming alternative to religious and scientistic worldviews. Beginning with Renaissance and nineteenth-century humanism, it explores how ideas of dignity, reason, and culture shaped socialist understandings of the “good life”. Thinkers such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier envisioned education, cooperation, and sensual freedom as paths to earthly happiness, while Marx and Engels redefined humanism through labour and historical materialism. The chapter also examines tensions between humanism, atheism, and religion within socialism, including moral and existential dimensions, sexual liberation, and the ambivalent legacies of the Enlightenment and antisemitism.