The Early Socialists on Needs and Society

Although the Stoic and Epicurean doctrine of the life according to nature and the ideal of the man of few needs were enormously influential in the period of the European Enlightenment, it is true to say that these philosophers were not read by Enlightenment and early socialist thinkers as moral philosophers so much as exponents of materialism. Marx, in a very interesting short history of the origins of socialism in The Holy Family (CW , Vol. 4, pp. 124-34), argues that socialism was born of a peculiar marriage of French and English materialism and that ‘French and English materialism was always closely related to Democritus and Epicurus ’ (p. 126). But, as we shall try to show, eighteenth-century materialism was a theory of the power of the object in a way that Hellenistic philosophy was not. Eighteenth-century materialism was deterministic while Stoic and Epicurean materialism, although postulating universal laws of nature and the operation of atoms as constitutive of the physical world, nevertheless held that the correct ordering of the human and moral realms depended on reason and the will to bring human nature into accordance with nature’s laws. The positions could hardly have been further apart, in fact.