The Free Development of All
The problem was not just to understand morality, but to improve it. Maybe socialism would never create a new socialist man. But institutional design could make a difference. Democratic rights, social solidarity, and economic safety nets could discourage, if not eliminate the worst forms of exploitation.
They could narrow the avenues of greed. Marx and Engels helped illuminate the role of ideology in historical change, ironically providing tools by which to critique their own capitulations to the status quo. In retrospect, it may be too easy to admire their predecessors and successors more than they.If there was one aspect of the family that all socialists embraced, it was parental concern for the self-realization of the next generation, extended to society as a whole. Marx and Engels stated the ideal with characteristic boldness in the Communist Manifesto: ‘‘The old bourgeois society with its classes and its conflicts of classes gives way to an association where the free development of each individual is the condition of the free development of all.,'3° At this, Owen, Thompson, Wheeler, de Saint-Simon, and Fourier would all have cheered. Mill and Stanton would have murmured at least some assent. Each would have gone on to explain, in their own distinctive voice, why the unregulated pursuit of individual self-interest could never achieve this nurturant ideal.