Book VII: Collectivist Organisation, I. (3)

Karl Marx, Engels, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue carefully guarded themselves against reproducing the Utopias of More, Campanella, Morelly and Cabet. Bebel was once questioned by a deputy belonging to the centre party with regard to the organisation of collectivist society. His answer was: “Do you think I am so indiscreet as to ask you for details of your Paradise?” Nevertheless Bebel himself in his book, “Die Frau und der Socialismus,” has attempted to construct a pic ture of the society of the future which has involved him in some severe reprimands.

Herr Schoeffle, a gentleman from Wurtemberg, who was professor of political economy at the University of Tübingen and afterwards at Vienna from 1860 to 1868, and Austrian Minister of Agriculture and Commerce from February 7th to October 30th, 1871, finally retired to Stuttgart, and in 1874 published a work in four bulky volumes entitled “Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers” (structure and life of the social body) in which he entirely assimilated the social body to a biological organism. A part of it he devoted to an examination of the working of collectivist society according to the Gospel of Marx. This has been published separately and sold by tens of thousands, under the title of the “Quintessence of Socialism.”