The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (254 page)

 
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Theory developed by
Bukharin
and
Stalin
and intended as a rebuttal of
Trotsky's
model of
permanent revolution
. Despite the failure of European revolutions, Russia could still build socialism through control over the commanding heights of the economy and under the political leadership of the CPSU.
GS 

 
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Socialist candidates and socialist election programmes predated socialist parties. The British
Labour Party
was founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, one of its components being the Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893. The oldest socialist party in a leading country is the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD, which can trace its origins to the German Workers’ Party, whose Gotha Programme of 1875 was fiercely criticized by
Marx
. The first socialist candidate in a US presidential election ran in 1892 (and got 0.19 per cent of the vote); no socialist party has ever established itself there ( See
Sombart
). Although there were prominent socialists in France during the Revolution ( see
Babeuf
) and during the uprising of 1848 ( see
Blanqui
), the continuous history of socialist parties in France dates back only to 1905. The reason for the late development of socialist parties was the late enfranchisement of the working class, where their mass support has always lain. Hardly had socialist parties started to benefit from the widening of the franchise when they were split asunder by the First World War. Many of the leaders of the socialist movements in combatant countries continued to preach international socialism, but they were deserted by their followers. Only when the war was going very badly for all combatants did anti-war socialism revive, in 1916–18. But this merely deepened the splits in the socialist movement, as many socialist parties were now in governing coalitions, sometimes as in Britain for the first time. The most successful socialist parties at this time were therefore those in Australia and New Zealand, which were less affected by the war. Between the wars the most successful socialist parties were in countries which escaped extreme depression and fascism, particularly in Scandinavia ( See
social democracy
).
After 1945, socialist parties spread worldwide, as many of the anticolonial parties in the Third World were instinctively, or explicitly, socialist. Those where the socialist heritage ran deepest were perhaps
Congress
in India and the
ANC
in South Africa. In some other countries, ‘socialism’ was little more than a label for whatever the local anti-colonial élite happened to want.
There is much discussion in the 1980s and 1990s on whether socialist parties are in permanent decline. Among the reasons for saying so are the decline in the
working class
, however defined, as a proportion of the population, the increased difficulty of funding the
welfare state
, and the (apparently) increasing unpopularity of socialist ideology among mass electorates. The main reason for denying the claim is that parties and politicians have a vital interest in their own survival, and rational socialist politicians are no less clever than rational politicians of other persuasions, so that they may be expected to adapt their appeals to suit changed conditions.

 
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The English word ‘society’ can be stretched or narrowed to cover almost any form of association of persons possessing any degree of common interests, values, or goals. ‘Society’ in the nineteenth century meant the upper classes; one might now refer to ‘international academic society’ or ‘European society’, though these uses might be disputed. The primary and most normal sense refers to a society defined by the boundaries of the state, even though this usage is odd and potentially misleading in the many cases where there is more than one sizeable ethnic or cultural group in a society, like Canada and South Africa.
The influential German sociologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Weber
and Ferdinand Tönnies , suggested that societies take different forms in so far as the very nature of the association between people differs. Tönnies distinguished a
Gemeinschaft
form, where people are linked by assumption, tradition, and familiar ties, from
Gesellschaft,
where their association is agreed, self-conscious, and quasicontractual. All societies contain elements of both.
A wide variety of contemporary writers choose to refer, in a Hegelian manner, to a ‘
civil society
’. A civil society in this sense is not the population of a state as such and it is very far from being the mere amalgam of people on a particular territory. Civil society is a range of relationships and organizations which possess a tendency to form a political system. The history of France from, say, 1780 exemplifies the distinction: the state has been reformed and redefined many times but France has remained a distinct and continuous civil society throughout the period. Neither Europe nor Brittany or Provence separately, for all that they might have societies in some sense, have been a civil society in the way that France has.
LA 

 
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An attempt to explain social behaviour by reference to modern biological theories and by natural selection in particular. The ‘new synthesis’ of biology and the social sciences, promised by E. O. Wilson amongst others, rests squarely upon Darwinian population biology, comparative ethology, modern evolutionary theory—once that theory had been purged of
Lamarckism
—and finally upon the particular concept of kin-selection. Consequently the sociobiologists’ central belief is that, while not all biological phenomena are adaptive in each moment of time, nevertheless natural selection has a pervasive role in shaping all classes of traits in organisms. And they have been particularly successful, perhaps, in explaining the natural selection of altruistic behaviour. In principle, then, all significant human social behaviour ought also to be explained by its biological basis. And, again in principle, it ought to be possible to establish the co-evolution of genes and culture. Whatever the truth of these claims, some practitioners of sociobiology have given the impression that they are genetic determinists or, at the very least, genetic reductionists. Debate about these issues, it may be suggested, has taken up a disproportionate amount of time and energy.
JH