Socialism and Human Nature
Critics of socialism claim that because humans are by nature selfish and cruel, socialism won’t work. This doesn’t follow.
Anyone who sets out to defend socialism in the early decades of the 21st century needs to confront the wide variety of anti-socialist arguments developed during the 20th. Economic calculation problems represent a problem for the practicality of at least some socialist proposals. Libertarian arguments based on the idea of a natural right to property challenge their morality. But one of the most persistent claims of socialism’s critics, one that I want to tackle head-on, is the idea that socialism is not just impractical or even immoral but unnatural.
Economist and libertarian social critic Murray Rothbard, for example, entitled a book of his essays Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. Psychology professor and science popularizer Steven Pinker breezily asserts in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature that “socialism and communism…run against our selfish natures.”
Arc Digital columnist and historian Joshua Tait discusses, in a piece from last week, why scientific claims of this sort appeal so strongly to the right.
These are the discoveries — typically biological, psychological, or anthropological — that…
