Those were fairly popular ideas at one time, even in their naive form -- especially in the United States, where for all the talk of capitalism being the national credo, the prospect of spending one's life as somebody else's exploited wage-slave has never seemed a proper fulfillment of the American ideal. In the 1840's, the famous editor Horace Greeley used to run Fourierist articles daily on the front page of The New York Tribune, precisely for the purpose of warning Americans against degenerating into a nation of soulless corporations and obedient employees, millionaires and beggars.

In later years came socialism's thousand ideological complexities and splintering movements -- the orthodox Marxists, Bolsheviks, anarcho-syndicalists, kibbutzniks, guild socialists, social democrats, Fabians and the lot. Yet in a sense those thousand movements did nothing more than debate how to fit the original undisputed principles to the contours of reality, and for all the ferocity of those debates, there were, finally, only two main approaches. So the complexities perhaps never did become too great.

One of the two approaches, the easier to describe, was always a matter of meditating on the beauties of the perfect plan for perfect institutions -- not Fourier's amusing scheme but something harder-headed and "scientific." When everyone thinks of the classic left-wing program, what they have in mind, probably without knowing it, is the plan drawn up in 1891 by Karl Kautsky and the orthodox Marxists at Erfurt, Germany, and from there exported to many a benighted place -- the plan for across-the-board nationalizations, the total mobilization of society, the economy functioning like an army on principles of solidarity and not profit.

Now, not everything in that idea was mistaken. On a small scale, people can indeed set up all kinds of cooperative enterprises and protect them from the rough-and-tumble of the profit system, and do quite well. On a larger scale, society as a whole has good reason to select entire industries and put them under public ownership and centralized administration, the way that, in a civilized country like Canada, the people in their wisdom have socialized medicine. In times of war, there might be reason to go further still and place the entire system under central control, exactly as Kautsky imagined.

But to suppose that centralized regimentation and giant state agencies were ever going to put an economy on a dynamic course for more than a moment, and efficiency would be achieved, and justice and happiness would flourish, and bureaucracy would not produce its well-known evils -- that idea always had more in common with Fourier's lemonade than the hard-headed "scientific" socialists ever imagined. And if that idea really did comprise the soul of socialism, and the Erfurt Program of exactly 100 years ago was the last word in social reform (as it has been in all the countries that have just now deleted the word "socialist" from their official name), then socialist ideas today would be as dead as no small number of people are saying they are, and there would be no point trying to revive them.

THE OTHER APPROACH HAS ALWAYS SEEN in socialism a set of goals -- not a set of institutions. The goals are to give working people the benefits of a dynamic economy, and to infuse a spirit of democratic equality into the general culture, and to give that culture a say over an otherwise amoral economic system, and to do these things not in some remote future time but today, or anyway tomorrow. Grand state agencies and a bit of central planning might be entirely useful for such a project. But so might be programs to build up the power of working people at the grass roots, through unions or worker-owned farms and businesses.

In an exalted mood, socialists might picture these methods leading one day to a moment when human relations would exude a balmy air of cooperation and justice, and socialism itself would be at hand, just as in the scientific plans. But there is no socialism itself, except poetically. In Michael Harrington's image, a modern economy lurches forward through a series of explosions, like an internal-combustion engine, and at each new explosion the whole system has to be reorganized, in a process without end. And the bigger and better the institutions that strengthen working people and society as a whole, the more these institutions, too, the socialist part of modern life, become vulnerable to the process of shakeup and change -- which is exactly what has happened to the social democrats of northern Europe, and for that matter to New Deal liberalism in the United States.