Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 08:32:18AM -0500, Dan Caugherty wrote:
> It seems the editor of this dictionary focuses primarily on the
> Cold War-era definition of socialism, as a stepping-stone to
> communism etc.  Both sides of that war were guilty of distorting
> the original definition.

Yup.
 
> Unfortunately, what we've failed to consider is that the concept
> predates Lenin, nor was the idea conceived by Karl Marx.
> Rather, socialism was first proposed by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy
> Bentham, as a reaction to the Dickensian conditions spawned by
> the laissez-faire capitalism of their day.

Britannica has this:

 "Socialism - system of social organization in which property and the
  distribution of income are subject to social control rather than
  individual determination or market forces.

  Socialism refers to both a set of doctrines and the political
  movements that aspire to put these doctrines into practice. Although
  doctrinal aspects loomed largest in the early history of socialism, in
  its later history the movements have predominated over doctrine, so
  much so that there is no precise canon on which the various adherents
  of contemporary socialist movements agree. The most that can be said
  is that socialism is, in the words of Anthony Crosland, a British
  socialist, "a set of values, or aspirations, which socialists wish to
  see embodied in the organization of society."

It also confirms that you can, if you like, trace the roots back to
Plato, but that the first experiments in which the word itself was used
were performed by folks like Saint-Simon and Fourier in France, and by
Robert Owen in England. There's a pretty good book by a guy named
Heilbroner, called "The Worldly Philosophers", that covers a broad range
of utopians, economists and other dismal scientists.

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