H,rro~t, of Europeon Idea. Vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 651-660, 1986 Prmted in Great Britam 0191-6599/86 %3.00+0.00 Pergamon Journals Ltd. EARLY FRENCH SOCIALISM RECONSIDERED-II. SOCIAL SCIENCE, RHETORIC AND HISTORICAL PROGRESS* PAUL E. CORCORANI The French socialists writers from the period 1830-48 illustrate a complex diversity of ideas and perspectives, but it is possible to discern a basic uniformity in their rhetorical objectives. Scholars have tended not to see this, and have instead drawn the conclusion that early French socialists were philosophically shallow, romantically utopian, inconsistent in method and unsophisticated in their comprehension of the dynamics of political power. In Part I of this study a review of the propaganda of Fourier and Cabet provided the rhetorical context within which a reassessment of early French socialism can be made. Here it is argued that when the larger movement of which the Fourierists and Cabet were representative is placed within a contemporaneous perspective, an interpretation arises that makes sense, rather than nonsense, of early French socialist ideas and the techniques by which they expressed them. It is a common but paradoxical criticism that the French socialists were loose and incoherent in argument, and yet were obsessed with a ‘systkme’ of total social harmony. This difficulty may have more to do with our own critical distance than we would like to admit. Critics invariably look back across the century of socialist and communist theory which has predominantly been articulated in a Marxist framework. Marxism, it will be generally agreed, has always stressed the importance of theoretical coherence and methodological precision, and has engaged in ideological criticism on the assumption that there is a certain structure to modes of political discourse. Thus is it now a critical reflex to look back and see in these early socialists an ideological incoherence or indeterminacy in comparison to the structure, or at least the aspirations, of Marxist philosophy and economics. The error of anachronism in the judgement of French socialist thought is unmistakable. Why should, for example, the Feuerbachian critique of Hegelianism and disillusionment with liberal-bourgeois German reforms be the portals to the royal road to socialism for Frenchmen who understood themselves to be carrying on the struggle of the 1789 Revolution? Did their failure to use a German scholastic vocabulary to expound a ‘dialectical’ phenomenology of historical materialism mean that they must be adjudged as unscientific and ideologically naive? Socialism as a Social Science A thorough reading of French socialist literature from this period did not turn up a single instance of the use of the term idbologie. Their use of sciencesociale is the closest equivalent to be found for the meaning that is now implied by the term *Part I of this paper was published in History of European Ideas 7 (1986), 469-488. TDepartment of Politics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5001. 651