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[German Version] (May 14, 1771, Newton, Wales – Nov 17, 1858, Newton), successful industrialist, who pioneered a multitude of social reforms and in his writings formulated the basic ideas of utopian socialism. Owen became famous for his cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, which set a new standard for technical operations, working conditions, and social programs. In 1815 he began to use his authority in public, supporting occupational safety in general and employment programs, and opposing child l…

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. History and Church History I. Philosophy 1. Terminology Communism (<Lat. communis, “common”) denotes (a) notions of a future social order in which private ownership is abolished and the means of production are owned collectively and administered by agencies of society. Consumption, i.e. the distribution of goods and services, is also regulated by collective distribution of the goods produced by society on the basis of its members' ma…

[German Version] Theory. Soviets (councils) are formed through equal, free, but not necessarily secret ballots (Elections) by an electorate organized by factory or military unit, and in part also by residential district. They are broadly responsible for economic, political, and legal matters. The concentration of all power in these soviets eliminates separation of powers. The elected members of these councils, whose discussions and decisions are ongoing and always public, are subject to an imperat…

[German Version] (to 1846: Lassal; Apr 11, 1825, Breslau [Wrocław] – Aug 31, 1864, Geneva, following a duel). On May 23, 1863, Lassalle became president of the first German labor party, the General German Workers' Association, one of the two parties that later formed the Social Democratic Party. He came from a well-to-do merchant family of liberal, assimilated Jews in Breslau. As a student of law and philosophy in Breslau, Berlin, and Paris, he was attracted to the left-wing Hegelians. During the …

[German Version] I. Definition The term social question is linked indissolubly to the social history of the 19th century; it denotes the diagnoses of the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society and the strategies for dealing with it. By the 1840s, soziale Frage was already in use in Germany as a translation of the French question sociale; against the background of dramatically rising mass poverty and the first food riots, it summarized various social transformations that were experienced as extreme crises. In particular, we can identify …

[German Version] Derived from French syndicat (“trade union”), the term denotes an influential current in the labor movement (Trade unions) at the turn of the 20th century, especially in the Romance countries of Europe. Radically anti-statist, its goal was a federally structured society based on producers’ cooperatives, with extensive self-determination of workers in their workplaces. In the spirit of K. Marx, it viewed the social conflict between capital and labor as an antagonistic opposition that …

[German Version] (ESK; Protestant Social Congress). E. Troeltsch described the ESK as an institution designed to “deal with all the basic problems of ethics with theoretical or practical significance” ( Soziallehren, 593) in light of the modern situation. In the fluid socio-political climate around 1890, A. Stoecker, A. Wagner, and L. Weber came forward, founding the ESK “to unite all social Christians in a neutral working forum” (Brakelmann, 177). Once the reservations of A. v. Harnack regarding the possibility of being co-opted into partisan politics had been satisfied, the ESK ¶ wa…

[German Version] (Apr 22, 1870, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk] – Jan 21, 1924, Gorki [now Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow; pseudonym since 1901 of V. Ilich Ulyanov). On Nov 8, 1917, after the successful October Revolution, the theoretician, organizer, and widely influential spokesman of the radical, Bolshevik wing of Russian social democracy was elected “chairman of the Council of People's Commissars,” thus becoming the head of the Soviet Russian government. In his theoretical works and through his political activity, he laid the foundations of Soviet communism. When he began to study…

[German Version] I. History The emergence of trade unions is associated with the development of modern capitalistic industrial society. The nascent unions considered themselves primarily representatives of the economic and social interests of their organized members but also as representatives of the unorganized workers in the various trades and professions. By virtue of their organizational goals and structures, they were organized as opponents to the employers and thus formed an integral part of t…