Which of the following was a common theme among nineteenth-century utopian socialists?

The Varieties of Socialist Experience

Even if Marx was more known about than known, the fact remains that by the end of the nineteenth century a politically oriented, class-conscious European socialist movement had emerged in his name; and by this time the word socialist meant what it still means today, a social and political doctrine and a political movement or system. In view of this latitude of meaning, it is scarcely surprising that ‘socialism’ has come down to us in social science literature as a noun qualified by an adjective – as in ‘utopian socialism,’ ‘scientific socialism,’ ‘state socialism,’ ‘revolutionary socialism,’ ‘evolutionary socialism,’ or (until recently) as ‘actually existing socialism,’ or again (today) as ‘market socialism.’ Similarly, the adjective ‘socialist’ can be employed as a pendant qualifying or characterizing an abstract noun, as in ‘socialist internationalism,’ ‘socialist economics,’ ‘socialist realism,’ or ‘socialist feminism.’

The above-listed collocations – the inventory is illustrative, not exhaustive – are not just convenient subdivisions, but serial attempts at spot-welding that can readily be arrayed in historical sequence. ‘Utopian socialism,’ as we have seen, dates from the 1830s and 1840s, ‘Fabian’ or ‘evolutionary socialism’ dates from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘Guild socialism’ dates from the period between the two World Wars, and ‘actually existing socialism’ dates from the latter days of Soviet communism. ‘Socialist internationalism’ peaked, then bottomed out dramatically, in the period before 1914; ‘socialist realism’ (like ‘socialism in one country’) belongs to the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union; ‘socialist feminism’ to Western scholarship of a later date. To array these composite terms historically in order to arrive at the meaning of their least common denominator, socialism, is not to pigeonhole them arbitrarily, nor yet to proceed reductively, if it is borne in mind throughout that each instance of spot-welding affected the coordinates of its successors.

More specifically, anarchism, syndicalism, and their offshoots (whether revolutionary or not) are kinds of socialism that were defined and elaborated against state socialism (Thomas, 1980); Engels in 1875 contrasted scientific with utopian socialism (even if the latter was largely a spent force, the former was to enjoy some shelf-life well into the twentieth century); Lenin defined Bolshevism, then communism as he understood the term, against the parliamentary, reformist socialism of the pre-1914 German SPD (and by extension the Second International); this reformist socialism had itself been elaborated in contradistinction to the revolutionary socialism that appeared to have had its come-uppance at the time of the Paris Commune (1871). Lenin's successors proceeded to counterpose socialism in one country against the socialist internationalism the First and Second Internationals had espoused. Overall, these developments do not add up to a tidy, formulaic picture. Yet there is a subtle patterning in the carpet. Positions and tendencies throughout the history of socialism were debated, articulated, and defined in relation to other, pre-existing socialist positions and tendencies.

Space as Environment

In the environmental perspective, the emphasis was given to the local connections between people, artifacts, and place. The first environmental approaches were developed by the sensualist psychology of the eighteenth century. Man was a product of whatever his senses impressed upon his mind. His aptitudes and personality reflected his environment. If it was disorderly or unsound, social life had many reasons to be stressed. By the end of the eighteenth century, social scientists were well aware of the social and political implications of such a conception. Jeremy Bentham conceived his Panopticon in order to provide criminals with an environment, which would teach them safer forms of behavior. More generally, the idea that ‘to reform society, you had to change its material setting’ was central to the nineteenth-century utopian socialism and still present in the conception of urbanism developed by the International Movement of Modern Architecture in the 1930s.

Johann Gottfried Herder was more sensitive to the harmony, which developed between peoples and the country they lived in than to the sensual influence of these surroundings on their mind and behavior. The early development of geography in Germany was linked to the combined influence of Kant (evident in Alexander von Humboldt's conception of geographical description) and Herder (who was closer to Carl Ritter). Such a conception was important for all the social sciences in Germany, since it was conducive to a keener interest in peoples than in individuals or social classes. For many German geographers, the harmony between a people and the land they lived in was expressed through its landscapes.

The Herderian environmentalism was a literary and poetic one. Natural evolutionism had a more direct impact on the social sciences, since it was a scientific theory. The early forms of evolutionism as developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had no direct impact on the then emerging social sciences. The publication of The Origin of Species occurred at a time when history and the idea of progress had become popular in the public opinion, and original forms of evolutionism had developed in sociology: hence the impact of its theses in the social sciences. For sensualist psychology or Herderian philosophy, the influence of things upon the human mind was a direct one. For scientific evolutionism, the relations were mediated through biological mechanisms.

Did environments shape completely the destiny of humankind and of any of its groups? Hot discussions developed between environmentalists and the scientists who believed in human liberty. In order to depict the relations between organisms and their environment, a new discipline, ecology, appeared. Named by Haeckel in 1866, its first scientific achievements occurred at the end of the nineteenth century; it became mature in the 1930s and 1940s. Geographers did not wait for the development of ecology to propose a new conception of their discipline: Anthropogeographie, or human geography, was named and shaped by Friedrich Ratzel in the 1880s and 1890s. For him and for the first human geographers in France, a strict environmentalism was an unbearable position, but physical constraints did exist and shaped at least partly human behavior and history: geographers pleaded for possibilism, which gave room to physical and biological constraints, but acknowledged the role of other variables.

By 1920, it had become evident that environmentalism was not a very fruitful way of conceiving the role of space in social functioning.

A Brief History of the Social Economy

The history of the social economy can be narrated through the three overlapping definitional lenses outlined above. First, the social economy can be traced back to related organizational roots in antiquity, such as Egyptian corporations, the Greek funds for the ritual organization of funerary ceremonies, and Roman colleges of craftsmen. It is more readily associated, however, with organizational developments in European medieval and early modern periods, particularly in the guilds and mutual associations that appeared in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon societies around the turn of the first millennium CE. Guilds provided spaces that enabled mutual professional development in various crafts and protected their members from the vagaries of feudal and mercantilist regimes. The social economy first came to fruition—“invented” as some claimed at the time—in the tumult of the Industrial Revolution and the ferment of new ideas of social organization. This period produced radical ideas of how to organize society that can loosely be grouped into three ideologies: first, the “utopian socialism” of the likes of Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Proudhon; second, Christian socialism that sought to protect people from social isolation and atomization; third a liberal or bourgeois movement that championed principles of self-help in retaliation to state interference and capitalist exploitation. Out of such ideas, especially from utopian socialism, came the cooperative movement that saw its principles of mutual aid and solidarity codified by the Rochdale Pioneers in Northern England. This period was marked by a number of experiments in social organization, from more radical socialist initiatives like Robert Owen's New Lanark to more philanthropic projects such as the model communities financed by industrialists like Cadbury. By the end of the 19th century, the social economy was beginning to be recognized in a number of European countries as constituted by the three pillars we still identify today: mutual societies, cooperatives, and nonprofit associations.

Second, during this period in the Francophone world, the social economy was defined for the first time as the science of the distribution of wealth—of social justice in economic allocation—in contradistinction to political economy, which was seen as the science of the production of wealth and the relationship between people and commodities in that process. These (social) scientific disciplines emerged in response to the institutionalization of state and market through the modern period and into the 20th century. The social economy, then, arising as a “third sector” to the state and market, can be seen as a bridge or mediating sphere between the two competing, polarized logics of the public and the private. Foucault has since argued that civil society—or the logic of “the social”—arose in the early modern period precisely to manage the tensions between the conflicting logics of the state and market: between the individualistic, calculative logic of market exchange and the collectivist, juridical logic of state sovereignty; or, put simply, between economics and law. From another perspective, anarchists and communitarians have long argued that associational reciprocity arose spontaneously, predating both the state and the market as a preexisting cooperative “state of nature,” in sharp contrast to the violent, bloody chaos envisioned by Thomas Hobbes. While possessing unique qualities, the social thus shares some characteristics with the market—spontaneous order, distributed knowledge, equilibrium—but also shares some with the state—collectivity, solidarity, justice—which remain deeply antagonistic to the market.

In classical liberalism, the social operates alongside the private and the public as a mediator between these two poles, as a separate and independent space called civil society; however, with the rise of capitalism, the social gets gradually squeezed out by dominant market forces, intermittently curtailed by state logics. Through the 20th century, this third principle of associational reciprocity has been marginalized and almost extinguished with the ascendency and dominance of, first, bourgeois laissez faire capitalism and, second, the technocratic-socialist welfare state. For instance, the cooperative movement—a key part of the social economy, and a manifestation of the social—grew through the 19th century on the model of the Rochdale Pioneers; but in the 20th century cooperatives were marginalized by advances in the market economy—notably the advent of mass production—and, in turn, by the rise of the welfare state, which absorbed many cooperative initiatives and programmes of community care. It is important to note that the modern welfare state—or what remains of it following the privatizations of the last few decades—was largely founded upon the incorporation of cooperative and mutual associational activities which first innovated and practised educational and care activities within communities.

The post-World War II history of the social economy is one of waves of activity that broadly correlate with socioeconomic crisis conditions. Many scholars account for this periodization in social economy activity as a product of its essential relation to periods of crisis in the state and economy. Indeed, much of what we consider the social economy consists in practices that are initiated in reaction to human needs being left unmet through state or market failure. For instance, the first post-war wave of social economy activity in Europe is associated with the 1968 generation of radical social movements and the revolt against the alienation of the paternalist and bureaucratic welfare state and also the exploitation and homogenization of capitalist mass production and consumption. In this period, from the 1960s to the late 1970s, many grassroots social organizations were founded, often with radical political objectives that attempted to reimagine ways of working and living through cooperative and small-scale collective forms. They have remained marginal alternatives to a mainstream increasingly dominated by the market. The principles of redistribution embedded in the welfare state and that of reciprocity in associationalism have since come under sustained neoliberal attack.

The second period emerged in reaction to the crisis of unemployment, deindustrialization, and uneven urban development of the 1980s and 1990s, following the “rollout” of neoliberal economic policies, especially in Europe and North America. Whereas the previous wave offered alternatives to state services, this wave sought to offer alternatives to the failures of neoliberal markets, especially in those disadvantaged neighborhoods and marginalized communities that increasingly marked postindustrial cities. Toward the end of this period, in the late 1990s, this wave began to be institutionalized by the state and incorporated into the growing public policy agenda around “the Third Way,” particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, where the New Labour government led the way globally on the development of supportive legal and policy infrastructure for an ascendant organizational form known as “social enterprise” that has come to be most readily associated with the social economy. In social enterprise, New Labour found the perfect vehicle for decentralizing and marketizing the delivery of public services as part of their agenda of tackling social exclusion and promoting the inclusion of deprived communities back into mainstream society.

After a long period of marginalization by market and state logics, the social has reappeared in the 21st century, in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a radical alternative to a neoliberal market economy. Most recently, there has been a strange reemergence of the social in growing preponderance of social-prefixed phenomena: social media, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, social analytics, etc., whose appearance is perhaps a sign that we are entering a new age in which state and market logics are no longer so dominant.

Regional Planning as Resource Development: 1920–50

Regionalism emerged as a significant political force in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily in conjunction with the consolidation of national markets and the spread of nationalist ideologies aimed at sustaining rapid industrialization. In the US, regional divisions between North and South exploded in a bloody Civil War, while less violent regional uprisings multiplied throughout Europe as new nation-states arose in Germany and Italy and older states such as France, Great Britain, and Spain attempted to integrate diverse regional cultures into unified national territories. Many of the cultural regionalisms that were politically asserted during this period, including those of Catalonia, Scotland, the Basque country, and the US South, have continued to the present as important political, economic, and cultural forces.

Regional planning as a distinct form of public intervention, however, first consolidated in the US in the 1920s during a period known as the Progressive Era, when many new experiments in urban government, public administration, and planning were initiated. This first phase drew upon European traditions of utopian socialism, anarchism, regional geography and sociology, and the regional political movements that arose in response to the homogenization of national markets and the deepening urban poverty that characterized late nineteenth-century Europe. Particularly influential were such anarchist thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, and two leading planning innovators, the polymath Scotsman Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city movement.

This first regional planning doctrine or paradigm viewed the large industrial capitalist city, with its teeming densities and unhealthy slum housing, as the primary cause of major social and environmental problems. It emphasized urban decentralization, typically into quasi-socialist new towns and garden cities that would combine the advantages of both the city and the countryside, while hopefully ameliorating the problems of each through some form of common or public ownership. Although the European critique of urban-industrial capitalism and the particular form it was taking in the industrial capitalist city significantly influenced this first phase of regional planning, its more radical European regionalism was watered down in its Americanization. What remained, however, were a strong anti-urban bias, an idealized vision of the countryside and the environment, and a specifically spatial strategy of reform.

The appropriate planning region tended to be defined in almost organic or ecological terms, building on the social cohesion that was presumed to be coincident with the physical environment. The work of regional physical geographers was of particular importance here. The most innovative and exemplary expression of this first round of regional planning was the TVA, a semiautonomous multistate unit of government responsible for resource development and environmental preservation in the large Tennessee River drainage basin.

The TVA model of regional resource development, which would later be replicated in India, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and many other countries, linked together the two main branches of early regionalist thought in the US, one centered in New York in the Regional Planning Association of America, with Lewis Mumford its best known figure, and the other representing the southern states of the US, giving voice to problems of regional underdevelopment and, to a lesser extent, racial discrimination. Metropolitan regional planning was also emerging at the same time in the US, but mostly as an adjunct to urban planning and often in antagonism with the resource-based and larger-scale ecological approach of the northern and southern regionalists.

This first phase, especially through the TVA, would have a significant influence on US national policy in the 1920s and early 1930s, but would lose nearly all its influence as the Great Depression deepened and national priorities shifted in response to the threat and reality of World War II. Once a grand utopian experiment, the TVA became little more than a munitions factory and a generator of cheap electricity for northern industries. By the time World War II ended, regional planning had almost disappeared in the US, although many other countries continued to create specialized agencies and initiate river basin hydroelectric and resource development schemes similar to the TVA for decades afterward.

There was very little theorizing about uneven regional development during this first phase. There was some concern for urban poverty and a widespread critique of the overconcentration of both wealth and poverty in the booming industrial capitalist cities, but the regional discourse rarely addressed directly the rootedness of these problems in the capitalist development process. During this period, the discipline of geography for the most part was theoretically moribund and increasingly isolated from developments in the social sciences as well as in professional planning practice. After the swift expansion of regional planning and regionalist thinking in the first quarter of the twentieth century, peaking in the formation of the TVA, an equally rapid decline took place in the second quarter century.

The Impact of Malthus and Malthusianism

Malthus's theory soon became known on the continent, particularly in France and Germany. In France, while the Essay of 1798 was not translated until 1980 (by Vilquin), parts of the Essay of 1803 were presented in the Bibliothèque Britannique as early as 1805 by the Genevian Pierre Prévost, who was also responsible for the translation of the third edition in 1809. The Principles of Political Economy appeared in French in the year of their English publication. In Germany, Malthus was translated several times from 1806 onwards. In the rest of Europe (Italy, Spain, Russia), Malthus's works were not translated until the second half of the nineteenth century, but as philosophers and economists read them in English, French, and German, they were much discussed (Fauve-Chamoux, 1984).

In view of the frequency of misquotations, mis-readings, second-hand references, silly remarks, and invectives accumulated by these commentators, however, one cannot help but wonder whether the majority of them, even Karl Marx, had really read Malthus's publications.

The most common misconception – particularly among economists – is that Malthus contended that the population really does increase in geometrical progression while the means of subsistence increase in arithmetic progression. In fact, Malthus referred only to tendencies, and refused to allow his theory to be reduced to the simplistic conclusion that population is regulated by subsistence.

An associated misconception casts Malthus as an enemy of demographic growth. In fact, as early as 1805 he made it quite explicit that “It is an utter misconception of my argument to infer that I am an enemy to population. I am only an enemy to vice and misery, and consequently to that unfavourable proportion between population and food which produces these evils.” This misconception was soon so widespread that the adjective ‘Malthusian’ was coined to describe not only the practice of restricting births but, in the last half of the nineteenth century, the practice of limiting economic production.

As a rule, socialists have poured scorn on Malthus for his liberal ideas and his skepticism with respect to social intervention policies. In attacking Godwin, he had undermined the very basis of utopian socialism. This resulted in a vigorous, if somewhat delayed, reaction from Godwin himself (Godwin, 1820), to which Malthus responded the following year in the Edinburgh Review.

This debate came to a head in 1839, when Marcus (1939) accused Malthus of advocating the asphyxiation of ‘surplus’ newborns, a myth which was taken up and popularized in France by Leroux (1839) with expressions such as ‘the somber Protestant of sad England’ and ‘the selfish defender of the propertied classes.’ Karl Marx, champion of invective, is every bit as dismissive, denouncing Malthus as ‘superficial,’ ‘a professional plagiarist,’ ‘the author of nonsense,’ ‘the agent of the landed aristocracy,’ ‘a miserable sinner against science,’ ‘a paid advocate,’ ‘the principal enemy of the people,’ etc. (cf. Michelle Perrot, Malthusianism and Socialism in Dupaquier and FauveChamoux 1983).

However, most socialists apart from Marx agree that there is a connection between overpopulation and misery, but distance themselves from Malthus with respect to the proposed causes and remedies. The most serious discussion of Malthus's theories is to be found in the work of Karl Kautsky (Kautsky, 1880). When neo-Malthusianism came to the fore at the end of the nineteenth century, however, socialist criticism once more became more radical. Where his doctrines are concerned, Malthus has had a large number of successors, many of them illegitimate – at least in the author's system of values.

The ‘legitimate’ successors to Malthus's works include the analysis of the causes, processes, and consequences of the growth of populations and, in political economy, the theory of effective demand, which Keynes revived (1939), affording it great topicality (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money), as well as the references made to the Essay on the Principle of Population by Charles Darwin (1838) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1858).

The illegitimate successors – the neo-Malthusianists – are much more numerous and more visible, having remained in the forefront.

As early as 1822, the Englishman Francis Place, while adopting Malthus's conceptual framework, proposed a much easier and more seductive way of checking population growth than moral restraint: the voluntary limitation of births within marriage (Place, 1822). Knowlton also advocated this approach in the United States (Knowlton, 1833), and the idea met with the approval of scholars such as Carlisle and Stuart Mill.

In 1860 the journalist Charles Bradlaugh set up the Malthusian League in London. The organization went from strength to strength from 1877 onwards, when Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, one of the pioneers of feminism, were prosecuted for obscenity.

Neo-Malthusianism was taken to France by the anarchist Paul Robin, who founded the League for Human Regeneration in 1896, and to Germany by the social democrat Alfred Bernstein, who in 1913 organized two meetings in Berlin, causing quite a stir. However, the neo-Malthusians came up against not only the hostility of the authorities but the distrust of socialist theorists.

At the time, militant feminism was evolving all over Europe, and birth control was just one element of its main objective: the sexual liberation of women. The decisive turn, however, was taken in the US thanks to Margaret Sanger, who in 1916 had founded a birth control clinic in Brooklyn. In 1925 she organized an international neo-Malthusian probirth control conference in New York, and in 1927 the first international congress on population was held. This was the basis of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Populations, which however almost immediately dissociated itself from the neo-Malthusian network.

2 The Origins of Ideology

The French Revolution gave birth both to the term ‘ideology’ and to many different ideologies that have continued to organize political discussion right up to the present day. Under the impact of revolutionary events, tradition lost its givenness, hierarchy no longer seemed natural, and monarchy no longer went without justification. The revolutionaries showed that society could be reorganized by an act of self-conscious political will (the definition of revolution itself). The attempt to reshape hearts and minds through festivals, paintings, engravings, operas, plays, and even ordinary items such as snuffboxes and playing cards drew dramatic attention to revolution as a mode of action. This attempt did not produce unanimity, however; rather it produced social conflict. As a consequence, revolution brought ‘the social’ as a category into sharper relief. As early as 1792, Antoine Barnave wrote his Introduction à la Révolution française, arguing that new forms of wealth produced ineluctably new forms of political authority (Barnave 1988). As the social determinants of politics became more visible, i.e., more of a problem to be investigated, ideologies took shape as formal doctrines about the proper relationship between politics and society.

Dostoevsky

The Russian novelist and essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky has often been regarded as an important forerunner of the existentialist movement. In his works, he treated a number of the themes for which existentialism eventually became popular. Although he was not a philosopher per se, Dostoevsky was far from being simply a littérateur. His novels are rife with philosophical themes, and his reflections also touch on fields such as theology, psychology, anthropology, politics, and social criticism. His most relevant works for ethics are Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Perhaps the central theme in Dostoevsky’s work is that of human freedom. Dostoevsky was consistently critical of materialism, determinism, and other contemporary movements that he saw as the enemies of freedom. Such movements seemed in the eyes of many to be merely the logical outgrowth of the advances in the sciences in the nineteenth century. At that time, fields such as psychology, economics, biology, and chemistry seemed to be able to explain human behavior better than ever before and even to offer the promise of a complete explanation in the future when, for instance, the social sciences became more developed or when more was known about the functions of the human brain. The view that science presents is that humans are simply biological machines determined wholly by nature and that once we understand fully the workings of nature, we will ipso facto have understood human beings. The idea of free will then comes to be regarded as an antiquated vestige of the dark ages of superstition that has no place in the mechanistic world of science where every effect has a cause. For Dostoevsky, this view is one that human beings will rebel against for all eternity. He does not offer metaphysical refutations of this view but instead simply claims that its results are intolerable for moral reasons. Humans need to posit the idea of freedom as a sort of regulative ideal, even though it may be empirically unprovable.

Dostoevsky likewise criticized various forms of communism and utopian socialism that were in vogue in his day. The rapid growth of technology during Dostoevsky’s time led some theorists to the view that it would be possible in the future to organize human society in such a way that the physical needs of everyone were met. Given the high productivity made possible by modern machinery and mass production, it was thought to be merely a matter of organizing labor and distributing society’s resources in an equitable fashion along socialistic lines. The belief was that individuals must merely be educated to recognize their rationally calculated best interest and they would act on it. If this could be done, then a new utopian age could be attained. Dostoevsky argues against this view, once again on moral grounds. He contests the claim that humans will be happy and content if their physical needs are met. Humans are more complex than cows and require more than the satisfaction of physical needs. There is a longing in mankind that remains even when all physical needs have been met. Humans are more than simply utility maximizers, and their actions cannot be explained merely as the result of enlightened self-interest. They do not simply lucidly perceive their best interest and then act upon it. Dostoevsky was suspicious of all utilitarian or socialist theories that claimed to know the rational best interest of man. He believed such theories could only lead to a limitation of human freedom. They fail to take into account the vast realm of the irrational in the human soul and therefore can never be a satisfactory explanation of human beings and human existence.

Dostoevsky rejects all rationalistic attempts to understand human nature and to ground morality. In his view, reason is simply a formal ability that is employed, for example, to work out a mathematics problem; in and of itself it is unable to recognize or distinguish between good and evil. Thus, modern science, which is founded on reason, is ultimately a moral void because it produces new technologies and new information but can offer no moral guidelines with regard to how to use them. The seat of morality for Dostoevsky thus lies not in reason but in a spontaneous inner feeling that he sometimes refers to as “conscience.” For Dostoevsky, all human beings are in possession of a natural moral impulse that immediately protests against immoral acts; in these cases, it is absurd when the Kantian or the utilitarian seeks the universal rule that applies to the particular case in question in order to demonstrate that the act is wrong. Moral conscience already knows that it is wrong, and reason can only obfuscate this by, for example, trying to rationalize an immoral action by giving discursive arguments and general laws that seek to portray it as morally correct. In this sense, reason is merely sophistry because it cannot of itself distinguish between good and evil or offer moral insight.

For Dostoevsky, the essential freedom at the center of human existence is not a liberating thing as for later writers such as Camus; instead, it is a negative formula, a prescription or invitation for nihilism. Dostoevsky’s memorable character, Ivan Karamazov, says, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The idea is that if we understand ethics to be the result of divine command as either the old law handed down to Moses or the new law uttered by Christ, then ethical principles and values have an absolute sanction in God. Thus, although individuals and particular cultures might have differing ethical ideas, these are merely human constructions that do not have absolute validity because only God’s divine commands enjoy this absolute, universal status. There is therefore a fundamental ontological difference between divine commands and human ones. Thus, to deny God’s existence is to invite ethical nihilism because this denial is tantamount to a denial of absolute ethical values. To say that God does not exist is at the same time to sweep away the ontological grounding of ethics. The only values that would be left would be relative, contingent human ones. In this sense, everything is permitted because no one set of human values or no one human moral code could be erected over or preferred to any other. Every ethical command or prohibition would merely be the statement of an individual culture, tradition, or person, which could be called into question by reference to other moral laws from other cultures. Dostoevsky thus understands the question as a kind of either–or proposition: Either God exists and there is a transcendent meaning and value, or he does not exist and everything is permitted.

The importance of Dostoevsky’s work lies in the fact that he articulated the problem of an ethics without God, which later became a central issue for the atheistic existentialists. Dostoevsky is counted along with Kierkegaard as a leading spokesman for theistic existentialism, although their influence has been most profound among the atheistic existentialists.