Abstract

This chapter considers some of the more influential arguments for socialism. These turn out to support different guises of socialism. Two key internal questions for socialists are (1) whether a socialist economy is based on coercion or voluntary cooperation, and (2) whether production should involve markets and competition. Different combinations of answers serve to separate utopian, Marxist, and market socialism from each other (we also comment briefly on anarchism and fascism, which can be seen as retaining elements of socialism). The goal of this chapter is to compare and contrast these different schools of socialist thinking, with a view to seeing how each variety of socialism can be defended.