The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 saw the first appearance of workers' and soldiers' councils, called Soviets. In 1917 the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, acting for all the Russian Soviets, became the chief competitor of Kerensky's Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, employing the slogan “All Powers to the Soviets”, used the Petrograd Soviet in their drive for power. In the October Revolution the Soviets, dominated by the Bolsheviks, replaced the Provisional Government as the government of Russia.

The 10th April 1848 is one of the most famous days in the history of the nineteenth century. The Chartists of London had screwed themselves up for a decisive trial of strength with the ruling classes. They found themselves outnumbered by the combined resources of the civil and military powers. They shrank back before the prospect of a collision with the vast forces of law and order and property commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Richard Mayne. What was to have been a triumphant demonstration of the overwhelming power and determination of the people, ended in the anything but triumphal progress of a few hired hackney coaches carrying a dubious petition. “The 10th April, 1848 will long be remembered as a great field day of the British Constitution”, announced the Times. “The signal of unconstitutional menace, of violence, of insurrection, of revolution, was yesterday given in our streets, and happily despised by a peaceful, prudent, and loyal metropolis. That is the triumph we claim…. This settles the question. In common fairness it ought to be regarded as a settled question for years to come. The Chartists and Confederates made the challenge, and chose the field and trial of strength. They must stand by their choice. They chose to disturb the metropolis for the chance of something coming of it. They fished for a revolution and have caught a snub. We congratulate them on their booty, which we hope they will divide with their partners in Dublin. It is, perhaps, a fortunate circumstance that so momentous a question as the free action of the British Legislature should be settled thus decisively….”

Aux élections à la quatrième Knesset (tel est le nom du Parlement de l'Etat d'Israël), le 3 novembre 1959, 7 Arabes ont été élus sur un total de 120 législateurs, répartis Comme suit:

C'est le résultat d'un tableau intéressant de participation de la population arabe en Israël ainsi que de l'influence exercée sur cette population par les partis juifs. L'étude des modalités de cette participation nous permettra aussi à connaître les préoccupations et les attitudes politiques de la minorité arabe d'Israël. En raison du secret du vote, les possibilités de pression ou de captation perdent en efficacité, et les conditions socio-économiques ainsi que les attitudes politiques de cette minorité se réflètent avec une asse grande clarté. Chaque membre des minorités est en mesure d'influer sur le résultat des élections générales israéliennes, puisque le système electoral adopté par Israël est la représentation proportionnelle, et que le pays tout entier forme une seule circonscription électorale.

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, as absolutism emerged in its classic development, the lower classes of western Europe experienced great insecurity and hardship. The Hundred Years' War, the end of serfdom, the quickening of economic activity, the secular price advance, and the explosion of religious conflict shattered traditional social bonds, produced widespread destitution, and uprooted large numbers of peasants who took to the roads in a desperate nomadism. These vagrant populations, existing on theft, brigandage and, mainly, begging, evoked severe governmental repression which was to prove generally unpopular and, in the long run, ineffective. In seventeenth-century France certain private groups also were to take up the cause of repressing vagabondage through a systematic program of confinement in workhouses – a program which, while complementing royal policy, would draw its main inspiration from the ascetic spirituality of the French Counter Reformation. These hôpitaux généraux are of interest as concrete expressions of the convergence of social problems, absolutist political tendencies, and religious attitudes.

The Independent Labour Party, which was founded in 1893 had, before the 1914–18 war, played a major part within the Labour Party to which it was an affiliated socialist society. It was the largest of the affiliated socialist societies with a pre-eminently working-class membership and leadership. Because the Labour Party did not form an individual members section until 1918, the I.L.P. was one of the means by which it was possible to become an individual member of the Labour Party. But the I.L.P. was also extremely important within the Labour Party in other ways. It was the I.L.P. which supplied the leadership – MacDonald, Hardie and Snowden – of both the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party. It was the I.L.P., with its national network of branches, which carried through a long-term propaganda programme to the British electorate. Finally, it was the I.L.P. which gave most thought to policy and deeply affected the policy of the Labour Party.

The year was 1920, the month September. Three men, one young and impatient, the other two calmer, less flushed, prepared their things and packed them in the tiny sailboat that was to ferry them across the White Sea. The sailboat left the shore, disappeared slowly from sight and was lost in a flood of grey. The three men were never heard from again.

To one familiar with the attitude of “near devotion” accorded the monarchy by the majority of Englishmen today, it may come as a shock to discover a lack of this devotion in mid-Victorian England. A sampling of comments from the radical press is a striking example. The regular arrival of Victoria's progeny evoked this impious suggestion in the Northern Star: That, rather than reciting national prayers of thanksgiving, congregations should sing “hymns of despair for their misfortune in being saddled with another addition to the brood of royal Cormorants.” The National Reformer referred to “our good kind, and dear Queen, who…could easily dispense with the allowance which her loyal subjects make her…unless she desires to be the last of England's monarchs…”

When H. M. Hyndman's contentious and authoritarian leadership of the British Social Democratic Federation provoked William Morris and nine other members of its Executive Council to resign on December 24, 1884, the Federation not only lost an important segment of its strength, but also some of its most effective members. With Morris went Dr. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Belfort Bax (the confidant of Engels), Samuel Mainwaring (a leader of the Labour Emancipation League), John Lincoln Mahon (the founder, with Andreas Scheu, of the Scottish Land and Labour League), Robert Banner (with the very active Woolwich branch of the Federation), W. J. Clark, J. Cooper, and Joseph Lane. On December 30, less than a week after the secession of this group, Morris and his colleagues formed the Socialist League which almost immediately threatened to become a most formidable competitor of the S.D.F. From its headquarters in a Farringdon Street loft at the edge of East London, the Socialist League issued its periodical, The Commnoweal, and sallied forth to realize William Morris's hope of educating the masses for “the great and inevitable change” in British political, economic, and social life.

During the first three decades of the Third Republic there appeared a group of left-wing republicans who became known as Radical-Socialists. As a group they had many ideas in common and tended to vote on many issues with a rather high degree of unity. However, a careful study of their voting record allows three divisions to be made among them. On the extreme Left were the hard core Radical-Socialists (HCRS). They are so designated because their voting record attained a total of about 90% on bills and orders of the day of an advanced social nature. Somewhat less consistent were the Radical-Socialists (RS) who attained at least 75%. Among the former were deputies whose stand for reform was about as consistent as that of the average Socialist. Some of the most famous were Georges Clemenceau, Camille Pelletan, Georges Perin, Tony Révillon, Désiré Barodet, Henri and Félix Mathé, Armand Duportal, Félix Cantagrel, Camille Raspati, Sigismond Lacroix, Ernest Lefèvre, Martin Nadaud, Stéphan Pichon, Emile Chautemps and Marius Chavanne. Among the Radical-Socialists were Antoine Achard, Jules Baulard, Henri Maret, Germain Casse, René Goblet, Paul Doumer, Edouard Lockroy, Gustave Mesureur, Louis-Bernard Montaut, Michel Salis, Emile Brousse, Jules Lasbaysses, Roque de Fillol, Gustave Hubbard, and Benjamin Raspati. Another group, somewhat peripheral to the present study but included in order to round it out, were the social Radicals(SR), or Radicaux de Gauche, as they called themselves after 1881. Their voting record averaged about 60%. The term “left-wing Radicals” includes all the above categories. The moderate or orthodox Radicals were really advanced liberals as regards social legislation, and do not form part of the groups examined in this essay.

Das seinerzeit unter den Polen und Italienern ziemlich populäre Tagesblatt „L'Espérance” erschien unter der Leitung des Franzosen Armand Lévy von 1859 bis 1861 in Genf. Lévy stand in Verbindung mit dem Prinzen Napoleon, bekannt unter den Spottnamen Plon-Plon und „roter” Prinz. Die „Espérance” war aber kein von der französischen Regierung subventioniertes Blatt. Sie nahm finanzielle Unterstützungen ausschliesslich von den gegen ihre eigenen Regie-rungen kämpfenden Patrioten an, hauptsächlich wohl von Italienern und Polen. Cavour gewährte der Zeitung keine Unterstützung, weil er sich mit Preussen und Russland nicht verfeinden wollte.

Wir haben uns heute so sehr an die Tatsache gewöhnt, in einer Massengesellschaft zu leben, daß es uns schwer fällt, die besonderen Gefühle, die das Stichwort „Masse” jahrzehntelang ausgelöst hat, nachzuempfinden. Das „tiefe Erschrecken vor dem Auftreten der Massen auf der Bühne der Weltgeschichte” ist inzwischen abgeklungen und einer sachlicheren Einstellung zu den Problemen der modernen Gesellschaft gewichen. Dennoch erfreuen sich, abgesehen von der nun schon beinahe legendären „Psychologie der Massen” des französischen Gelehrten Gustave Le Bon, solche einseitigen Darstellungen wie José Ortega y Gassets „Aufstand der Massen” noch einer großen Verbreitung, so daß es nicht ganz belanglos sein dürfte, sich zu vergegenwärtigen, welche Ansichten ursprünglich über den Charakter der Massen bestanden haben und welche Traditionen sich hierfür anführen lassen.

Die revolutionären Pariser Ereignisse vom Juli 1830 entfachten in den Staaten des Deutschen Bundes von neuem eine politische Bewegung, vor allem in den Reihen der bürgerlichen Jugend. Die Regierungen schritten sofort, insbesondere gegen die Tätigkeit radikaler Burschenschafter, mit äußerster Strenge ein. Die Androhung und Verhängung schwerer Kerkerstrafen ließ bald die Zahl der Flüchtlinge aus studentischen Kreisen und Journalistenzirkeln ansteigen. Das Ziel dieser Emigranten, die sich über die Grenzen in Sicherheit brachten, war neben Belgien und Frankreich die Schweiz. Hier, in den verschiedenen Kantonen, trafen die Deutschen mit zahlreichen Leidensgefährten aus Italien und Polen zusammen. „Alle beseelte der glühende Haß gegen ihre Unterdrücker. Alle waren von ihren Regierungen verjagt, in der kleinen Schweiz zusammengewürfelt; was konnten sie Besseres tun, als zu konspirieren”. Mit diesen Worten kennzeichnete ein zeitgenössischer Beobachter die Atmosphäre, in der die Neuankömmlinge lebten und darangingen, Zukunftspläne für die Befreiung ihrer Länder zu schmieden.

The formal structure of Thomas More's Utopia is simple and well known. It consists of two books, the first of which contains, in the form of a dialogue between More and an imaginary traveller, Raphael Hythloday, a sharp criticism of English social conditions, the enclosure movement, the penal code and the existing pattern of international relations. The second, in the form of a lengthy tale related by Hythloday, is a description of the social, economic, political and religious conditions of the Isle of Nowhere, Utopia.

In den Monaten zwischen September 1845 und dem Frühsommer 1846 schrieben Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels in Brüssel gemeinsam ihre „Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie, in ihren Repräsentanten, Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner” und des sogenannten „wahren” Sozialismus in Deutschland; zu diesem geplanten Buch sollte Moses Hess einige Kapitel (gegen A. Ruge und G. Kuhlmann) beisteuern. Die geplante Veröffentlichung unterblieb damals, weil die Geldgeber für den Druck und Verlag (J. Meyer aus Osnabrück und R. Rempel aus Bielefeld) von ihrem Versprechen zurücktraten. Die erhalten gebliebenen Teile des Manuskripts dieses Werkes von Marx und Engels das, wie Marx 1859 schrieb, ihre „Selbstverständigung” zustande brachte, wurden 1932 zum ersten Mal ungekürzt publiziert.

Es muss einem Belgier auffallen, dass im algemeinen die Sozial-geschichte seines Landes im Ausland wenig bekannt ist. Oft ergibt sich, dass man Belgier, die eine nicht unbeträchtliche Rolle gespielt haben, eigentlich nur dem Namen nach kennt.