4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Fourier, to Proudhon, to Owen, to Hodgskin, within a theoretical ambience provided by the economic writings of Ricardo and Sismondi. As a result the story of nineteenth century Europe became a story of two competing tendencies: one tendency was towards a consolidation of the popular gains made in 1789 and a carrying forward of its agenda towards a socialist denouement, a tendency increasingly associated with the emerging proletariat; the other tendency was towards a consolidation of the bourgeois order through a warding off of the challenge posed by the emerging proletariat. 1871 meant a severe setback for the first tendency. With the defeat of the Paris Commune, the French bourgeoisie carried through what Gramsci called its 'permanent revolution', i.e. the consummation of its march from a victory over the feudal lords in 1789 to a victory over the proletariat in 1871; and it did so through an alliance with petty property, i.e. with the support of the peasantry which had been a gainer from the French Revolution of 1789. This defeat in its turn cast a shadow over the socialist movement in Europe as a whole for the rest of the century. The objective of recapitulating this, and of highlighting the origins of the socialist project in the unfulfilled promise of the French Revolution is to underscore the fact that this simple point is often missed by both the friends and the foes of socialism. Foes of socialism, not surprisingly, portray it as a separate, anti-democratic tendency, alien to the democratic aspirations of the French Revolution, and pitted against capitalism which, through its institutions of private property and bourgeois democracy, represents the true fulfilment of these aspirations. Friends of socialism, paradoxically, often argue in an almost identical fashion, portraying their own movement as an alien development unconnnected with the peoples' struggle that led to the establishment of the bourgeois order, and treating all bourgeois institutions including liberal democracy as worthy of contempt. If the foes of socialism seek to portray its adherents as a bunch of hoodlums with knives between their teeth, some adherents of socialism actually revel in this portrayal of themselves. As a matter of fact however, socialism seeks not merely to destroy bourgeois institutions, but to transcend them, not to jettison the democratic rights that the people have acquired under the bourgeois system in favour of some ad hoc authoritarian rule by a coterie, but to deepen and broaden these rights. Three points are to be noted in connection with this perspective on socialism. First, the relationship of socialism to the bourgeois order is qualitatively dissimilar to that of the bourgeois order to its predecessors. The fundamental premises of the feudal society, namely social division according to birth, were anathema for the emerging bourgeoisie; but the premises of the bourgeois revolution, the slogans on which it mobilised people (as opposed to its hidden agenda), are