Editing Socialism (section)

=== Reactionary Socialism ===
'''Obsolete aristocrats''' in France and England upbraided their bourgeois successors. Dismayed, not so much by the conditions of the proletariat but by the attendant social instability, their cry went up: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."<ref name=":0" />  

'''Petty-Bourgeois adjuncts''' (Sismondi at their head) decried capital only insofar as they found themselves tumbling from its seat and thrown beneath the wheels. Competition doomed them, and they sought therefore to constrain it, to cramp productive development to the point of their own preservation, making them both reactionary and Utopian.   

'''German philistines''' imported and presumed to correct French socialism, forgetting meanwhile that they did not import the conditions of France along with her literature. Against every modest gain of bourgeois liberalism they ham-fistedly flung the rhetoric of Socialists in France (a country in which such rhetoric was deployed against an already developed bourgeois state), serving the absolute governments more than anyone. After 1848, this type lost their appetite for such rhetoric and became full-throated reactionaries.