Roots and Branches of the Radical Left

Socialism is presented as an economic theory. In reality, woven through every part of the theory are two things that must be adopted before socialism can "work properly": a pseudo-history of mankind, and a massive shift of worldview. Both rest on a fundamental lie about human nature: they blame man's conditions for what belongs to the man himself.

That ideology did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of long-standing ideas, taken up across a chain of events and twisted over time into a promise of a better way for human beings to live, which is why the whole runs far deeper and is far more complex than the economic label suggests. Along the way it was woven in and out of great thinkers, at different points and for different reasons. Some were used for it and some against it, and through all of it the idea kept building.

This map lays that out where it can be seen: the evolution of the ideas, the effects they had, and the chain of cause and effect that followed from thinker to thinker.