History of socialism French revolution, as well as from the German philosophy of GWF Hegel, and English political economy, particularly that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx and Engels developed a body of ideas which they called scientific socialism, more commonly called Marxism. Marxism comprised a theory of history (historical materialism) as well as a political, economic and philosophical theory. In the "Manifesto of the Communist Party", written in 1848 just days before the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote, "The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property".
Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory and leftist endeavor by freeing it from unjustifiably restrictive assumptions about the practical institutional forms that representative democracies, market economies, and the social control of economic accumulation can and should assume. Unger notes that ""Politics" sets out to execute a program for which no ready-made mode of discourse exists," and that thus it "raids many disciplines" and develops a "language for a vision" as it moves forward. In discussing the predicament of social theory and offering his corrections to its failings, Unger suggests that the difficulties of social theory can be traced to the difficulty of accounting for the context-breaking