A Summary of the Principles of Socialism

By William Morris & H.M. Hyndman

Hyndman and Morris wrote the Principles together1. They were first published in Justice, Volume 5, Number 173, on the 4th May and shortly afterwards came out in book form, published by Reeves and with a dust jacket designed by Morris. The book was collectively signed by each member of the Executive Council of the Democratic Federation.

The versions here are taken from a scan of the first edition originally paid for by Microsoft and now held on the archive.org site. The original machine-generated text has been manually proofread and corrected by Graham Seaman for the Marxist Internet Archive. There are three versions:

This set of multiple versions of the text is experimental and may change in future

 

Notes

1. E.P. Thompson commented on the division of labour between the two in the first edition of William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary. The comment was removed in the later, abridged version. Thompson wrote:

Hyndman claimed the Summary as mainly his own work. See Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911) p.357. Also Hyndman to Alf. Mattison, August 16th, 1920: “I wrote it all with the exception of about a page and a half which Morris wrote. Now which is that page and a half? Nobody has guessed this riddle yet” (Mattison Letterbook). But Hyndman is an untrustworthy witness. He claimed also the main authorship of the Joint Manifesto of Socialist Bodies (1891), a fact which Shaw denied. So we must leave Hyndman to keep his “riddle”.

References to `The Principles of Socialism' in the Chronology: