idealized the old order, but at least they did not idealize the new. Marx, however, sang the praises of the great capitalists—their energy, their rigorous subordination of means to ends, their very ruthlessness. He had no quarrel with modern technology or modern individualism, once the "limited bourgeois form is stripped away." The breakdown of community life might be "sickening," but it was the price that had to be paid for progress.

It is significant that Marx was not greatly disturbed by the sexual individualism that disturbed so many nineteenth-century social critics. The Marxist view of marriage stood in sharp contrast to that of communitarians, who deplored the reduction of marriage to a purely contractual relationship. Marx and Engels had no objection to such an arrangement. They wanted to push it to its logical conclusion, as they saw it. Under socialism, marriage would give way to free unions based solely on personal preference. The social stake in family life, they believed, was confined to reproduction and child rearing and did not extend to the living arrangements into which consenting adults might choose to enter. The goal of socialism was the fullest development of the individual. Capitalism, in spite of its individualizing effects, still encouraged the "greatest waste of individual development," sacrificing the interests of the individual in the process of enlarging the productive capacities of mankind as a whole. Socialism would reconcile the individual and society. It represented a "higher synthesis" between individualism and "organic unity."

Elster, a sympathetic critic, finds the "indiscriminate solidarity" envisioned by Marx and Engels both unconvincing and a little ominous. People need a "narrower focus of loyalty and solidarity than the international community of workers," according to Elster. Altruism flourishes in "small, stable groups" and "declines as the circle of individuals expands." "Free-floating benevolence" is incompatible with "personal integrity and strength of character." The most valuable and persuasive element in Marxism, for Elster, is the way it makes "self-realization" the "central value in society." But this is another way of saying that Marxism owes much of its appeal, at least in the West, to its identification with the central values of capitalism itself—which can allegedly be achieved, in their fully developed form, only after the socialist revolution.

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