Socialism

Socialism, or Vaestic social science, is one of the three recognised modalities of Knowledge of Vaestism. It is the most recent of the three, having originated in the High Radiance of the 19th century following the elaboration of the concept of personation, which allowed Vaestic intellectuals to consider societies as collective wholes with their own characters. Where internalism is the study of the human spirit and its presentation, and externalism studies what is outside the human, socialism concerns itself with what is constituted by the interactions of humans with each other. It encompasses the cores of the social sciences that are familiar in a Western context, such as sociology, economics, and political science, as well as Vaestic scientific history in contrast to the exemplary history studied by internalists. Socialism is the Vaestic super-discipline that has been most affected by the Post-Radiance and its particular philosophical currents such as Yerethonism, which have led many socialists to embrace a general scepticism of the power and reliability of most human Knowledge, and to promote the extension of state power as the only security for humanity in a deteriorating world.

History

First formulated as a distinct modality in the 1860s in an attempt to distinguish objective analysis of human society from both the natural science of the externalists and the ethical reasoning of the internalists, socialism was originally widely seen as the least prestigious of the three modalities dogmatically established by Prophet Yorsephor in 1897. Yorsephor himself, otherwise a stalwart conservative, seems to have believed that the fledgling socialists could be co-opted to prevent the Strong Externalists' extension of quantitative externalist methods to political thought and social organisation, one of the major causes of the heretical turn in Kiy. In reality, the early socialists were quite comfortable with the use of quantitative methods in general, but strove to distinguish the grounding and significance of social from natural scientific facts. Many socialists were uncomfortable with the reactionary hue of Yorsephor's Tempering of the Prophecy, but they were never subject to organised official suspicion in the manner of the externalists—itself a circumstance that led many externalists interested in the workings of human society to 'convert' to the newly established modality. Nonetheless, the general view that socialism had no distinguished lineage in Vaestic thought and was merely a safe haven for the dregs of the other two super-disciplines meant that there were few socialists to be found in distinguished Scholarly positions at the turn of the 20th century.

The end of the Yorsephorian Tempering after 1912 led to a gradual regularisation of the socialists' position, as they were now free to explore their subject without having to continually define themselves against the externalists. The rise of the New Estate and its concomitant social effects were provoking an official interest in questions of sociology and political economy, and this led to increasingly frequent promotions and commissioning of socialists by forward-thinking governments such as Vsevolod I's Terophan. The decisive moment came with the election of S. Zbivoy Nekhmatov, an Azophine socialist, as Interrex in 1943. Nekhmatov in many respects laid down the course that socialism would follow for the remainder of the century, beginning as a moderate political commentator and a careful analyst of interordinate relations before plunging far into the depths of the emergent Post-Radiance as the interordinate climate worsened in the 1950s, calling with growing urgency for strident reforms and adopting an increasingly doom-laden tone in his public appearances and dealings with the Vaestic courts. After Nekhmatov's death, in the decade following the Long War, the Terophite philosopher Yeretho went on to make some of the most influential contributions to socialism as a theoretical level, submerging the cherished Vesnite belief in metaphysical human freedom within an analysis of the Banner-State as a large-scale machine, with the collective providing the only possible means by which human freedom could be instantiated.

Though the classical dispute between 'conservative' internalists and 'progressive' externalists that once marked the Yorsephorian reaction has continued under a different form in the ongoing 'War of Modalities', socialism now stands as a strident and independent super-discipline in its own right, rejecting the moral advice of the internalists as obsolete and empirically ungrounded nostrums, while throwing sarcasms at the externalists for their supposed ignorance of the realities of human politics and their exaggeration of the capabilities of technical progress. The mainstream of Post-Radiance socialists have continued functionally to be partisans of the New Estate, though they place great emphasis on the need for central coordination and surveillance, as well as effective welfare policies that will ensure social stability.