Socialism
Brown first thought of himself as being 'Labour' and his sense of social injustice was roused when he accompanied his father on visits around Kirkcaldy seeing the pain of unemployment and the misery of poverty and squalor as the mining and textile industries collapsed. Growing up he discovered Tawney, Tressell, Cole and other socialist texts which inspired him. He also found inspiration in Blake in poetry, Potter in drama, Lawrence in literature and the socialist leader James Maxton in Scottish history. These, he argues, fuelled his passion and activism, reinforcing his own political experience. For Brown the ethical basis of British socialism has several themes: the view that individuals are not primarily self-centered but are co-operative, that people are more likely to thrive in communities in which they play a full role and that people have talents and potential that the free market will not allow them to fully realise. In addition, one of the most enduring of Brown's themes is the commitment to equality.
Read more about this topic: Gordon Brown
Famous quotes containing the word socialism:
“Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)