Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are publicly or commonly owned and controlled co-operatively, or a political philosophy advocating such a system.^[1][2] As a form of social organization, socialism is based on co-operative social relations and self-management; relatively equal power-relations and the reduction or elimination of hierarchy in the management of economic and political affairs.^[3][4]

Socialist economies are based upon production for use and the direct allocation of economic inputs to satisfy economic demands and human needs (use value); accounting is based on physical quantities of resources, some physical magnitude, or a direct measure of labor-time.^[5][6]Goods and services for consumption are distributed through markets, and distribution of income is based on the principle of individual merit/individual contribution.^[7]

As a political movement, socialism includes a diverse array of political philosophies, ranging from reformism to revolutionary socialism. State socialist currents of socialism advocate for the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange as a strategy for implementing socialism; while social democrats advocate public control of capital within the framework of a market economy. Libertarian socialists and anarchists reject using the state to build socialism, arguing that socialism will, and must, either arise spontaneously or be built from the bottom up utilizing the strategy of dual power. They promote direct worker-ownership of the means of production alternatively through independent syndicates, workplace democracies, or worker cooperatives.

Modern socialism originated from an 18th-century intellectual and working class political movement that criticised the effects of industrialisationand private property on society. Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen (1771–1858), tried to found self-sustaining communes by secession from a capitalist society. Henri de Saint Simon (1760–1825), who coined the term socialisme, advocated technocracy and industrial planning.^[8] Saint-Simon, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx advocated the creation of a society that allows for the widespread application of modern technology to rationalise economic activity by eliminating the anarchy of capitalist production that results in instability and cyclical crises of overproduction.^[9][10]

Socialists inspired by the Soviet model of economic development, such as Marxist-Leninists, have advocated the creation of centrally planned economies directed by a single-party state that owns the means of production. Others, including Yugoslavian, Hungarian, East German and Chinese communist governments in the 1970s and 1980s, instituted various forms of market socialism,^{[citation needed]} combining co-operative and state ownership models with the free market exchange and free price system (but not free prices for the means of production).^[11]

(via Socialism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. The term can mean several things, for example:

1. A cultural movement of the Italian Renaissance based on the study of classical works.
2. An approach to education that uses literary means or a focus on the humanities to inform students.
3. A variety of perspectives in philosophy and social science which affirm some notion of ‘human nature‘ (by contrast with anti-humanism).
4. A secular ideology which espouses reason, ethics, and justice, whilst specifically rejecting supernatural and religious dogma as a basis ofmorality and decision-making.

The last interpretation may be attributed to Secular Humanism as a specific humanistic life stance.^[1] Modern meanings of the word have therefore come to be associated with a rejection of appeals to the supernatural or to some higher authority.^[2][3] This interpretation may be directly contrasted with other prominent uses of the term in traditional religious circles.^[4] Humanism of this strand arose from a trajectory extending from the deism andanti-clericalism of the Enlightenment, the various secular movements of the 19th century (such as positivism), and the overarching expansion of the scientific project.

Humanist, humanism, and humanistic may also refer simply and loosely to literary culture.^[5

(via Humanism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Manorialism, an essential element of feudal society,^[1] was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the villa system of the Late Roman Empire,^[2] was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe, and was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market economy and new forms of agrarian contract.

Manorialism was characterised by the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord, supported economically from his own direct landholding and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under his jurisdiction. These obligations could be payable in several ways, in labor (the French term corvée is conventionally applied), in kind, or, on rare occasions, in coin.

In examining the origins of the monastic cloister, Walter Horn found that “as a manorial entity the Carolingian monastery… differed little from the fabric of a feudal estate, save that the corporate community of men for whose sustenance this organization was maintained consisted of monks who served God in chant and spent much of their time in reading and writing.”^[3]

Manorialism died slowly and piecemeal, along with its most vivid feature in the landscape, the open field system. It outlasted serfdomas it outlasted feudalism: “primarily an economic organization, it could maintain a warrior, but it could equally well maintain acapitalist landlord. It could be self-sufficient, yield produce for the market, or it could yield a money rent.”^[4] The last feudal dues in France were abolished at the French Revolution. In parts of eastern Germany, the Rittergut manors of Junkers remained until World War II.^[5]

(via Manorialism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Romanticism (or the Romantic Era or the “‘Romantic Period”’) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.^[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.^[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,^[3] education^[4] and natural history.^[5]

The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.

Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.^[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

(via Romanticism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.^[2][3][4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.^[5][6][7]Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.^[8][9]

In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound‘s 1934 injunction to “Make it new!” was paradigmatic of the movement’s approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.^[10] A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).^[11]

The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term “avant-garde”, with which the movement was labeled until the word “modernism” prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).^[12]Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or “the avant-garde of modernism”.^[13]

(via Modernism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Now *ism’s have a variety of meanings, but at their root, they indicate a belief or principle. Now, I suppose there can be as many systems of though and belief as there are thinkers and believers. However, the credibility of some *ism’s are stronger than others, and unless you are a subscriber to relativism you will agree that some are more valid than others.

You wouldn’t believe how many *ism’s there are. With a quick Wikipedia Wildcard search, I came up with thousands of *ism’s to explore, which means I could be at this for a while.

This series isn’t meant to promote one *ism over another or to give a reflection of the *isms I espouse (many of them I reject entirely), but I will gravitate towards ones I find interesting. Each *ism will also include links to other *ism’s to explore.

So without further introduction, here’s the first *ism, individualism, an *ism which I happen to be quite proud to hold.

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses “the moral worth of the individual”.^[1] Individualists promote the exercise of one’s goals and desires and so independence and self-reliance^[2] while opposing most external interference upon one’s own interests, whether by society, family or any other group or institution.^[2]

Individualism makes the individual its focus^[1] and so it starts “with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation.” Classical liberalism (including libertarianism), existentialism and anarchism (especially individualist anarchism) are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis.^[3]

It has also been used as a term denoting “The quality of being an individual; individuality”^[2] related to possessing “An individual characteristic; a quirk.”^[2] Individualism is thus also associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles where there is a tendency towards self creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors^[2][4] as so also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.^[5][6]

(via Individualism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)