Many reformers embraced socialism, but they used the term in a quite particular, non-Marxian way in the 1880s. Socialism involved an appreciation and a celebration of “society” and a rejection of atomistic individualism. If socialism meant anarchism or Marxism, the younger economists opposed it, but to the extent it meant only a kind of antithesis of individualism and an advocacy of cooperation, they too embraced it. They believed, as Ely put it, that government was “the agency through which we must work.”
