As a concept of an ideal society, communism is derived from ancient sources, including Plato's Republic and the earliest Christian communes. In the early 19th century, the idea of a communist society was a response of the poor and the dislocated to the beginnings of modern capitalism. At that time communism was the basis for a number of utopian settlements; most communistic experiments, however, eventually failed. Most of these small-scale private experiments involved voluntary cooperation, with everyone participating in the governing process (Daniels).

The governments of Italy, France, Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark differ in various ways. Some are monarchies. All are democracies, however, and all have some features of the American political system. The important point is that in each of these countries that majority of the people rules, and the minority has rights that must be respected by the majority. Their governments are violated into power by the majority and must seek approval of their policies from the people at regularly held elections (Foreman 106).

The word “democracy” comes from the Greek word demokratia. This, in turn, was derived from two other Greek words: demos, meaning “people,” and krator, meaning ”rule” or “authority”. The people of ancient Greece used the word demokratia to describe a government where every citizen took part in making the laws and administrating justice. Over the past 2,500 years, the concept of democracy has undergone many changes. But the word “democracy” still refers to rule by the people(Scholastic Editors 335).

Beginning with the first popular rebellion against monarchy in England (1642), which was brought to a climax by the execution of King Charles I, political and revolutionary action against autocratic European governments resulted in the establishment of democratic governments. Such action was inspired and guided largely by political philosophers, notably the French philosophers Montesquieu and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the American statesmen Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Before the end of the 19th century, every important Western European monarchy had adopted a constitution limiting the power of the Crown and giving a considerable share of political power to the people. In many of these countries, a representative legislature modeled on the British Parliament was instituted. British politics was then possibly the greatest single influence on the organization of world democracies, although the French Revolution also exerted a powerful influence. Later, the success of democratic institutions in the United States served as a model for many peoples (Foreman 287).

The collapse of the capitalist economy, it was thought, would culminate in a political revolution in which the masses of the poor would rebel against their oppressors. This proletarian revolution would do away with private ownership of the means of production. Run by and for the people (after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship), the economy would produce, not what was profitable, but what the people needed. Abundance would reign. Inequalities and coercive government would disappear. All this, Marx and Engels expected, would happen in the most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments. These prophecies have not come true. Capitalism, though sometimes threatened, has not collapsed; shortages, inequalities, and coercive government have persisted in countries that called themselves Communist; and followers of Marx have come to power in nations that lacked the preconditions he and Engels considered essential. The first of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base. Its people, still largely illiterate, had no experience in political participation. In 1917, after a series of halfhearted reform measures and disastrous mismanagement of the war effort, the antiquated mechanism of czarist rule simply disintegrated and was swept away. It was succeeded, after a lengthy period of political upheaval, by the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxism—later known as the Communist Party—led by Lenin (Foreman 123).

Between 1945 and 1975 the number of countries under Communist rule increased greatly, partly because of the way the victorious powers in World War II divided the world among them, and partly because revolutionary Commun

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