Pierre Leroux claimed he invented the word in a Parisian journal in 1832.
The Latin word socius meant companion or ally. It carried no economic weight, only the suggestion that human beings were followers moving through the world together.1 The adjective socialis entered French by the fourteenth century, describing the condition of living with others.
Pierre Leroux, a journalist and follower of Henri de Saint-Simon, claimed to have first used socialisme in the journal Le Globe in 1832.2 The term was coined in direct opposition to individualisme.
English adopted the word by 1837, possibly first in reference to Robert Owen's communes in Britain.3 By the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were shaping it into something harder, tying it to class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism.
Andrew Vincent traced the word's roots to the Roman legal term societas, which meant both companionship and a consensual contract between freemen.4
By 1848, the Communist Manifesto had given the idea its most aggressive articulation. Lenin later positioned socialism as the transitional stage between capitalism and communism. In 1918, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself the All-Russian Communist Party, blurring boundaries that theorists had only recently drawn.
George Bernard Shaw, writing in 1900, observed that socialism was often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply the propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.5