A Socialist Empire

When conquistador Francisco Pizarro came across the Incan empire, he didn’t quite know what to make of it. So he merely destroyed it.


Ever since scholars have puzzled over what the Incan society was really like.


Economist and historian Louis Baudin makes sense of the Inca way of life in his classic 1928 work, L’Empire socialiste des Inka (The Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru), offering a key concept to our understanding of the Incan civilization: socialism.


Socialism, Baudin explains, entails “the substitution of a rational plan of organization, based to a certain extent on collective ownership, for the spontaneous equilibrium achieved by the operation of individual self-interest and the free play of competition [and] the more or less complete destruction of the mechanism of the pricing process.”


Though taking pains throughout to make his book non-ideological, Baudin ends with a warning: “It is incumbent upon us to take action if we do not wish to become the subjects of a new Inca empire.”