Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to Owenite socialism, outlining the broad philosophy of the movement, its organisation, and sociology. I then describe the enduring legacy of the movement: its novel critique of classical political economy, its influence on early feminism, and its contribution of novel terms to the political lexicon. I then outline the argument which follows in the remainder of the text.
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Notes
- 1.
Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 86–101; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 236.
- 2.
Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 197; Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789–1850, 86; 101; Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark, 75; Joad, Robert Owen, Idealist, 8–9; Miliband, ‘The Politics of Robert Owen’, 23; Beer, A History of British Socialism, 131; Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography, II:585–86; Wallas, ‘The Beginning of Modern Socialism’, 44; Bennett, The Hidden Oak, 35.
- 3.
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 236; Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, 238–39.
- 4.
Pūras, ‘Robert Owen in the History of the Social Sciences’; Stewart and McCann, Educational Innovators; For Owen’s influence as an educationalist in Spain, see Castellano and Pachón, ‘Robert Owen’s Quest for the “New Moral World” in a Non-Industrialized Country’; For the influence upon French Saint-Simonians of Owen’s ideas about moral education as a means of achieving social change, see Schwanck, ‘Robert Owen’s Influence on French Republicanism in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, 8–10.
- 5.
O’Brien, ‘Robert Owen and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union’, 87; Wainwright, A New Politics from the Left, 90.
- 6.
Wainwright, A New Politics from the Left, 90; Tam, The Evolution of Communitarian Ideas, 3–4; Cole, Attempts at General Union; Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium.
- 7.
Edsall, The Anti-Poor Law Movement, 1834–44.
- 8.
Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press, 56.
- 9.
Scriven, Popular Virtue, 74.
- 10.
Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, 21.
- 11.
Jenkins, 144.
- 12.
Chase, Chartism.
- 13.
Epstein, ‘The Constitutional Idiom’; Stedman Jones, Languages of Class.
- 14.
Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites’, 17; See also Claeys’s discussion of James Napier Bailey as offering a bridge between Chartism and Owenism Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 234–38.
- 15.
McCalman, Radical Underworld, 198–200.
- 16.
Crisis no. 3, 16, ‘The Catechism’ (14 December 1833), 125; A Fellow Labourer [William Heighton], An Address to the Members of Trade Societies, 31; Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness, 57.
- 17.
Berg, The Machinery Question, 22–24. It is unsurprising that Owen, who had made his fortune in the cotton industry, should have been an enthusiast about the possibilities of mechanisation and industrialisation.
- 18.
Berg, 27.
- 19.
Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970, 582.
- 20.
Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth 1688–1959, 143; 167.
- 21.
Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, 68.
- 22.
Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 6.
- 23.
Edinburgh Review no. 49 ‘Signs of the Times’—Thomas Carlyle (March–June 1829), 441.
- 24.
Waterman, ‘The Sudden Separation of Political Economy’, 119.
- 25.
Lockley, ‘Map** Protestant Communalism’, 32–34. It has also been argued that the appeal of Owenite community to urban labourers, with its emphasis upon a nostalgic, pastoral return to nature and to the immediate, emotionally rich relationships of rural life, can be understood only through the lens of romanticism. Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 239–45.
- 26.
Gregory Claeys identifies the importance of paternalism to socialism, emphasising ‘the extent to which socialism from its origins would insist upon the paternal duties of governments towards the poor. So, too, it invoked the memory of a society, regarded as only recently lost, in which landowners and masters, without being identified with any particular party, took such responsibilities seriously and did not abandon their servants and labourers to the vaguaries [sic] of the market’. Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 40; See also, Stafford, Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia, 36–47. Ophélie Siméon argues that the young Robert Owen was a ‘paternalistic entrepreneur rather than a socialist’. Siméon, Robert Owen’s Experiment at New Lanark, 4.
- 27.
Logie Barrow argues that such an account of environmental determinism was a common feature of an existing ‘plebeian autodidact culture’, in which ‘the involvement of many independent-minded plebeians in a culture of self-education reinforced their openness to environmental strategies’. Barrow, ‘Determinism and Environmentalism in Socialist Thought’, 194; 202.
- 28.
Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, 159–69.
- 29.
Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlet, no.32, 18, (2 August 1817), 569–70.
- 30.
Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 108–9.
- 31.
Pitzer, ‘The Original Boatload of Knowledge’.
- 32.
The splinter societies included (i) Macluria (named, unsurprisingly, by William Maclure), (ii) Feiba Peveli (named by Stedman Whitwell according to his plan for all place names to be determined by longitude and latitude to prevent the repetition), (iii) a community known, rousingly, as ‘Community No.4’. Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent, 153–54.
- 33.
Lockwood, The New Harmony Movement, 82; Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent, 116.
- 34.
New Harmony and Queenwood have each been the subject of comprehensive monographs: Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium; Taylor, Visions of Harmony.
- 35.
New Moral World, no.11, 46, ‘Notes of a Looker-On’ (13 May 1843), 366.
- 36.
Bennett, The Hidden Oak, 66–72; Coates, ‘Communities of Co-Operation’, 47.
- 37.
Garnett, Co-Operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities, 100–129; Geoghegan, ‘Ralahine’; Langdon, ‘A Monument of Union’.
- 38.
Armytage, Heavens Below; Bestor, Backwoods Utopias; Garnett, Co-Operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities; Langdon, ‘Pocket Editions of the New Jerusalem’; Langdon, ‘A Monument of Union’; Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium.
- 39.
Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 54–56; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 203–7; Oliver, ‘The Labour Exchange Phase of the Co-Operative Movement’. The concern with currency was a particular preoccupation of John Gray, who advocated in his The Social System for a nationally coordinated and centrally-planned economic system in which the value of goods would be denominated in labour notes. The Owenite scheme for labour notes was also adopted by Josiah Warren for his Cincinnati Time Store, although this was set within a philosophy of individualist anarchism. Gray, The Social System; Warren, The Practical Anarchist.
- 40.
Crisis, no. 3, 7&8, ‘Proceedings of the Fifth Co-operative Congress’ (19 October 1833), 62.
- 41.
Oliver, ‘The Labour Exchange Phase of the Co-Operative Movement’, 361–64.
- 42.
Durr, ‘William King of Brighton’, 19–20; Fraser, ‘Owenite Socialism in Scotland’, 60–64.
- 43.
McCalman, Radical Underworld, 194–200; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 672.
- 44.
As a reflection of the influence of Owenism, three of the Rochdale Pioneers donated some of their ‘divi’, the dividend paid by the co-operative, to Queenwood. This is, in a way, ironic, given that the innovation of the ‘divi’ represented the abandonment of the Owenite vision of co-operation as subordinated to the goal of community-founding. See Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement in England, 51–53; Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism, 91–92; Siméon, Robert Owen’s Experiment at New Lanark, 143; Thornes, ‘Change and Continuity in the Development of Co-Operation’, 30–35.
- 45.
Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 228.
- 46.
Pankhurst, William Thompson; Rose, ‘John Finch’; Salt, ‘Isaac Ironside and the Hollow Meadows Farm Experiment’.
- 47.
Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 212.
- 48.
Claeys, Owen, Robert (1771–1858), Socialist and Philanthropist.
- 49.
Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 97. As the official newspaper of the Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union, the Pioneer also offers an important insight into the movement during its trade unionist phase.
- 50.
Claeys, ‘From “Politeness” to “Rational Culture”’, 22.
- 51.
For more on the culture of Owenite branch life, see Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and Radical Culture’.
- 52.
Trade Union Congress, A Short History of British Trade Unionism, 11.
- 53.
Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 196; Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 31; Siméon, ‘The Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union, 1833–1834’, 24–26.
- 54.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 265. The shift is captured in the now archaic distinction between a trade union, which was the organisation of a single trade, and a trades union, which was a horizontal combination of different trades.
- 55.
Thompson, ‘Senex’s Letters on Associated Labour’, 21; 16.
- 56.
Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism, 115. Guild socialism was a movement which blossomed briefly in the inter-war period and sought to establish self-governing industry-specific guilds as the means for workers to gain social and economic power. Guild socialists were concerned with the alienating consequences of capitalist wage labour but suspicious of the consolidation of power in the state as the solution. They argued for the extension of democratic control beyond ‘some special sphere of social action known as “politics”…to any and every form of social action, in especial, to industrial and economic fully as much to political affairs’. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-Stated, 12. As a result, they were deeply critical of the Labour Party’s over-estimation of the transformative potential of parliamentary success, and advocated instead for workers’ control of social and economic processes through self-governing industry-specific guilds. Wright, ‘Guild Socialism Revisited’, 171.
- 57.
Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism, 110.
- 58.
Bensimon, ‘The IWMA and Its Precursors in London, c. 1830–1860’, 34–35.
- 59.
Saville, ‘John Watts (1818–87)’.
- 60.
Williams, Abel Heywood, the Man Who Built the Town Hall.
- 61.
Jolliffe, ‘John Francis Bray’.
- 62.
Purvis, ‘Rochdale Pioneers’.
- 63.
Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism; Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium; Foxwell, ‘Introduction’; Thompson, The People’s Science.
- 64.
Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 101–2.
- 65.
Laski, ‘Introduction’, 56.
- 66.
Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 167.
- 67.
Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 7–14; 51; Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 167, 181–83; Claeys, ‘Early Socialism as Intellectual History’, 896.
- 68.
Anderson, Joyous Greetings, 51.
- 69.
Siméon, ‘“Goddess of Reason”’.
- 70.
Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem.
- 71.
Taylor, 263.
- 72.
Kolmerton, ‘Egalitarian Promises and Inegalitarian Practices’; Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 219–22.
- 73.
Claeys, ‘“Individualism,” “Socialism,” and “Social Science”’. The first manuscript usage of the word ‘socialist’ occurs in a November 1822 letter from Edward Cowper to Robert Owen, in which Cowper observes that ‘Mrs. Johns…seems well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist’. ‘Jo. Applegath’ is likely Cowper’s brother-in-law Joseph Applegath. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 955. The first occurrence of the word ‘socialist’ in print is found in the London Co-operative Magazine five years later. London Co-operative Magazine, 2, no. 11 (November 1827).
- 74.
Marx and Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’; Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
- 75.
See, for example, Beecher, ‘Early European Socialism’; Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists. Charles Fourier did take a brief interest in Owen’s work at New Lanark in 1822–23, an interest which Owen did not reciprocate. Fourier soon came to dismiss Owen as a mere ‘moralist’, and although they did meet when Owen visited Paris in July 1837, the language barrier was insurmountable. See Bouchet, ‘A Transient Allergy’.
- 76.
When Barbara Taylor describes Owenism’s ‘utopian strategy’, or W.H.G. Armytage describes Owen as a ‘Utopist’, it is not in this sense. See Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 142; Armytage, Heavens Below, 141.
- 77.
J.F.C. Harrison makes the same complaint about the use of the label. Harrison, ‘A New View of Mr Owen’, 3.
- 78.
Leopold, ‘Scientific Socialism’.
- 79.
Crisis no. 4, 10, ‘The Truth of Robert Owen’s Doctrine…’—Verax (14 June 1834), 78–80; Desmond, ‘Artisan Resistance and Evolution in Britain’, 93.
- 80.
Crisis no. 1, 40, ‘Scientific Lectures’ (8 December 1832), 159; Crisis no. 2, 26, ‘Iron Houses’ (6 July 1833), 206; The Co-operative Miscellany no.1, 1, ‘Cure for Consumption’ (January 1830), 19; The Social Pioneer no. 2 ‘The Scarlet Runner’ (16 March 1839), 15.
- 81.
Tawney, ‘Robert Owen’, 37–38.
- 82.
NMW no. 3, 125, ‘Our Name’ (18 March 1837), 161–2.
- 83.
Butt, ‘Introduction’; Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 72–74; Leopold, ‘Scientific Socialism’; Miliband, ‘The Politics of Robert Owen’; Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites’. This included disputes in the GNCTU as to whether the Union should represent all classes, including employers, and as to whether confrontational strikes were a legitimate means of pursuing social change. See Siméon, ‘The Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union, 1833–1834’, 26–27.
- 84.
Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 92; Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites’. According to John Butt, ‘Owen’s anti-radicalism can be traced back at least to his signing of a Unitarian message of loyalty to the Crown in 1793 during the anti-Jacobin outrages. To the end of his days there was little sign of change’. Butt, ‘Introduction’, 13.
- 85.
Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 19.
- 86.
Ashcraft, ‘Liberal Political Theory and Working-Class Radicalism’, 265–66.
- 87.
Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, 199.
- 88.
Royle, Victorian Infidels; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 135; Lineham, ‘Christian Minorities’, 565.
- 89.
Claeys, ‘From “Politeness” to “Rational Culture”’, 25. See also Prothero, Artisans & Politics, 263.
- 90.
Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 160.
- 91.
Frow and Frow, The New Moral World; Royle, Radical Politics; Royle, Victorian Infidels.
- 92.
Lockley, ‘Christian Doubt and Hope in Early Socialism’, 373.
- 93.
Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement in England, 43.
- 94.
Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 100–104; Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem, 160; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
- 95.
Taylor, ‘Explaining the Origins of Socialism’, 396; Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and Radical Culture’, 87–106.
- 96.
Stedman Jones, ‘Utopian Socialism Reconsidered’, 142; Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, 48.
- 97.
NMW no.2, 55 ‘The Millennium’ (14 November 1835), 20–1.
- 98.
Taylor, Eve & the New Jerusalem.
- 99.
NMW no.6, 48 ‘Socialism as It Should Be Advocated’—S.N. (21 September 1839), 755–7.
- 100.
Drolet and Frobert, ‘The “Science of Education” and Owenism’.
- 101.
Bestor, Backwoods Utopias; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites.
- 102.
As such, I will not be interested in the subject which J.F.C. Harrison describes as ‘the central feature of Owenism’, that is ‘the dual nature of its role in two such different societies as early nineteenth-century Britain and America’. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 2.
- 103.
For Pant Glas, see Armytage, ‘Pant Glas: A Communitarian Experiment in Merionethshire’.
- 104.
In 1840, it is estimated that 99.5% of the British population identified as being Christians. Around 0.3% of the population identified as having no religion, and 0.2% as being Jewish. While these statistics do not reflect the visibility or cultural presence of other faiths, they do illustrate the dominant position of Christianity. Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales’.
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Lucas, E. (2023). Introduction. In: Early British Socialism and the ‘Religion of the New Moral World’. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23940-3_1
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