Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Gregory Claeys
improve rather than dismantle the rapidly extending empires of the period
(Claeys 2010).
Most types of later socialism thus presumed that some form of centralised
state would persist after socialist reforms had been introduced (e.g. Gonner
1895). However, a greater stress was given in British socialism to local and
municipal forms of organisation over centralised control, in France to the
commune (municipality or township), in Switzerland the canton. French
socialists were also suspicious of proposals for state nationalisation of the land,
preferring peasant proprietorship in the interim, while German socialists
rejected Bismarckian paternalist schemes of state insurance. Socialism thus
gave greater stress to decentralisation, local control and trades’ and federative
democracy than did Marxism, which urged a substantial centralisation of
state power during the period of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This
preference for more direct over more representative forms of democracy was
thus not anti-political, but intensified political practices in proposed socialist
societies. Referenda were in some cases proposed in order to secure popular
assent. More importantly, and particularly in so far as feminism played a
leading role in early socialism, ‘politics’ was extended beyond economic
into personal relationships, the ‘personal’ effectively becoming ‘political’ as
patriarchal assumptions of power were challenged. (On the development of
feminism in early socialism see Taylor 1983; Kolmerten 1990; Moses 1993;
Pilbeam 2000;Wilson2002.)
2 Definitions, historiographic controversies and boundary issues
Throughout the nineteenth century the terms ‘communism’ and ‘social-
ism’ were often used more or less interchangeably in the popular as well as
the reformist press. The word ‘socialism’ appeared first in English, French,
German and other European languages from the mid-1820s onwards (see
Claeys 2003;Reybaud1840;Stein1964). From the publication of Marx
and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), however, and more
emphatically from the early 1880s, Marx’s followers distinguished between
the earlier or ‘utopian’ forms of socialism, and their own ‘scientific’ com-
munism, a juxtaposition that continues to dominate the historiography of
the nineteenth-century socialist movement. Non-Marxists have also fre-
quently adopted the terminology, but giving a different stress to the term,
and emphasising a common belief among the early socialists in a benef-
icent natural order, the essential goodness of human nature, a belief in
rational solutions to the social problem through the discovery of new laws
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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914
of social organisation, and a faith in tactics of rational persuasion. Here
the chief ‘utopian’ factor is ‘the belief in education and in the power of
the knowledge of what is good’ (Sombart 1913,p.39), which resulted in
underestimating the strength of their opponents and overestimating their
own (see Claeys 1989a).
In the case of Marx and Engels, the utopian/scientific distinction was
held to rest on three grounds: (1) that the proletariat were merely a passive
‘suffering mass’, rather than the active agent of revolution; (2) the belief
that society could or should be transformed by propaganda and experi-
ments only, rather than revolution; (3) a refusal to acknowledge that the
seeds of social development lay in the economic development of capitalism
(as summarised in Engels 1972b). This teleological conception is, how-
ever, no longer justified. For many early socialists, like the Chartist leaders
James Bronterre O’Brien and William Lovett in Britain, or the Cabetists in
France, see the struggle for the franchise as a means to socialist ends, though
they rarely counsel revolutionary transformation as such. Robert Owen
and most of his followers also adopted a theory of economic immiseration,
the centralisation of capital and recurrent commercial crises to argue that
the existing economic system would usher in its own collapse. They also
saw the advent of industrialisation as ensuring a higher standard of living
for the working classes, and contended thus that socialism could not have
been introduced in any earlier historical period. Bracketing this group of
writers together, moreover, obscures their very substantial differences. In
particular, the systems of property-holding proposed by Four ier and Saint-
Simon offer a much greater role to private property than does Owen’s;
some consequently have denied the label of ‘socialist’ to Fourier entirely
(e.g. Riasanovksy 1969,pp.185–214). In addition, not only has ‘history’
failed to deliver the revolutionary outcome predicted by Marx; the notion
that it is sensible to trust to spontaneous historical processes, rather than
planning future development, has also been heavily devalued (e.g. by Wells
1933,p.38). Those hostile to socialism may regard all large-scale collec-
tivist schemes, particularly of the communist type, as ‘utopian’ in the most
negative sense. Still others would term all forms of socialism ‘utopian’,
Marxist or otherwise, in the precise degree to which they presume a fun-
damental improvement in human behaviour under altered circumstances,
particularly the elimination of selfishness. The weight of evidence against
the ‘utopian/scientific’ distinction is thus overwhelming. Historiographi-
cally it is clearly preferable to speak now of ‘early’ rather than ‘utopian’
socialism.
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Gregory Claeys
Although this chapter concentrates upon the chief early socialist schools,
it is worth noting that there are substantial scholarly disputes as to who
should be included under the ‘socialist’ rubric. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809–65) is usually described as a founder of the nineteenth-century anar-
chist movement, because he described his ideal form of government in
terms of ‘anarchy’, the absence of a master or sovereign. Most actual gov-
ernment was to be through a national exchange bank that would ensure
‘mutualism’, or the guarantee of an economic credit created by actual labour
time. Some of his works, however, notably What is Property? (1840), had
a marked influence on the socialist movement, especially the individualist
wing of its French followers (Vincent 1984). Michael Bakunin (1814–76),
too, though an anarchist, aimed at a regime of social justice and equality
not dissimilar from the vision of many socialists of the period, and also
had a marked influence on the socialist movements of Spain and Italy in
particular. The leading British liberal writer of the period, John Stuart Mill
(1806–73), who supported co-operative efforts as a type of half-way house
to socialism, famously declared that his views ought to be classified ‘under
the general designation of Socialists’, aiming thus at a
time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when
the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only,
but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending,
as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert
on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be
thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring
benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society
they belong to. (Mill 1874a, pp. 231–2)
Given the perceived importance of retaining Mill’s undiluted liberal pedigree
many Mill scholars have disputed this self-description (but see Claeys 1997).
Similar problems arise with the classification of the ideas of Thomas Carlyle
and John Ruskin, both of whom proposed collectivist (Carlyle) as well as
communitarian schemes (Ruskin) indebted to, as well as influential upon,
the socialist movement, but which were authoritarian, paternalist and anti-
democratic. It was said of Ruskin’s writings that they had ‘probably done
more than any other single influence to imbue English minds with senti-
ments and principles of a socialistic character’ (Rae 1891,p.88). Writers like
William Morris have been enrolled under the Marxian banner (Thompson
1977), but are as plausibly described as non- or even anti-Marxist (Hardie
1907,p.25;Cole1954,p.419). The Positivist followers of Auguste Comte
(1798–1857), who had been Saint-Simon’s secretary, evince a variety of
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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914
socialist qualities (see Harrison 1908, p. xv), and continued Saint-Simon’s
insistence on the coming government of society by scientists and industrial-
ists. So, too, do many prominent New Liberal writers, such as John Hobson,
who projected schemes of a mixed private and public economy (see Hob-
son 1909,pp.89–156, and generally Clarke 1978 and Freeden 1978). While
plans for land nationalisation, such as that of the naturalist Alfred Russel
Wallace (1823–1913), which restricted the collectivist principle to the soil
alone (Wallace 1882), tended to be rejected by socialists as too limited,
some had socialistic aspects (Beer 1920). A number of leading proponents
of eugenics termed their proposals for state interference to ensure genetic
purity ‘socialist’ (e.g. Pearson 1887a, 1887b).
The term ‘socialism’ thus became increasingly susceptible to a wide defi-
nition. It was often used synonymously with ‘collectivism’, including writ-
ers like the gradualist Belgian land nationaliser Jean de Colins (1783–1859),
whose scheme of ‘Rational Socialism’ also had a large agrarian dimen-
sion. ‘Collectivism’ could, however, also be used more narrowly to describe
efforts to restrict inheritance as well as nationalise land and capital (e.g.
Laveleye 1885,pp.244–64). In 1848 Proudhon famously said that socialism
entailed ‘every aspiration towards the improvement of society’. The state-
ment by the later Victorian British statesman Sir William Harcour t that ‘we
are all socialists now’ also indicates the degree to which collectivist or statist
approaches to poverty, education, sanitation and trade unions in particular
had become ubiquitous by the 1880s. Hence Dicey’s well-known descrip-
tion of the growing appeal of collectivism, defined as ‘faith in the benefit
to be derived by the mass of the people from the action or intervention of
the State even in matters which might be, and often are, left to the uncon-
trolled management of the persons concerned’ (Dicey 1914,p.258). This
view thus came to be understood as having widely replaced ‘individualist’
approaches to poverty and social planning, notably in various forms of New
Liberalism.
By the 1880s, programmatically, ‘socialism’ broadly came to mean col-
lective control over the means of the production of wealth, particularly land
and industry, for the benefit of the whole people.
2
More crudely expressed
2 For t he most influential British socialist, Robert Blatchford, whose Merrie England (1894) sold more
than two million copies, and whose Clarion circulated more than 80,000 copies weekly, the ‘root idea’
was ‘That the country, and all the machinery of production in the country, shall belong to the whole
people (the nation), and shall be used by the people and for the people’ (Blatchford 1902,p.84). (Cf.
Graham 1890, p. xxi: ‘I take the form of Socialism called Collectivism, which postulates the collective
ownership of land and capital, with production under State direction, to be Socialism.’) To Schaeffle
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Gregory Claeys
in terms of interests, it meant a system in which individual interest was
sacrificed to that of the community, and specifically that of the capitalist
class to the common good (Flint 1895,p.17). Broadly speaking it entailed
a co-operative as opposed to a competitive approach to production. It was
usually contradistinguished from revolutionary collectivism or communism
(especially Marxist), and anarchism. In so far as radicalism was under stood as
proposing collectivist legislation in aid of the working classes, and the lim-
itation of private property in the name of the public weal, socialism could
be defined as its logical outcome (e.g. Besant 1893,p.4; see Davies 1914).
A number of movements were peripheral to socialism or contained socialist
elements, including working-class political organisations such as Chartism
in Britain; trade union organisations like syndicalism, which were power-
ful in France, Spain and Italy; producer co-operation; and guild socialism.
From the 1880s onwards reaction against centralisation also brought several
strands of socialism increasingly into closer proximity with anarchism; a
noted contemporary commentator wrote that: ‘all socialists are working for
the decentralisation of government. They look upon the present state as
too highly centralised. They wish to transfer functions from central govern-
ments to local political units, in order that the business of the people may
be near the people’ (Ely 1894,p.31).
While we cannot explore their political economy here in any detail,
socialists from Owen onwards through Karl Rodbertus (1805–75)andMarx
confronted Smithian and Ricardian political economy at some length, offer-
ing a sharp critique of competition, of the inegalitarian nature of capitalist
distribution and its inevitable tendency through the ‘iron law of wages’
to increase poverty, and of dominant theories of value, especially that of
Ricardo (Claeys 1987; Thompson 1984). In its place they offered various
schemes of communal and collectivist production and distribution driven by
a theory of justice that was usually either egalitarian or, alternatively, based
upon work, and dedicated to production for use rather than profit (e.g.
Hardie n.d., p. 58). In general liberal contract theory of the sort associated
‘the Alpha and Omega of socialism is the transformation of private and competing capitals into a united collective
capital’ (1889,p.20). To Villiers ‘There is one thing, and one thing only, common to all Socialisms –
the belief in the common ownership of land and capital’ (1908,p.18). For Besant ‘Socialism is the
theory which declares that there shall be no private property in the materials which are necessary for
the production of wealth’, whether land or ‘wrought material’ (Besant and Foote, 1887,p.6). To Ely
it was ‘that contemplated system of industrial society which proposes the abolition of private property
in the great material instruments of production, and the substitute therefore of collective property;
and advocates the collective management of production, together with the distribution of the social
income by society, and private property in the larger proportion of this social income’ (1894,p.19).
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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914
with Locke was now introduced into economic argument, with a view thus
of democratising the labour process, and overruling any ‘laws’ supposedly
dictated by the market.
Contemporaries tended to divide nineteenth-century socialism into five
distinct periods: (1) the aftermath of the French Revolution; (2)the
‘utopian’ phase of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon; (3) an era of decline
from c.1849–63;(4) the years from the formation of the International in
1864, to its dissolution in 1872;(5) the epoch dominated by Social Democ-
racy, from the early 1880s.
3 Owen and Owenism
Born in Newtown, Wales, Robert Owen (1771–1858) rose from humble
origins to become one of the greatest entrepreneurs of his age, achieving
both fame and fortune as a cotton-spinner at New Lanark, near Glasgow.
Early alarmed by the deleterious effects of factory work on operatives,
Owen in his first major published work, A New View of Society; or, Essays
on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–14), heralded
the one great idea he never tired of reiterating: that human character was
essentially the product of the environment, and was not voluntarily cho-
sen. If that environment were ameliorated, so too would human behaviour
become more orderly, sociable and ‘rational’. If religion persuaded people
that character was not malleable, it was, as Owen announced in 1817,the
principal obstacle to humane social reform. Owen by 1815 had gained con-
siderable renown as a sympathetic employer who endeavoured to improve
conditions in his mills and the villages surrounding them. After Waterloo,
social dislocation and unemployment convinced him that limited reforms,
such as restricting the hours of child labour, were insufficient. Instead, by
1820, Owen became convinced that increasing mechanisation and a steady
narrowing of the division of labour would destroy the character of the work-
ing class (Owen 1993, i,pp.109–19). The causes of poverty, he asserted,
lay in the injustice of the existing system of wages, which did not return to
labourers the value of their produce (Owen 1993, i,pp.287–332). His rem-
edy, unfolded from 1817 onwards, was that a ‘new moral world’ should be
created based upon small-scale communities of no more than 2,500 persons,
living and working in common, aiming at self-subsistence, and alternating
between manufacturing, agricultural and other forms of labour. By 1820
he coined the phrase the ‘social system’ (whence ‘socialism’ derives, in
English) to describe his opposition to the ‘individual’ system of ‘buying
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Gregory Claeys
cheap and selling dear’, soon to be termed ‘individualism’ (Owen 1993, ii,
p. 11). (Two-thirds of Owen’s autobiography (1858) reprints his chief early
writings. An annotated edition of the autobiographical section is Owen
1993, iv. The chief biographies are Booth 1869;Cole1965; Donnachie
2000;Harvey1949; Jones 1889;andSargant1860. Bibliographies of Owen’s
writings include A Bibliography of Robert Owen, the Socialist 1914 and Goto
1932–4. Essay collections on Owen include Butt 1971; Pollard and Salt
1971; Tsuzuki 1992.)
From the mid-1820s until his death Owen’s chief aim was to construct a
model community exemplifying these principles. The first great effort was
at New Harmony, Indiana, the last at Queenwood, or Harmony, Hamp-
shire, from 1839–45, with followers attempting a variety of similar schemes
at Orbiston and elsewhere, all of which were short-lived. (On Owenism
see Bestor 1950; Garnett 1972;Harrison1969;andRoyle1998.) In the
intervening years he played a role in the nascent trade union movement,
helped to set up ‘Labour Exchanges’ in the early 1830s, where artisans were
to trade directly with one another, and inspired the beginnings of the con-
sumer co-operative movement. He also constructed, by the early 1840s, a
substantial network of branches of a new organisation, the ‘Association of
All Classes of All Nations’, which aimed at disseminating socialist propa-
ganda as well as establishing a community (Claeys 1998). Despite his initial
secular outlook, he portrayed his principles in the early 1830s in terms of a
‘rational’ ‘new religion’ that sought to promote charitable principles (Owen
1993, ii,pp.167–201).
As the ‘Social Father’ of this sectarian organisation, Owen tended to act
in a paternalistic manner towards his followers. His eventual scheme for the
political organisation of communities, as published in The Book of the New
Moral World (1836–44), proposed the division of the community into eight
age-groups, with each person following the same sequence of development
through life. The first ‘class’, to age 5, would attend school; the next (5–
10) would assist in domestic labour; those 10–15 would learn agricultural
and industrial skills. All those aged 15
–20 w
ould engage in production
and the oversight of younger members, being supervised themselves by
those aged 25–30. Finally, the 30–40-year-old group would govern the
community, and the most mature, aged 40–60, would conduct ‘foreign
affairs’ (Owen 1993, iii,pp.286–97; see Claeys 1989a). By institutionalising
a traditional, gerontocratic principle of rule by elders Owen wished to avoid
any elections or contests for leadership, as well as ensuring ‘equal rights’ and
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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914
‘equal education and condition through life according to age’ (Owen 1993,
iii,p.365). Social order would be preserved in part, too, simply because
the community was small enough to ensure a mutual policing of morals.
‘Democracy’ in the traditional electoral sense, then, was to be superseded,
but what Owen took to be its rational content, a substantive plea for equality,
would be realised in community. In principle this scheme was to apply as
much to women as men, and feminism, with a demand for liberalised
marriage and divorce laws, would emerge as a characteristically Owenite
theme by the mid-1830s (see Kolmerten 1990;Taylor1983; and Thompson
1997).
Owenite propaganda ensured the widespread introduction of the term
‘social’ to modify ‘democracy’ in British radical discourse from the late 1830s
onwards, by which political ends, chiefly the goal of attaining universal male
suffrage sought by the Chartist movement, became increasingly understood
as entailing ‘social’ ends, especially the improvement of working-class eco-
nomic standards. Equally impressive, analytically, was Owenism’s critique of
the chief models of plebeian radicalism, especially the United States, which
by the mid-1830s was rapidly developing a class of poor (Claeys 1996).
To Owenites this exemplified the operations of the competitive system. It
also proved that democracy as such did not solve working-class economic
distress, and that poverty was not caused, as radicals of a Cobbettite ilk
continued to suggest, by heavy and unjust taxation imposed by a corrupt
state, but derived from the injustice of the wage relationship, and the fail-
ure of the wage to reflect the value of the produce of labour. This would
become, in Britain and elsewhere, one of the most significant arguments
against other forms of radicalism through the end of the century. Most of
Owen’s follower s were more committed to traditional forms of democratic
rule than Owen himself, but accepted the thrust of this critique of the
economic assumptions tacit in existing radical democratic theory.
Of all of the early socialist groups Owenism engaged in the most pro-
longed confrontation with classical political economy, producing dozens of
pamphlets on the subject, and a number of major works, including John
Gray’s A Lecture on Human Happiness (1826)andThe Social System (1831);
William Thompson’s Inquiry Concerning the Distribution of Wealth (1824)and
Labor Rewarded (1827); and John Francis Bray’s Labour’s Wrong and Labour’s
Remedy (1839) (see Claeys 2005). These addressed some themes Owen him-
self had introduced, notably the disadvantages of competition, the harmful
effects of unproductive labour, increasing specialisation, the instability of
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Gregory Claeys
capitalism, and its proneness to promote poverty. Those inspired by Owen,
however, were also relatively independent thinkers, and as early as the 1820s,
notably in the writings of George Mudie and John Gray, had begun to pro-
pose the rational reorganisation of the national economy by some system of
planning. This implied a vastly more complex system of production, as well
as the possibility of expanding needs, rather than the stasis and renuncia-
tion of luxury associated with Owen’s community proposals. By the early
1830s, Owenites also offered a relatively sophisticated analysis and critique
of recurrent economic crises, which they saw as endemic to capitalism and
prone to deepening working-class poverty.
4 Fourier and Fourierism
The social system proposed by Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was less a
reaction to industrialisation than Owen’s proposals, and more a criticism
of the irrationality and injustice of the existing commercial system (see
Fourier 1966–8. English excerpts include Fourier 1901, 1971a, 1971b). The
son of a Besanc¸on cloth merchant, Fourier saw his f amily fortune disappear
during the French Revolution. He passed much of his life as a commercial
traveller, broker and clerk in cloth houses in Marseilles, Rouen, Lyon and
Paris, remaining a bachelor. He preferred children at arm’s length (dining
apart from their parents in the ideal future), but doted on cats and flowers.
In the latter years of his life he returned home punctually each day to
await – in vain – any capitalist, Napoleon or other fondateur who might
call to offer support for his system. His introspection bred heady fantasy;
salt water might be made to taste like lemonade, ‘anti-tigers’ would carry
humans from place to place, and the Pole rendered fertile by cosmic light.
Fourier’s ideal was based on his discovery, announced in his first major
work, the Theory of the Four Movements (1808), that the human and material
worlds were being governed by one law of ‘passionate attraction’, of which
Newton’s law of gravitation was the natural basis. The development of this
idea took the form of Fourier’s critique of commercial selfishness, waste and
individualism in the latest stage of history, ‘Civilisation’, which increasingly
tended to empower merchants, bankers and stock-jobbers, and to promote
both monopoly and speculation. His later chief writings were the Tr a i t
´
ede
l’Association Domestique-Agricole (2 vols., 1821), also published under the title
of La Th
´
eoriedel’Unit
´
e Universelle (1822), and Le Nouveau Monde Industriel
et Soci
´
etaire (1829)andLa Fausse Industrie (1835–6), which exemplify his
theories of association.
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Non-Marxian socialism 1815–1914
The basis of Fourierism was the assumption that God intended a cer-
tain form of social order to secure mankind’s happiness. Yet this order,
if discernible by reason, was not, paradoxically, based on it. The folly of
humanity hitherto consisted in having failed to recognise this. As Fourier
proclaimed, announcing the psychological radicalism, hostility to repression
and devotion to pleasure that distinguish his system:
My theory confines itself to utilising the passions now condemned, just as Nature has given
them to us and without in any way changing them. That is the whole mystery, the whole
secret of the calculus of passionate Attraction. There is no arguing there whether God
was right or wrong in giving mankind these or those passions; the associative order
avails itself of them without changing them, and as God has given them to us. (Fourier
1901,p.66, 1851)
Fourier described an elaborate cosmology; his relig ion included a belief
in the immortality and transmigration of the soul. God had not intended,
he insisted, that the greed and selfish aggressiveness characteristic of ‘civil-
isation’, epitomised by England as the social type and the Jews (whose
emancipation he accordingly opposed) as the individual type, should be the
final development of humanity. Early convinced of the essential dishonesty
of the commercial system, he became persuaded that a new system that
encouraged honesty, economy and association in line with human instincts
needed to be designed; this became his life’s task. His proposed scheme of
organisation was based upon a radical view of the human passions, whose
repression, unlike most of the pre-socialist utopian writers and many later
socialists, he condemned utterly. The problem was rather ‘to change the direc-
tion of passion rather than to change or repress the passions and instincts’
(Fourier 1971a, p. 191). Hence Fourier has often been seen as a precursor
of Freud. He assumed the community could both harmonise and satisfy
human passions in a manner, under the r ubric of the idea of ‘associative’
order (ordre soci
´
etaire), that promoted happiness while abolishing poverty.
More than any other early socialist writer, thus, Fourier proposed to max-
imise individuality while exalting the social or community bond at the same
time.
The key to this scheme was ‘passional attraction’, by which the free play
of the passions was to produce universal harmony. Fourier identified twelve
‘radical passions’, susceptible of 820 variations, and arranged around three
types of attraction, the sensitive being based upon enjoyment, the affective,
bearing on group affinity, and the familial, relating to parenthood. Eventu-
ally the Phalanx would exhibit ‘Harmonism or Unityism ...an unbounded
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