Tradition

Utopian Socialism

Early 19th century

The first generation of socialists: that industrial society could be reorganized by design, demonstrated in model communities and argued from moral appeal rather than class struggle.

Utopian socialism is a label its subjects never used. Marx and Engels applied it in 1848 to the socialists who preceded them, meaning it as a criticizm: these men had seen the misery of industrial society clearly but proposed to escape it by persuasion and example rather than by the movement of history, and so had no account of how their schemes would come about.

The criticizm is fair and the achievement was real. Saint-Simon argued that industrial society had made the old ruling orders parasitic and that authority should pass to those who actually produce — engineers, bankers, scientists — a claim that founded technocratic politics as much as socialist politics. Fourier designed the phalanstery around the proposition that work could be made attractive by matching it to passion rather than suppressing it, and wrote about the emancipation of women in terms that Marx thought the sharpest of the period; the word feminism is his coinage's descendant. Owen, uniquely, had run the thing: New Lanark was a working mill town with schooling, limited hours and no child labor that remained profitable, and he spent his fortune on New Harmony trying to repeat it.

What they share is the conviction that the arrangement of society is a design problem open to intelligence — and the absence of any theory of who would carry the design out. Their practical legacy ran through the cooperative movement, the model factory town, and municipal reform rather than through revolution.

Lineage

Descends from

  • Enlightenment Philosophy18th century

    The founding conviction — that the arrangement of society is a design problem open to reason rather than a settlement to be endured — is the Enlightenment's, applied to industry.

Gave rise to

  • Marxism19th century to present

    Marx and Engels named them in order to bury them, but took the critique of industrial misery, the labor theory of exploitation in embryo, and the goal of association from exactly this generation.

  • Positivism19th century to present

    Comte was Saint-Simon's secretary, and the claim that authority should pass to those who understand production survives the break between them intact.

Provoked a reaction in

  • Marxism19th century to present

    The charge is that they had no theory of how their schemes would arrive: socialism argued from moral appeal and model communities, with no agent and no mechanism.

Thinkers3
Related through shared thinkers1