Gareth Stedman Jones, Utopian Socialism Reconsidered

From People’s History and Socialist Theory, Raphael Samuel (ed) Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, (1981)

Utopian socialism has rarely been considered in its own right. Its very title suggests a juxtaposition to a 'scientific' successor and the general approach to the subject (see for example Cole or Lichtheim) still bears the imprint first placed upon it in the Communist Manifesto and Anti-Duhring .

Engels' interpretation of 'utopian socialism' in Anti-Duhring is characterised by two features. (1) The highlighting of those elements of the thought of St Simon, Fourier and Owen which look forward to the positions of Marxist socialism. (2) The definition of 'utopian socialism' from its inception as an ideology corresponding to the aspirations of an immature class - the proletariat. This line of approach has tended to be followed in general histories of socialism .

A reconsideration of 'utopian socialism' involves the removal of the teleological and reductionist presuppositions that characterised Engels's approach. Rather than pick out certain elements of interest to a later quite different theorisation of socialism, while relegating the rest to the individual 'eccentricity' or 'naivete' of founding fathers (Fourier, Owen) and rather than presuming its special affinity from the beginning to the outlook of the working class, an attempt should be made to re-establish the integrity of 'socialist' discourse in its initial phase - without imposing anachronistically later preoccupations upon it. (I use the word 'socialism' here for convenience, the word only came into common parlance in the 1830s, when the theoretical work of St Simon, Owen and Fourier was already virtually complete.)

I argue that despite manifest differences between the thought of these theorists, there was by the late 1820s and early 1830s, a sense of a common socialist platform, recognised both by socialists themselves and by their opponents. The aim of the rest of this chapter is to unearth the tacit and explicit presuppositions that went together to make up this platform . Most histories of socialism concentrate upon the differences between particular socialist schools and their shifts from year to year in strategy and tactics. I am interested in the reverse problem - the underlying assumptions that distinguished socialists from non-socialists, and what remained constant in these assumptions between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolution of 1848. This continuity of shared assumption, I argue, is best located in the form of socialist reasoning rather than the changing content of particular schools of socialist thought.

I begin by comparing the first systematic works of the three founders - St Simon's Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneve (1802) , Fourier's Theory of the Four Movements (1808) and Owen's New View (1812-16), and show how they became the founding documents of the three major strands of a socialist movement in England and France up to the mid-1830s. I illustrate the difference between the theories by examining the disagreements between the adherents of the different tendencies when they began to enter into active competition with each other at the end of the 18205. These disagreements did not cluster around rival analyses of the nature of capitalism, for it is an anachronism to assume that they were concerned with such an analysis; they focused, rather, around religious and philosophical issues ( equality v hierarchy, human uniformity v differentiation of human types, the speed of social transformation, self-interest or 'devotion' ( altruism) as the mainspring of human and socialist progress, the relationship between socialism and religion) .

Beneath these disagreements, I try to uncover common presuppositions:

(1) All three theories start from the ambition to construct anew science of human nature .

(2) They focus on the moral/ideological sphere as the determining basis of all other aspects of human behaviour .

(3) The ambition is to make this sphere the object of an exact science which will resolve the problem of social harmony.

(4) Each identified pre-existing moral, religious and political theory (not class or state practices) as the principal obstacle to the actualisation of the newly discovered laws of harmony.

(5) No distinction is made between physical and social science , each had the ambition to be the Newton of the human/social sphere.

These similarities demarcate what is relatively constant in the many variants and hybrids of 'socialism' which sprang up between the 1820s and 1840s. They explain aspects of the political stance of socialism which looks aberrant, if interpreted as some reflex of a workers' movement, and they illuminate the extent of the gulf between pre-existing socialism and historical materialism as it developed from the mid-1840s .

I amplify this analysis by examining four major features of socialist analysis in the 1815-48 period.

(1) The consistent idealism of socialist conceptions of history.

(2) The absence of a specifically economic sphere of conflict in their diagnosis of the current situation

(3) In the light of (1) and (2) , their conception of the place of a working-class movement and class struggle .

(4) The peculiar intertwining between socialism and religion which characterised the whole phenomenon of 'utopian socialism'.

1 On history

I emphasise the common tendency to model history on the development of the individual human being - a tendency most marked in St Simon whose new science of 'social physiology' should be understood literally (e.g. , the French Revolution as the crisis of adolescence, force and exploitation as the gradual diminution of childish aggression, etc.) . I similarly show how an idealism of scientific discovery dominates Owen's treatment of the industrial revolution. In the case of Fourier, I emphasise how it is the mode of love and amatory relations, rather than production, which provides the determinant principle of each historical phase .

2 The lack of a specifically economic analysis

My general point is that while nearly all socialist critiques were agreed in defining competition or egoism as the essential feature of the present, competition was seen as an ideological phenomenon with economic effects, rather than an economic phenomenon with ideological effects. Competition governed the economy, but it does not arise from the economy, nor is it confined to it. The social is a field of antagonism between man and woman, rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, nation and nation, man and man. Competition is only the most striking manifestation of how human potentiality in every sphere is thwarted by institutions and ideologies which promote individualism. Moreover, no variety of socialism in the period questions the wage relation itself. Since there is an axiomatic assumption of natural harmony between nature and human nature, the problem of antagonism and evil is displaced away from the sphere of production (the sphere of the interaction between man and nature) into the spheres of circulation , distribution, politics, force, ideology and morality ( the spheres of the interaction between man and man through the medium of humanly created institutions) . The socialist critique of political economy precisely concentrated upon emphasising the impossibility of isolating a distinct economic sphere .

3 (a) On the working class

The attitude of early theory towards the worker was distant and paternalist. Both Owen and St Simon before the late 1820s focus primarily upon their lack of education. It is the middle class ( when not the sovereign himself) as the enlightened section of the population which is most likely to form the vanguard of progress towards socialism (because of its educational level).

After 1830, the working class is seen in a more hopeful light . Working-class enthusiasm for co-operation could show them to be harbingers of a purer morality (in Owen's view) ; or more widely, workers and women as the most oppressed groups were likely to adopt the socialist cause, as slaves had led the movement towards Christianity. Since the coming of Christianity was the main allegorical model for the coming of socialism, however, a movement of the oppressed at the bottom of society did not exclude the possibility of its ultimate promulgation from the top (the emperor Constantine) .

3 (b) On class struggle

This, by the whole character of socialist theory, was generally regarded in a negative light. Socialism was the cause of humanity, the general harmony between each and all. Class struggle was part of the phenomenon of competition, the striving for particular and individual material interests. There were those, after 1830, however, pulled by the weight of a working-class movement, to attribute a more positive significance to the workers' struggle. Such struggle could be positively evaluated in socialist terms if the material struggle was shown at a more profound level to have an ideal and universal (rather than particular) meaning. I analyse some of the writings of Leroux and the young Marx to illustrate this point .

The problem of knowing what significance to attribute to class struggle was closely connected with the problem of 'devotion' versus material self-interest as a trigger to action. I show how this problem was resolved in an ideal and universal direction by the Owenites (with the aid of phrenology) , by the St Simonians (through their division of history into organic and critical epochs) ; and, finally, the creative disagreement it introduced into the first discussions of German socialists in the early 1840s - provoked by the argument of Lorenz von Stein (the first major source of information about French socialism in Germany in 1842) that communism depended not upon the power of its ideas, but the needs of the stomach. I show how this idea was treated by :V1arx, Engels and Hess in their early writings .

(4) The problem of religion

This problem is not satisfactorily solved in secondary sources . Most often, (a) religion is treated as an external embellishment to the real secular core of socialist thought ( Stein, Engels, Cole , Lichtheim) ; or (b) it is seen as a colouration given to the socialism of the period by the still semi-secularised aspirations of its constituency - a sort of modernisation theory of utopian socialism (see the otherwise excellent studies of the Owenites by J .f .C . Harrison or the Cabetists by C. Johnson); or (c) socialism is treated as the last phase of a Christian millennial tradition which had surfaced with Thomas Mililzer in the sixteenth century (Henri Desroches) .

Against (a) I argue on the general grounds outlined above that one must attempt to analyse the socialist theory of the period as an integral whole and not arbitrarily dissolve it into forward-looking and redundant elements. Against (b) I argue that the religiosity of the socialism of the period cannot be satisfactorily explained in sociological terms. While a religious background may indeed illuminate the religious tone of the aspirations and language of many socialist supporters, it will not adequately explain the paradox of the founding theorists themselves - from free-thought backgrounds, cool and detached in their discussion of religious phenomena, yet also comparing their status to that of Christ and explicitly or implicitly claiming divine inspiration for their thought. I argue that religiosity was not extrinsic but inherent in the structure of early socialist thought. It was not personal megalomania or sociological predisposition that led to a religion of socialism but the very nature and object of the thought itself. Since socialism claimed to be a science of human nature, and to have solved the mystery of social harmony and universal happiness, it impinged directly upon the territory of pre-existing moral theory - par excellence the Christian church. Since the founders of socialism were deists and regarded the newly discovered laws of human nature as the laws of God, they could not but imply a privileged intimacy with the mechanics of the divine. Christ could then be seen as the ancestor of their science, disallowed by God the father, in Fourier's words, from expressing except in 'parabolic form' the true laws of human nature and thus the solution to human happiness which had to be the product of human free will. Against (c) therefore, I argue that utopian socialism was indeed a religious movement, but not in any meaningful sense a Christian one. It was a new humanist religion, whose gospel was the new science. Socialism possessed no critique of the state and no conception of a capitalist economy. It attacked not the practices of the state or the ruling class, but the false or ignorant or alienated theory, on which it presumed the practices were based. Its yardstick of judgment was its knowledge of the true nature of man, which excluded original sin and the laws and coercion based upon it . Its true enemy was the church which had distorted Christ's original message, and in practice as well, socialists fought their battles more consistently against the church than the state or a class of capitalists .

Once 'utopian socialism' is redefined as a new 'science' of man and by the same token anew religion of human emancipation , much that otherwise looks incoherent, inconsistent or irrelevant in the socialist story can be set back into place.