Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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The sleepy developmental pace of the manufacturing period transformed into a true Sturm und Drang original: "Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress); a period of rapid, turbulent growth. period of production. With ever-increasing speed, the division of society into great capitalists and propertyless proletarians was completed. Between them, instead of the former stable middle class, an unstable mass of artisans and small tradesmen led a precarious existence; they were the most fluctuating part of the population. The new mode of production was still only at the beginning of its ascending branch; it was still the normal, regular, and, under the circumstances, the only possible mode of production. But even then, it generated glaring social grievances: the crowding of a homeless population into the worst living quarters of large cities; the dissolution of all traditional bonds of lineage, of patriarchal subordination, of the family; overwork, especially of women and children, to a terrifying degree; and the mass demoralization of the working class, which had been suddenly thrown into entirely new conditions—from the country to the city, from agriculture to industry, from stable to daily changing, insecure living conditions.

At that point, a twenty-nine-year-old manufacturer appeared as a reformer, a man of such childlike simplicity of character that it approached the sublime, and at the same time a born leader of men as few others. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist Enlightenment thinkers: that the character of man is the product, on the one hand, of his innate organization, and on the other, of the circumstances surrounding the individual during their lifetime, especially during the period of development. In the industrial revolution, most of his peers saw only confusion and chaos, a good opportunity to fish in troubled waters and to enrich themselves rapidly. He saw in it the opportunity to put his favorite principle into practice, and thereby to bring order into the chaos. He had already attempted this successfully in Manchester as the manager of five hundred workers in a factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, as managing partner in the same spirit, only with greater freedom of action and with a success that brought him European fame. A population that gradually grew to 2,500 people, and which had originally consisted of the most mixed and for the most part highly demoralized elements, he transformed into a complete model colony in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor relief, and the need for charity were unknown things. And this was achieved simply by placing the people in more human conditions and, in particular, by having the growing generation carefully educated.