The Battle for Minds and Secular Salvation “Utopia” and “Utility”
Community, the joyful sound,
That cheers the social band,
And spreads the holy zeal around,
To dwell upon the land.
—Owenite Hymn, No. 129
What other Utopians dreamed of, Robert Owen, son of a Welsh saddlemaker, tried to make reality. Undoubtedly a man of genius, he was a combination of the visionary and the realist. He had been moulded in the crucible of hard personal experience, had by his own efforts succeeded, achieved affluence, and thereafter had attempted to transform the lessons of that experience into broad social concepts, and these again into radical philanthropic experiments. That he ultimately failed was a great, even if predictable, tragedy, due as much to the unsoundness of his social premises, shortcomings of his personality, and failure to understand the changing times and the temper of factory workers after 1834, as to the implacable hostility he aroused within the establishment when the full implications of his growing radicalism in politics and religion became apparent.
Genius is a mysterious thing. What are the forces at work when at a critical moment it breaks through the cocoon of the past—traditions, customs, filiations—and emerges in its own independent originality? At what point did this young shop-assistant named Robert Owen, who had been sent out into the world to make his way, attain to that level of perception that resulted in an internal, personal revolution?
We do not know. Owen himself was incapable of giving us the clues.
Causes [he told his Lanark audience in 1816] over which I could have no control, removed in early days the bandage which covered my mental sight … The causes which fashioned me in the womb … these gave me a mind that could not rest satisfied without trying every possible expedient to relieve my fellow men from their wretched situation, and formed it of such a texture that obstacles of the most formidable nature served but to increase my ardor, and to fix within me a settled determination, either to overcome them, or to die in the attempt.1
He had risen fast when a very young man, and could have every incentive and temptation to enrich himself, like others, profiting from the interminable hours of labor of the children, women and men in the cotton factories. At eighteen he was already manager of a Manchester cotton enterprise, soon become a partner in it, and rapidly developed the reputation of one of the most enterprising and astute cotton mill administrators in England or Scotland. At twenty-nine he married the daughter of a Scottish mill-owner at New Lanark, and it was here and at Orbiston, close to Glasgow, that he projected the staggering experiments that were intended to reform the society of his day from top to bottom.
Owen was born in 1771 and died in 1858. He was thus the contemporary of what we may call two ages—the age of an expiring domestic industry and the age of the new triumphant industrialism. In his outlook he tried to assimilate both of them into the optimistic rationalism of the eighteenth century that permeated the thought of William Godwin and Shelley—namely, that Reason is an irresistible force for the elimination of the evils of society and for its re-creation once the veil of ignorance and superstition is lifted from the eyes of both the rulers and the ruled; and that there are immense possibilities inherent in the unprecedented productive powers unleashed by the new machines.
He came to the conclusion that
society may be formed to exist without crime, without poverty, and with health improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundred-fold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes, at this moment, except ignorance, to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.2
He asked that the improvement of human beings—“vital machinery”—be placed on the same level as that which was “inanimate.” For examples of what society should not be like, he needed to look no farther than the factory of his own father-in-law David Dale at New Lanark, with its two thousand workers, of whom one quarter were children brought from poorhouses and elsewhere, six years of age and upward, who labored alongside their seniors for fourteen to sixteen hours daily. Yet Mr. Dale was a devout and well-meaning Christian, who no doubt regarded the condition as part of an unchanging and unchangeable world order. For his son-in-law, however, it was these children that became his first care. Once he became part-owner of the factories, he began creating for them an environment that would favor their physical and mental growth. He originated the first infant school in England; he reformed the brutal primary schools and remade then into education institutions of humanity, kindliness and cooperation. His program was so advanced that it furnishes models even today.
With the same intensity, intelligence and sympathy, Owen worked to transform the entire community of Lanark into a truly habitable and comfortable place, with improved housing, sanitation, sites of recreation, and stores that would charge no more than the cost of the articles. He paid good wages, even at times when he was forced to keep his factories closed. He was, in other words, a model employer, and his town became a model town for all to come and see. And they came, great and small, to observe and marvel. Even Tsar Nicholas of Russia was an approving visitor …
Owen’s vision became more and more expansive. Why could not New Lanark become the model for the rest of the world? A new Garden of Eden with “superior habitations, surrounded by gardens, pleasure grounds, and scenery, far better designed and executed than have yet been possessed by the monarchs of the most powerful and wealthy empires.”3
Why not a world in which the battlefields of competition would give way to “villages of co-operation,” and the struggle between classes give way to a universal harmony of interests? If only manufacturers would practice some restraint on their profits, and like himself be satisfied with a profit, say, of 5%, and turn the surplus to the improvement of the workers’ lot and environment. But he soon discovered that his own partners were not satisfied with such an arrangement, intended to destroy the “profit motive” so essential to modern enterprise, and Owen was forced to break with them. Gradually he moved toward a greater and greater radicalism; his anticapitalism took on fiercer tones, and he joined to it a persistent attack on religion and religious groups that estranged both the established and the dissenting religious bodies. From a well-meaning and somewhat eccentric “philanthropist,” he had turned, it became clear to them, into an enemy of the establishment, an apocalyptic and fiery preacher of social upheaval. Sceptical of political reform, still hopeful of a peaceful transformation achieved by the triumph of Reason, he saw the New Jerusalem already in the making. Undauntedly he proclaimed that labor was the ultimate source of all wealth, and that since the invention of the steam engine and the spinning jenny, the latter had been appropriated by “a few … who continue to absorb the wealth produced by the industry of many.”
The mass of the population are become the slaves to the ignorance and caprice of these monopolists, and are far more truly helpless and wretched than they were before the names of Watt and Arkwright were known … Of this new wealth so created, the laborer who produces it, is justly entitled to his fair proportion; and the best interests of every community require that the producer should have a fair and fixed proportion of all the wealth he created.
Such were the sentiments he expressed in his celebrated “Report to the County of Lanark” in 1820. A year later he was ready to proclaim to the world “the commencement, on this day, of the promised millennium, founded on rational principles and consistent practice.”4
He was not only a man of high-sounding word. He was also a man of deeds. Out of his own wealth he gave and gave toward the establishment of such cooperative villages, whether at Orbiston, or in America in the New Harmony colony of Indiana. He practically bankrupted himself in these enterprises; that they failed was undoubtedly due as much to the inevitable processes of history—the triumph of capitalism—as to the unrealistic vision of a future attainable without a class struggle.
But he swept the minds of thousands and thousands of workers, and left an indelible mark on the entire working-class movement of the period. He was a prime mover and the fashioner of the program of the mighty Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, founded in 1833, with a membership of near half a million, and one of the great forces in the spread of Britain’s cooperative societies. Before long, he himself would witness the extent to which the very thing he had dreamt of avoiding, the inexorable clash of forces, became a reality, when, to meet the dark threat of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, the powers of government and wealth set out to smash it, succeeding through a virtual lockout and the prosecution and transportation of a number of alleged “conspirators.”
Perhaps the saddest and greatest tribute to Robert Owen was paid him by one of his followers, an architect named Welsh, a member of the Builders’ Union—a tribute that no subsequent condescension toward Owen or disparagement of the Utopian dream can diminish:
It is my impression that with your assistance and counsel we can plant a giant Tree the top whereof shall reach to Heaven and afford shelter to succeeding generations.5
There may be a strong presumption that any aristocracy monopolizing the powers of government would not possess intellectual power in any very high perfection. Intellectual powers are the offspring of labor, but a hereditary aristocracy are deprived of the strongest motives to labor. The great part of them, will therefore, be defective in those mental powers.
—James Mill, “Essay on Government” 1814
The season of fictions is over.
—Jeremy Bentham
The new forces that now more cohesively and self-consciously marshalled their numbers to challenge the predominance of the Tory landlord establishment were the so-called “middle rank”—the middle classes—industrialists, financiers, the more affluent tradesmen, along with a number of intellectuals more and more vigorously asserting an identity of interests—in other words, a “class-consciousness.” They were to become among the most formidable allies of the traditional party of “Whigs,” who considered themselves the heirs of the “bloodless” Revolution of 1688, and drew a great measure of their support from the nonconformist religious sects, as well as the commercial and manufacturing segments of society.
Among them were to be found a self-styled group of “radicals,” and among the most influential of these, the so-called “philosophical radicals”—the “Utilitarians”— established the ideological basis for middle-class activity and thought and laid the foundations of latter-day Victorian liberalism. They proved to be by far the most thoroughgoing of the middle-class reforming agents, and it was with their vigorous and articulate support and that of the working classes that the Whigs succeeded in carrying the great Reform Bill of 1832. The “Utilitarians” represented an astonishing phenomenon in the intellectual and political life of England; for aside from the extensive influence of their leaders, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and the latter’s son, John Stuart Mill, they marked the first time in England’s history that a British philosopher—to wit, Jeremy Bentham—had succeeded in founding not only a philosophical school, but a political party as well.
History—that is, time and place—proved a beneficent fostering mother to such a movement, for England was the motherland of the Industrial Revolution, and in this respect supreme in the whole world; the political and social situation in the country, the rising activities of the working classes, the mounting power of the “middle rank,” the loosening hold of the Tory oligarchy over the country, were powerful historical elements favoring the Utilitarian cause.
Jeremy Bentham and his followers rose to the situation. Bentham was a bizarre, eccentric genius (unjustly belittled by Karl Marx), who lived from 1748 to 1832. In his long life he produced a staggering body of publications on legislation and ethics. He was the generous patron of both James Mill and John Stuart Mill. A wealthy bachelor, he became one of the partners in Robert Owen’s New Lanark ventures. He was an open-handed, dedicated believer in the need for reform. It is gratifying to remember that he died in the year that the great Reform Bill was carried.
The Utilitarians grew in numbers and support. In 1824 they founded the Westminster Review, which set out to compete for influence with the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review—the most conservative journals of the day. In 1828 they established University College, London (later to become the University of London), the first nondenominational institution of higher learning in England.
The general principles of the Utilitarian school go back in history as far as the seventeenth century. The doctrine of “utility” asserts that human conduct is morally good in so far as it promotes “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” What is of eminent significance for the nineteenth century is that the doctrine was not confined to moral and ethical speculation merely, but became a central element of, and was made the motive agent leading toward, “practice”—action. And that action was to be directed toward an alteration of things that were obstacles to the achievement of “human happiness”; in other words, reform of the status quo. It is for this reason that John Stuart Mill celebrates Jeremy Bentham as “the father of English innovation both in doctrines and institutions… He is the great subversive, or, in the language of continental philosophers, the great critical thinker of his age and country.”6
Bentham was very much the offspring of the British and French Enlightenment; he was the heir of Locke and Hume and of the French philosophes of the eighteenth century. In many ways he was a kind of philosophe himself, thrust into a century of revolutionary upheaval and compelled to adapt his thinking to a new world of realities. He brought the tested weapons of the Enlightenment: a staunch belief in reason, common sense, experience, and fact. What could be more agreeable and welcome to the middle classes than the ethic of “enlightened selfishness”? What more easily comprehensible than Bentham’s analysis of human nature?
Nature, he wrote, has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for these alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other hand the chains of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.7
Or, as John Stuart Mill put it,
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.8
Jeremy Bentham’s was a computer mentality. His ambition was to reduce the feelings, pleasures and pains, and the human motives, to something approaching mathematical certainty. That was the so-called “hedonistic calculus” for which he was to be attacked so fiercely by those who felt that the highest human aspirations and qualities—virtue itself, honor, and duty—were being desecrated. To claim that the noblest characteristics of mankind, that its highest virtues, were to be reduced to a mere animal happiness! To assert that the moral sense was not inborn in man, but an acquired quality that could be developed by means of education! For education, the Utilitarians taught, and habitual practice, far from encouraging individual “selfishness,” would tend to teach human beings to identify and reconcile their “selfish” interests with those of the community, which, like them, is concerned with the advancement of human happiness. Universal happiness is the product or sum of individual happinesses.
But Bentham was not unaware that there were “particular interests,” “sinister interests”—class interests—that were totally opposed to the “happiness” principle, so long as it subserved the interests of the majority. Hence Bentham advocated universal suffrage—a franchise of equality, and a revision of the Constitution, which Bentham called, addressing himself to the Tory aristocracy,
a collection of pretences under which, the written formulas in and by which you have been in the habit of carrying on incessant war for the sacrifice of the universal to your own particular interest—the carrying on in the most regular and commodious manner the work of oppression and depradation on the largest scale.9
In Bentham’s mind industry and industrialism represented the irresistible liberating forces of mankind, and he foresaw an almost idyllic Utopia in their continued advancement, marked by an ever-advancing benevolence. Every code of law, he claimed, that is to promote the greatest happiness, must aim to achieve “subsistence, abundance, security and equality.”
The middle classes, then, in the eyes of the Utilitarians, were to be the props, mainstays, and propelling motive elements in advancing civilization. It is to them that the lower sectors of society would look for guidance and instruction. James Mill, intellectual son of Bentham, eloquently proclaimed that it was the “middle rank”
which gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself their most distinguished ornaments, and is the chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature, (and) is that portion of the community of which, if the basis of representation were ever to be extended, the opinion would ultimately decide.10
This was written long before the Reform Bill of 1832 was to set the seal on middle-class ascendancy.
As for the laboring classes, the Utilitarians believed these would discover that their own interests coincided with those of the middle class, and that the ever-increasing fortunes of their masters would redound to their profit too. Seemingly conflicting “self-interests,” becoming more and more “enlightened,” would result in the achievement of a joint “happiness” for all. Not that the Utilitarians were unaware of the sharpening intensity of the class struggle, for in 1821, James Mill wrote to the economist David Ricardo:
It is very curious that almost everybody you meet with—whig and tory—agree in declaring their opinion of one thing—that a great struggle between the two orders, the rich and the poor, is in this country, commenced—and that the people must in the end prevail;—and yet that the classes of the rich act as if they were perfectly sure of the contrary … The old adage seemed to be true, that when God wants to destroy a set of men, he first makes them mad.11
The early Utilitarians never questioned the sanctity of private property, though they attacked without reservations the monopoly of the aristocracy and their immunity from taxation. Having a profound faith in education as a panacea for the ills of mankind, they labored in such organs as the Westminster Review for the reform of the franchise, for free trade, and in behalf of universal peace; and hoped to achieve a considerable extension of influence and knowledge through such organizations as the Mechanics Institutes and the associations for the diffusion of knowledge, which addressed themselves to the larger sections of the population. The University of London was to become one of the most influential centers for the diffusion of their ideas.
That they represented a very concrete threat to the established Tory order soon became apparent from the attacks to which they were subjected, as being “godless,” as preaching “immoral” doctrines centered on the selfishness of human beings, as subjecting the finest emotions and aspirations of mankind to some kind of inhuman “calculation” and undermining long established traditions, beliefs, and practices. Their impact on contemporary literature very soon becomes discernible. When Bentham died in 1832, he could rest assured of a vigorous and active progeny, and would have smiled (perhaps triumphantly) over Thomas Carlyle’s rage, expressed the year before in Sartor Resartus. With his customary exaggeration, Carlyle had written, that “Utilitarianism spreads like a dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel will be rabid.”12 And some years before, Blackwood’s Magazine was sadly reflecting:
In Mr. Brougham’s pamphlet on the Education of the People, we think the terms servant and master are never used; it is constantly the working classes and their employers … Why are the good old English words—servant and master—to be struck out of our language?13