Utopian Socialism

What the Name Means

'Utopian' does not mean unrealisable; it names where the reasoning stands. The solution is not sought inside the historical movement but designed by reason and imposed on society from outside. In Engels's account this is a diagnosis of a period, not a jeer. Around 1800 the contradictions of capitalism were only beginning to take shape, and the means of ending them still more so. The proletariat appeared as an oppressed and suffering order incapable of helping itself, so help could seemingly come only from outside or from above.

The Three

Saint-Simon (1760–1825). He read the French Revolution as a class war not merely between nobility and bourgeoisie but among three parties, the non-possessors included. To see that in 1802 was, in Engels's words, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816 he declared politics the science of production and foretold its complete absorption by economics. In his society, however, command lay with scholars and industrialists (manufacturers, merchants, bankers) and the bankers were to direct the whole of social production by regulating credit.

Fourier (1772–1837). A satirist who laid bare the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world, and the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of general emancipation. He divided history into savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate and civilisation, and showed civilisation moving in a vicious circle of contradictions it reproduces without solving, so that 'under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself'. Engels credits him with using dialectics as masterfully as his contemporary Hegel.

Owen (1771–1858). A cotton manufacturer. From 1800 to 1829 he turned New Lanark, a village of 2,500, into a model colony where drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits and poor laws were unknown. He founded the first infant schools, taking children from the age of two; where competitors worked people thirteen or fourteen hours a day, New Lanark's day was ten and a half; when a cotton crisis stopped work for four months, his workers were paid in full. The business more than doubled in value. He was still not satisfied: 'The people were slaves at my mercy.'

What Was Missing

Engels's conclusion is not a list of faults but a single point. They treated society's wrongs as a task for reason to remove, not as a problem of a historically formed mode of production bound to pass beyond itself. The more completely their systems were worked out in detail, the more they drifted into pure fantasy.

And then comes the sentence that matters most here: 'we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.'

Why the Entry Still Earns Its Place

The label 'utopian' served through the twentieth century as a device for pushing opponents out of an argument. In Engels's usage it does no such work: it asks what conditions a given project could have arisen from. Anyone reaching for the label today (for co-operatives, community experiments, basic-income designs) should first read how Engels recorded Owen's infant schools and his shortened working day.