Early Socialism as Intellectual History

This article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the author's own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history of emotions, and a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism AcknowledgementsThis paper was first given at the Approaches to Intellectual History Workshop, EUI Florence, on 1 March 2013. I am grateful to Ann Thomson in particular for her suggestion to prepare it in the first instance.Notes1 George Jacob Holyoake. The History of Co-operation in England (2 vols, Trubner & Co, 1875), vol. 1, p. 294.2 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Religion and the Origins of Socialism’, in Religion and the Political Imagination, edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge, 2011), 171–89 (171). This article concentrates on early socialist efforts to replace existing religions, and argues that even Marx's attempts to supersede Christianity rested upon essentially religious premises; see Stedman Jones, ‘Religion and the Origins of Socialism’, in Religion and the Political Imagination, edited by Katznelson and Stedman Jones, 187. A notable exception to the Marxist approach, which focused instead on divisions between communists and socialists, and between localists and communitarians and centralists or statists, is G. D. H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 1789–1850 (London, 1962).3 See his later study for the subsequent development of some of these themes: J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979).4 J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London, 1969), 4.5 See also my editions of Owen's works and a comprehensive selection of his correspondence, with a number of Owenite pamphlets and other works; Robert Owen, The Selected Works of Robert Owen, edited by Gregory Claeys, 4 vols (London, 1993); Robert Owen, The Owenite Socialist Movement: Pamphlets and Correspondence, edited by Gregory Claeys, 10 vols (London, 2005).6 In particular, John Dunn has noted Pocock's greater emphasis on the history of political thought, or on language embedded in time, compared to Skinner's on the history of political theory, or concepts embedded in philosophy; see John Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1996), 21. But Dunn goes on to claim that ‘it was only in Cambridge that the emphasis on the historicity of the history of political theory became overwhelmingly dominant’; see Dunn, History of Political Theory, 25. Pocock prefers ‘the Cambridge method’ to describe the diverse work of the group chiefly based in Cambridge and their focus on ‘a multiplicity of language acts performed by language users in historical context’; see J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History (Cambridge, 2009), vii. These varying emphases leave open the question as to whether any particular intellectual investigation requires its own unique approach.7 See Robert Owen and His Legacy, edited by Noel Thompson and Chris Williams (Cardiff, 2011), 246–47.8 See here Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek, ‘Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism: From the Principles of ‘89 to Modern Terrorism’, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge, 2011), 200–54; Gregory Claeys, Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge, 2013), in which republicanism remains a central theme.9 But others focused on problems as such, for example, Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005).10 It remains central in Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (London, 2015), forthcoming, and is tentatively unfolded in Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London, 2011).11 There are of course many political dimensions to the ways in which these problems were explored which have bedevilled the wider development of the subject on both sides of the Atlantic. Most of the contributors to both the ‘Cambridge’ debates and their Sussex counterparts were concerned with reconstructing the history of what came to be called ‘liberalism’ in light of the debacle of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and were reluctant to focus further to the left on the political spectrum, preferring to pass over in silence the possibility of a probably ‘ignoble’ science of politics located there. To some degree their collective endeavour can be construed as a Cold-War-based teleological history, particularly in the focus upon republicanism and liberty. Some, like Pocock, indeed found themselves under fire by a ‘Red Guard’ of Marxist historians during the 1960s and 1970s, to their marked distaste. Some of this antagonism was also represented in the hostility of many Marxisant social historians to ‘elitist’ (‘bourgeois’?) intellectual history from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, and the common accusation that intellectual history was about intellectuals and hence inherently suspect. At the same time, left historians like E. P. Thompson long showed a clear reluctance in turn for dabbling in the ephemera of ideas as such, at least (in his work on John Thelwall) until the end of his life.12 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990), 20–48 (40).13 See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985). Pocock regarded Karl Popper's lectures which resulted in The Open Society and Its Enemies as a major intellectual influence on his own development, and his later writings on Burke clearly position him in relation to parts of this debate. I do not of course hold him in the least responsible for the conclusions I have drawn from his arguments respecting the subjects under discussion here.14 So many readers have interpreted it; More's own intentions of course remain another issue.15 See Claeys and Lattek, ‘Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism’, in Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Stedman Jones and Claeys, 204–05.16 To Isaiah Berlin, however, the ‘apotheosis of the romantic will’ precisely represented a revolt against not only ‘the myth of an ideal world’ but equally any preference for uniformity over variety of character; see Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 207–37. But Berlin, like Marx, presumes that all utopias are ‘true for all men, at all times and places’, which ignores the industrial and technical basis of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopias and their explicit declaration that only technology can alleviate many of humanity's basic burdens; see Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity, 211.17 See Robert Owen, ‘The New Religion’ and ‘Second Lecture on the New Religion’, in Owen, Selected Works, II, 167–201.18 For example, Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1953), best supplemented historically by Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1947).19 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (London, 1913), 247. For an extension of this argument, see Gregory Claeys, ‘Paine and the Religiosity of Rights’, in Revolutionary Moments, edited by Rachel Hammersley (London, 2014).20 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London, 1962), 102.21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, aphorism 209.22 This is the central question animating Citizens and Saints.23 But there are possible exceptions; see Gregory Claeys, ‘“The Only Man of Nature That Ever Appeared in the World”: “Walking” John Stewart and the Trajectories of Social Radicalism, 1790–1822’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), forthcoming.24 See Gregory Claeys, ‘News from Somewhere: Enhanced Sociability and the Composite Definition of Utopia and Dystopia’, History, 98 (2013), 145–173.25 See Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010), chapter 1.26 See George Boas, The History of Ideas (New York, NY, 1969), 73.27 Pocock, Political Thought and History, xiv.28 A start here, though, for instance, is An Emotional History of the United States, edited by Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York, NY, 1998).29 Pocock, Political Thought and History, 110.30 Think merely of two usages of ‘social’: the invitation, ‘Oh, come round to our house, we're having a social do’, and ‘it is your social responsibility to assist that man who has fallen on the pavement’.31 But those who analyse ‘propaganda’, ‘myth’, ‘collective manipulation’ and so on will disagree. Perhaps this project is less history as philosophy or political philosophy, and more history as history. Pocock, it might be noted, rejects the ‘history of ideas’ as an adequate label for his own activities, while this is Berlin's preferred self-description, and also sees himself, unlike Skinner, as not engaged in philosophy as such; see Pocock, Political Thought and History, 127, 130.32 Boas, History of Ideas, 132.33 To illustrate the power of suggestion, Freud gives several examples of Maoris who died after finding out that food they had eaten belonged to a chief, which was taboo; see Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, NY, 1962), 42–43.34 Dunn, History of Political Theory, 17.35 Dunn, History of Political Theory, 18.36 See most notably: Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London, 1896); Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism (London, 1899); Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution (London, 1913).37 See Pocock, Political Thought and History, 72–73.38 This is partly covered by a concern with ‘climates of opinion’ noted by Lovejoy as the sociological contribution to the historiography of ideas; see Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The Historiography of Ideas’, in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, MD, 1938), 4.39 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, NY, 1961), 15.40 Which poses additional problems for any Comtean or other scheme of progressive historical secularisation in suggesting the possibility of degeneration rather than maturity

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