In this new world of falling water, burning coal, and whirring machinery, utopia was born again. It is easy to see why this should have happened, and why about two-thirds of our utopias should have been written in the nineteenth century. The world was being visibly made over; and it was possible to conceive of a different order of things without escaping to the other side of the earth. There were political changes, and the monarchic state was tempered by republicanism; there were industrial changes, and two hungry mouths were born where one could feed before; and there were social changes—the strata of society shifted and “faulted,” and men who in an earlier period would have been doomed to a dull and ignominious round, perhaps, took a place alongside those whom inheritance had given all the privileges of riches and breeding.
In contrast to all these fresh possibilities were the dismal realities which were easily enough perceived by people who stood outside this new order, or who by temperament revolted against the indignities and repressions and vilenesses that accompanied it. It is not my particular business here to deal with the facts of history; but unless one understands the facts of history, the utopias which I am about to present lose a good part of their meaning. Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so big that all men might be fed—the very instruments that were to give the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of torture.
I do not speak too harshly of the early industrial age; it is impossible to speak too harshly. Take the trouble to read Robert Owen’s “Essay on the Formation of Character” (Manchester: 1837) and learn what conditions were like in a model factory run by an enlightened employer: it is a picture of unmitigated brutality. One must go back to the blackest periods of ancient slavery for a parallel, if indeed one would find it, for the Pyramids that were built under the lash have a certain grandeur and permanence which justify their existence, whilst the goods which were produced in Yorkshire through the maimed bodies of pauper children proved to be as impermanent as the lives that were sacrificed in making them.
Those who were inside this new order—the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys whom Dickens pictures in Hard Times—sought to realize their utopia of the Iron Age on earth. When we are through with the genuine utopians we shall examine the idola by which all the “practical” men of the nineteenth century, Marx as well as Macaulay, patterned their behavior. Those who stood out against this new order were not so much opposed to the new methods as to the purposes for which they were being used: they felt that an orderly conquest of Nature had turned into a wild scramble for loot, and that all the goods industrialism promised were being lost, for the benefit of a few aggressive and unsocialized individuals. With the host of critics and interpreters and reformers that arose in the nineteenth century we shall have a little reckoning to make presently: those who concern us here however belong to the stock of Plato, More, and Andreae, in that they attempted to see society as a whole, and to protect a new order which would be basically sound as well as superficially improved. Yet with the exception of the utopias which revolted against industrialism these nineteenth century essays are partial and one-sided; for they tend to magnify the importance of the industrial order as much as Gradgrind and Bounderby did, and in doing this they lose sight of the whole life of man. These industrial utopias are no longer concerned with values but with means; they are all instrumentalist. I doubt whether an intelligent peasant in India or China would get out of the whole batch of these utopias a single idea which would have any bearing on the life that he has experienced—so little of human significance remains when the problems of mechanical and political organization have been disposed of!
One symptom of this lack of individuality, this lack of what, in the old-fashioned sense used to be called a philosophy, is the fact that we can treat all these industrial utopias in groups. The first of these group-utopias I shall call, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the Associationists.
III
Among the Associationists, the most influential utopian is Charles François Marie Fourier. He was a prolific and incoherent writer, and his Utopia, if the truth be told, exists as disjecta membra rather than as a single work; but in his case I make an exception to the criterion of selection; because in every other respect he has a claim upon our attention. This Fourier was a dry little French commercial traveller, whose personal fortune was lost in the French revolution and whose hopes for founding a real eutopia were blasted by the July revolution of 1830. Again and again he transferred himself from one line of goods to another
