Millennium and Enlightenment: Robert Owen and the Second Coming of the truth

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article aims to explain the family resemblance between the early socialism that emerged in France from the aftermath of the Revolution and Owenite socialism, which emerged out of the very different political and religious circumstances of late Georgian Britain. While the ‘sciences’ of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were conceived to end the crisis produced by the French Revolution, Owen’s newfound principle, what he called the ‘science of the influence of circumstance’, emerged from his A New View of Society and his ideas on formation of character, was directed to the solution of the problems of industrial Britain during the French wars and after. The article shows that, contrary to the arguments of the pathbreaking work of Gregory Claeys, Owen’s ideas had less to do with a Republicanism that, for Claeys in following the work of J.G.A. Pocock, had its roots in the Renaissance, and more to do with the emergence of the science of society whose origins lay in the late Enlightenment and the shared concerns of English, Scottish, and French thinkers on trying to understand an emerging and new social order.