Robert Owen's Socialism did not begin as, and was never in its creator's mind, a class movement. That was, in large part, why Marx called it "Utopian." Owen became a working-class leader, not because he wished to appeal to one class alone, but because only the workers followed his leadership. He was essentially a philanthropic reformer, acutely conscious of the evils of the in dustrialism by which he had made his wealth, and confident that these evils could be prevented, and the new productive forces turned to the benefit of mankind, by proper organization and control. He believed the evils of industrialism to be due mainly to two causes—competition and bad education. For competition, which forced down the standard of life and set man against man, he desired to substitute a co-operative control of industry, in order that production might everywhere be maximized in the interests of all, and the product distributed among all according to need. But he believed that men would only give up competition and live co-operatively if, in childhood, they were educated in the right social ideas. His Socialism was, therefore, founded on education, and he was out of his element when he was called upon to lead a great working-class movement which sought to establish Social ism and co-operation by mass action without changing the hearts of men by education. But Owen was also an extraordinary opti mist, able to believe that the hearts of men in the mass could be suddenly changed by the proclamation of his new doctrines. In this spirit, he accepted the role of working-class leader; but the failure of his great trades union, instead of discouraging him, merely sent him back to spend the rest of his life, undismayed, in educational propaganda on behalf of his ideas.
The two decades which saw the rise and fall of Owenite Social ism as a mass movement were fertile in the growth of Socialist theories. Writers such as Thomas Hodgskin (Labour Defended, 1825), attacked the orthodox economists, and drew Socialist deduc tions from Ricardo's subsistence theory of wages; while William Thompson (Distribution of Wealth, 1824), combined constructive Owenite Socialism with destructive criticism of the Ricardians. J. F. Bray, Charles Hall, John Minter Morgan, Piercy Ravenstone, T. R. Edmunds, John Gray and George Mudie are also among the writers who, during these decades, formulated, on broadly Social ist lines, a powerful indictment of capitalist society, reinforced by Thomas Carlyle's denunciation of the Manchester school, and by the Radical political writings of William Cobbett and a host of working-class journalists. Apart from Owen, no writer at this stage designed a constructive Socialist scheme ; but the movements of working-class Radicalism, from the Spenceans of 1816 to the Chartists of the '3os and '4os, were strongly imbued with anti capitalist economic doctrines. Engels, and to a less extent Marx, were in close touch with the Chartists, and there is a direct line of succession from the Chartist and kindred movements of the '4os to the Marxian agitation of 1864 and the following years.
French Socialism.—Meanwhile, in France, Socialism had been pursuing an independent course. Count Henri de Saint-Simon (176o-1825) began to develop his Socialist views about the same time as Owen in Great Britain, while Francois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837), although he outlined his Socialist scheme as early as i8o8, had little influence till a good deal later. Both
these writers belong, far more than Owen, to the category of Utopian Socialists ; for neither had at any stage the same con nection as Owen with the organized working-class movement, for which, in France, the time was not yet ripe. Saint-Simon's scheme was, in essence, a plan for the ordered government of society by economic experts. Out of it arose, after his death, a powerful school of thinkers, including Bazard and Enfantin. It greatly in fluenced Comte, and left its most abiding mark in the development of Positivism, rather than on Socialist thought. Fourier's plan of phalansteres was far more like Owen's scheme for Villages of Co operation; but it, too, was developed rather as an abstract pro posal for the perfecting of human institutions than as an attempt to deal with the positive evils of contemporary industrial society. Both the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists founded societies in Great Britain; and these were found now disputing and now collaborating with the Owenites.
French Socialism entered on a new phase after the Revolution of 183o. Considerant carried on the tradition of Fourier. Louis Auguste Blanqui began his long career of insurrectionary organi zation. Louis Blanc, in 1840, published his famous tract, L'Organi sation du Travail. P. J. Proudhon, in the same year, startled Paris with his first important work, Qu'est ce que la Propriete? The stage was being set for the French Revolution of 1848, in which, for the first time, the gulf between Socialists and ordinary Republicans was made clearly manifest, and, outside England, a proletarian movement made its distinctive appearance.
Of these leaders, Blanqui, who spent the greater part of his life in prison under successive French Governments, counts, not as a theorist, but as the most persistent revolutionary organizer in Socialist history. His was largely the work that went to the mak ing of the Paris Commune of 1871; and it was the misfortune of the Commune that the Versailles Government had him safe in prison before it was proclaimed. Proudhon counts less as a Social ist than as a theorist of Anarchism and a powerful influence on the development of French trade union and Co-operative thought. Louis Blanc, with his scheme of national workshops (q.v.), be longs more properly to the Socialist tradition. Like Owen, he attacked the vices of competition, and urged that the State should eliminate the capitalist by establishing workshops of its own, to he handed over subsequently to the workers to control. Blanc was a member of the revolutionary Government of 1848, but the work shops started by that Government were a mere travesty of his scheme, and were deliberately crushed by the anti-Socialist majority in the Government. His ideas, and those of Buchez, helped to inspire the Christian Socialists in England, where Charles Kingsley contrasted Blanc's plan for the organization of labour favourably with the purely political demand of the Chartists.