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<title> The New Order of Things Proposed </title>
In early 1800s industrialism bloomed across Europe. New technology and knowledge about business accumulated the wealth of the nations. But the wealth was only distributed among a few factory owners and other, already well-off, people. A vast majority, mostly factory workers and their families, lived under conditions which we today would find hard to imagine.

One who paid attention and tried to improve the situation of the poor was Robert Owen, a successful businessman in cotton manufacturing. He came to Lanark in Scotland from Wales at the age of twenty and became manager of a cotton mill. There he made some observations of the working class in its misery and started to improve its conditions. The results were, according to outside observers, impressive and the mill was commercially successful. He called the reformed community New Lanark. 

In 1824 Owen left for the United States. He bought some 30,000 acres of land in Harmony, Indiana, and started a new community based on the ideas he had developed in New Lanark. One of the ideas was basically that improvements and social reforms for the workers will yield efficiency in the long run. Owen's experiments in New Lanark and New Harmony turned out very differently, and in this essay the two experiments will be compared with each other, considering similarities and differences concerning how they both started, how they developed and how the results turned out.

The two projects started very differently. When Robert Owen arrived at Lanark and became manager of the cotton mill, he took notice of the conditions under which the workers and their families lived. The society he saw was marked by heavy rates of crime, poor sanitation, child labor, lack of education and a widely spread drunkenness. The moral among the people was very low due to these harsh conditions, and Owen realized that these circumstances made the workers less productive and he initiated reforms with the long-term intention of increasing the efficiency of the workers. He started educational programs for the workers and their children, improved the workers' housing and established a store where the workers could buy quality products at almost cost-price. In his so-called New Lanark, he had thus changed the prevailing conditions under which the people had lived. 

In New Harmony, on the other hand, the conditions were completely different. During his years in New Lanark, he had developed ideas for creating the most happiness to the largest amount of people as possible. With New Harmony he hoped to get a greater success than in New Lanark, since he was given the possibility to form the initial conditions himself. There were no harsh conditions to overcome, but simply a need to create an atmosphere of communion. He had made very specific plans before putting his ideas into practice, and in the beginning of the project everything was very well ordered, but soon differences about government and religion surfaced and Owen had no solution to the problems, since he himself wanted control and personally had a chilly relation towards religion.

In New Lanark he had never come across the problem of government since he had acted completely on his own without having to consider the opinions of others. The plans he had made for New Lanark were not as far-stretched as those of New Harmony, but instead he had looked at each problem and attacked it individually by reforms. By doing so he had transformed the mill in New Lanark from a factory into a community, while in New Harmony he had started with a community and tried to make it productive, which had turned out to be a more difficult aim than he probably had anticipated. 

Another difficulty with the project at New Harmony was that one of his aims had been to attract intelligent and honest people who were interested in developing a new form of society. And some people were, but the some were not so honest and not so interested. They saw a golden opportunity to take advantage of Owen's offer, meaning getting food and housing for free. At the mills in New Lanark the people had been in need of his reforms and had enthusiastically taken part in them without reservations. 

For Owen personally, the project in New Harmony was a very expensive affair. He himself had been responsible for the financing, and the community had yielded him no profit. When he left, after three years as the front leader of the community, he only had one tenth of his fortune left. Soon after his departure the community dissolved. In New Lanark, the reforms he had inaugurated had made the workers more efficient and turned the cotton mills into one of the world's most profitable, in spite of the costs of the reforms. It was regarded as an example and was praised all across Europe for it's good results, and Owen left it when it was reaching it's peak.

Thus New Lanark started as a reaction to Owen's observations. He wanted to do something about existing circumstances and he did, whereas New Harmony was the result of years of planning by Owen during the successful years in New Lanark, and had to be started from scratch. In New Lanark Owen was able to have all control himself, but in New Harmony differences in political and religious views characterized the ruling of the community. Finally, the economic turnouts of the two experiments were very different; New Lanark was a financial success, while New Harmony became an economic disaster for Owen. Moreover, New Lanark was regarded as an example for the benefits of social reforms, while New Harmony showed the impossibility of completely planning a society - even with the best of intentions.
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