<doc.id=1005.a5>
<title> The new order of things proposed </title>
In this essay I will compare the social experiments of Robert Owen in New Lanark, Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana USA. I will first give a brief presentation of Owen and his two communities and then discuss the differences between them.
Robert Owen who was born in 1771 made a very quick climb up the societal ladder when he in early years dropped out of school and set of to work in London. He started as an apprentice to a clothier and at the age of nineteen he, as manager and partner of a Manchester cotton firm, purchased a mill, New Lanark, in Lanarkshire in Scotland. Owen's idea was to do a social experiment in New Lanark. In this experiment he would show how to reform the society of the industrial revolution, where vast amounts of people suffered in factories all over the country. He based his project on some few very simple ideas. First he argues that the character of man is formed, not by him, but instead for him by the circumstances that surrounds him. Therefore every person can be good and moral and of use to society if placed in the right environment as soon as the are born. Second, the cause of the suffering that was all too obvious at this time was man's subordination to the machine. He said that in order to eradicate this distress we needed to make the machines ease the burdens of the workers not multiply them, as the case now were.
New Lanark was at the time of Owen's buying it, in the same state as many other industries. Child labour, long working days, generally poor conditions and immorality and crime in abundance. The way Owen saw it this was not an efficient way of running a business. Therefor, to combine ways of going through with his social experiment and increasing the efficiency of the mill, he started to build new houses for the workers, set up education for the children working at the mill and started a health care project. As an effect of this, in combination with his good knowledge of handling the workers, he managed to get rid of his workers' bad habits of drinking, steeling, prostitution and so on. For many years New Lanark was a model enterprise which was a financial success while at same time being an exemplary factory when you looked at working conditions 
Owen now set out to make social reform on a nation level. He started agitate for the parliament to pass a bill that would change the conditions on factories all over Britain. The bill constituted of three provisions that was, not to have child labour done away with, but at least make the conditions under which they worked more endurable. Owen's idea was that no child under the age of twelve should be allowed to work and they were not to work for more then ten and a half hour per day and not at all during night.
Although the British parliament wanted to make at least some reforms and also asked Owen for a plan to deal with the problems that had arose since the end of the war against Napoleon they thought of his ideas as to extreme and did not acknowledge them. Owen now more then ever wanted to prove, by practical examples that his ideas of small self-supplying communities were the perfect solution to the problems.
New Harmony, in Indiana USA, was such an example. In 1825 he bought about 30.000 acres of land for money he had taken from the New Lanark project. On this land he started his community. It was to be based on communistic ideas in that the village life should be structured in such a way that everybody would benefit from the work of the community as a whole. 
The community of New Harmony constituted of some one thousand people, a number that Owen saw as the ultimate population of such a community. The 'philosophy' on which the community was based was that of common property. This can be problem in that a system like that can only work when all involved are of the right community character as is pointed out in American Utopianism (49).
On commencing the project Owen invited people well disposed and industrious to come join him. Many came and a lot of them were not, as Owen had wanted, all that hard working and determined. This is one of the reasons for New Harmony's failure and one of the differences between New Harmony and New Lanark, differences I will deal with now.
There are a few basic factors that differs between New Lanark and New Harmony and which will account for the success of the former and the failure of the latter. The first is the initial states and aims of the communities. New Lanark was a mill being in a terrible state of poverty and oppression and as such had as its main goal to make a good profit. New Harmony was a community started from scratch with the goal of proving a sociological and political point. 
The second factor is the people of the two communities and their response to Owen running the show. In New Lanark the population consisted mainly of poor workers and their families. In New Harmony it was different. People who lived here did so because they chose to. They were there for a very specific reason, namely to try on a new way of life. The people in Owen's first experiment had to accept his role as leader something the New Harmony-people didn't. This brings me to the public reactions at Owen's ruling the communities. In New Lanark he was the manager of an industry where the workers were supposed to take orders and I don't think they really cared about whom gave them the orders. The fact that Owen made improvements on their living conditions probably didn't make them oppose him. As for New Harmony, the people were of a different character. Some of them probably didn't see Owen as the only person capable of leading the project and some did in fact, although with no hard feelings against Mr Owen, break out to start a neighbouring village. This is, then, the reason that New Harmony didn't last more than three years. (You could see the fact that New Lanark was successful and New Harmony failed as the biggest difference between the two) When political issues arose in New Harmony, on account of different opinions regarding the government of the community, Owen didn't have the knowledge to tackle them and remain in control of his project.
To conclude, then, the main differences are the basic natures and aims of the two communities. "Whereas New Lanark was a factory turned into a community, New Harmony was planned as a community with a factory attached" (The Western Intellectual Tradition p. 468)
</doc>