On Robert Owen and the History of Experiments in Living

Back in 1991 my co-blogger here at Crooked Timber, Elizabeth S. Anderson, reminded every one of the significance of John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living (Ethics, 102(1): 4-26). She situated Mill’s views on the matter in the context of a debate with Bentham (and Parfit) over the nature of the good in which Mill wanted to defend a hierarchy of goods in an empirical fashion. In the paper, it’s Mill’s actual life that is the paradigmatic experiment in living “or a valid test of a conception of the good,” (p. 15; see also the use of ‘disconfirmation’ on p. 16.)

What’s striking about this conception of an ‘experiment in living’ is how first-person-ish it is. In Mill’s case the experiment was done on him by his father, and he himself could refute it in virtue of the crisis he experienced and the lack of remedy Bentham’s theories afforded. As Anderson notes this is ultimately a quest for self-understanding. (p. 24) As she explains, “The crucial test for a conception of the good is that it provide a perspective of self-understanding which is both personally compelling (has normative force for the agent) and capable of explaining and resolving her predicament-the reasons for crisis and for recovery from it.” (p. 24) An experiment in living is both epistemic and therapeutic in character.

In what follows, I am not mostly interested in these features of experiments in living. But they do lurk in the background of what I am after.

About a decade ago, my friend Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) also drew on Mill in his “Expanding the justificatory framework of Mill’s experiments in living.” Utilitas 27.2 (2015): 179-194. Here “experiments in living are meant to provide the engine of social progress: not only do we have the opportunity for improving our cultural and moral condition, but we can also better discover why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful.” (179) Notice the first-person plural; the perspective is clearly social and collective in character. The experiment still has an epistemic quality, but now it is primary a means toward discovery and social progress.” Interestingly enough, Muldoon builds a vindicatory aspect — “why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful” — into his approach.

I don’t mean to deny that there is a first-person-ish and individualizing element to Muldoon’s account: “experiments in living, and the individuality that they promote, make us worthy objects of moral contemplation.” (180) Muldoon is a liberal and he is interested, in part, in supporting “negative freedom” (179) and “individual autonomy.” (185-186) And crucially for Muldoon’s approach, he understands Mill as claiming that “we are on firmer justificatory ground when fewer people share the same conception of the good.” (180)

However, the main point of Muldoon’s article is to defend the following idea(s):

I argue that experiments in living can offer both an exploration of different conceptions of the Good, but also, particularly in the case of larger-scale social experiments of living, an exploration of different conceptions of Right. Experiments in living serve as engines of social discovery, by allowing diverse populations to develop new ways of living with one another. These experiments embody a potentially new set of justificatory reasons – ones that become apparent in virtue of the fact that they bubble up from a diverse population with a plurality of values and perspectives. Most importantly, the experiments happen through time – rather than an instantiation of public reason that occurs at a particular moment in time, the process of experiments in living is continuous. (Muldoon, 180)

What’s crucial for my purposes here is that this conception of experiments in living are collective in nature and extended in time. In addition to these two features the experiments embody or materialize justificatory reasons. So, it is not sufficient that a group is trying out a new mode of living and (say) producing together survives, but the manner in which they survive — the success conditions — justifies the practice. To put it in Muldoon’s terms (who draws on Reichenbach in so doing), “justification becomes subsumed under iterated discovery, which includes a permanent competition of perspectives.” (190)

So much for set-up.

Before he became a full-blooded and famous socialist, Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a self-made capitalist, and a rather successful one. In fact, it is little exaggeration to say that Owen was one of the first capitalists if not the first to grasp, in practice, Adam Smith’s point at the start of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that human and machine capital can mutually reinforce and enhance each other. His insight was that a better educated and housed workforce would be outlandishly more productive than the status quo. (He thought, for example, that this would dispel any worries about Malthusian traps.) In fact, he came to realize that if one postpones child-labor to give kids time to develop and become educated, they would be far more productive than they otherwise would be and also have much longer working lives. By all accounts, New Lanark was immensely profitable to him.

Now if you read Owen’s own account of New Lanark in A New View of Society (1813-1816), you’ll immediately notice how paternalistic Owen’s views are. He is not especially interested in defending individual autonomy or self-discovery; rather he wants to create an orderly and disciplined population that is not just more productive, but less criminal and more generous to others. I don’t mean to suggest Owen is a philistine about this; he clearly wants his workers to be partake in intellectual and self-development; there is time in the workweek for attending public lectures. But the project evokes More’s Utopia much more than Humboldtian self-development.

In a New View of Society, Owen is quite clearly a kind of mitigated Benthamite. In the first essay, he introduces the idea that ignorance can be dispelled by a “single principle of action, which, by its evident operation and sufficiency…That principle is the happiness of self, clearly understood and uniformly practised; which can only be attained by conduct that must promote the happiness of the community.” And in the fourth (1816) he asserts that “That government, then, is the best, which in practice produces the greatest happiness to the greatest number; including those who govern, and those who obey.” But he recognizes that this sometimes required concessions to path dependency and (feasibility) constraints. For in the third essay, he embraces the idea that “in devising these plans, the sole consideration was not, what were the measures dictated by these principles, which would produce the greatest happiness to man; but what could be effected in practice under the present irrational systems by which these proceedings were surrounded?”

With that in place, let’s return to experiments in living.

In a New View of Society, Owen explicitly presents New Lanark as an experiment. This was part of the original dedication to the fourth essay (1816) which became the first dedication in subsequent editions. The language of experiment is not as emphasized in the first (1813) essay, but becomes more salient in the second (1816) essay. So, it’s possible that Owen himself did not initially foresee what I am about to highlight.

Anyway, in the dedication he writes this: “instead of devoting all your faculties to invent improved inanimate mechanism, let your thoughts be, at least in part, directed to discover how to combine the more excellent materials of body and mind which, by a well-devised experiment, will be found capable of progressive improvement.” So, here there are really two points worth emphasizing: first, that the social reformer and capitalist should not focus only on improving inanimate capital in the workplace, but also how human bodies and minds can be so constituted that open-ended progress is possible. Capitalism of developing human capital is being invented. And, second that the way to discover this is by way of social experiment.

In the first essay, Owen himself tells us that his reports on New Lanark are themselves the effect of many what we might call ‘field experiments’ over decades: “The view of the subject which is about to be given has arisen from extensive experience for upwards of twenty years, during which period its truth and importance have been proved by multiplied experiments.” Unfortunately, Owen does not share his protocols and data, so we can’t really say much about how sophisticated his evidential and epistemic practices were (even though the outcomes were rather impressive).

But interestingly enough, in the second essay he does distinguish different kind of field experiments. He describes what he calls a ‘a very partial’ experiment by his father-in-law (Dale). I think by ‘partial’ Owen here means ‘not fully controlling the social environment.’ This matters not just because of the quality of experimental control, but Owen thinks that what we would call ‘culture’ or ‘the environment is destiny. Also, Owen is somewhat critical that Dale had to delegate quite a bit of the oversight of the experiment to others. He then shifts to his own more successful (presumably less ‘partial’) experiment.

Now, in reading Owen’s account, one may think that the experiment is of people These are the ones that are housed, fed, educated, drilled, etc. In fact, one may well think that the whole village (New Lanark) just is the experiment. But for Owen the experiment is really of his principles. And this anticipates Muldoon’s way of thinking about what an experiment in living is. I quote Owen:

I have thus given a detailed account of this experiment, although a partial application of the principles is of far less importance than a clear and accurate account of the principles themselves, in order that they may be so well understood as to be easily rendered applicable to practice in any community and under any circumstances. Without this, particular facts may indeed amuse or astonish, but they would not contain that substantial value which the principles will be found to possess. But if the relation of the narrative shall forward this object, the experiment cannot fail to prove the certain means of renovating the moral and religious principles of the world, by showing whence arise the various opinions, manners, vices, and virtues of mankind, and how the best or the worst of them may, with mathematical precision, be taught to the rising generation. (Second essay)

So, for Owen the experiment embodies social principles (which include moral and religious kind). And these principles are instantiated not just in the design of the experiment itself (housing, feeding, education, drilling, proscribed mores) etc., but they can also be taught to the subject population. In fact, if you look at the curriculum Owen describes, it won’t go too far to say that the villagers are indoctrinated into the preferred principles from a very early age. They are expected to make these their own. That is, J.S. Mill was not alone in being the subject of drilling in Benthamite principles.

In fact, Owen himself goes on to claim in the second essay that his principles are not tailored to the particular case: “The experiment narrated shows that this is not hypothesis and theory. The principles may be with confidence stated to be universal, and applicable to all times, persons, and circumstances.”

To be sure, this claim must be modified to some degree. When he was still at New Lanark, Owen quite clearly still embraced social hierarchy. And he thought that the principles he prescribed were apt for a working class and its place in society. That is, “a reform in the training and management of the poor, the ignorant, the untaught, the untrained, or ill-taught and ill-trained, among the whole mass of the British population.” (second essay) While he allows for some modest human difference, he does not expect much social mobility. So, the principles while universal in character are calibrated to a particular kind of sub-population.

Let me wrap up.

It’s fair to say that Owen’s idea of an experiment at New Lanark anticipates Muldoon’s gloss and extension of Mill’s experiment in living as collective in nature and extended in time by embodying justificatory reasons. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, these support Benthamism, in part, against Mill’s criticism and they are (unlike Muldoon’s vision) fundamentally anti-individualist in character despite being devoted to the development of character. In a New View of Society, Owen himself proposes to apply the principles of New Lanark to the nation as a whole from the top down. (In part to prevent, I suspect, the kind of violent revolutions seen in France.) So, one way to understand On Liberty is as an attack on the spirit of Benthamite (early) Owenism.

Owen himself must have felt the force of some of Mill’s subsequent reservations. Becauseduring  the rest of his life we see him engaged in organizing and developing not just socialism, but bottom up relatively small-scale experiments in communal living (most famously New Harmony). But that’s for another time.

• An earlier modified version appeared at Digressionsimpressions.