Robert Owen and his Legacy

By Chris Williams and Noel Thompson

J. F. C. Harrison has written that ‘for each age there is a new view of Mr Owen’, which is proof of the fertility and continuing relevance of his ideas. Not just in Britain and America but today around the world anti-poverty campaigners, birth-controllers, collectivists, communitarians, co-operators, ecologists, educationalists, environmentalists, feminists, humanitarians, internationalists, paternalistic capitalists, secularists, campaigners for social justice, trade unionists, urban planners, utopians, welfare reformers can all find something to admire and inspire in the treasure trove that is the thought and actions of Robert Owen. Owen was a creative genius of global significance, a radical writer and activist of international reputation and reach who has inspired those seeking to change human society for the better. The contributors to this volume include not only many of the recognized experts on the life, work and legacy of Owen, but also work from younger scholars or scholars coming to the field afresh. The volume presents the most recent and original research on Owen. Owen notoriously (and impressively) dabbled in many spheres, and this is reflected in the its breadth of content. The unifying themes are Owen’s profile in his own time, and the relevance of his ideas for the generations that followed. His importance for educational and social philosophy, for political economy and for the political theory of socialism are all discussed, as are his contribution as a philanthropic employer, his political activities and the specificities of his historical context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783162932

Chris Williams

He’s a person who wants to see every kid achieve in life. He has worked with kids most his life, teaching them how to conduct themselves and to focus on their goals and work hard at it. He has a master’s degree in biblical studies and is a licensed minster, where he spends a great deal of his time doing what he loves: helping kids with their spiritual development, giving them the tools they need to live a productive life.

Book preview

Robert Owen and his Legacy

In Memory of Nina Fishman (1946–2009)

Robert Owen and his Legacy

Edited by

Noel Thompson and Chris Williams

Cardiff

University of Wales Press

2011

© The Contributors, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN        978-0-7083-2442-4 (hardback)

                 978-0-7083-2443-1 (paperback)

e­ISBN      978-1-78316-293-2

The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover: main image is a watercolour portrait of Robert Owen, c.1850; photograph courtesy of Gillian Brench, Lily May Photography 2011. To the right are shown the New Lanark millworkers walking home from the mills in a photograph taken c.1890; by permission of the New Lanark Trust. Below is a coloured engraving surveying New Lanark from the north, after John Winning’s watercolour c.1818; © RCAHMS.

Contents

List of Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Introduction

Noel Thompson and Chris Williams

1 Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues

Ian Donnachie

2 Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists

Gregory Claeys

3 The Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to World Heritage Site

Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold

4 Robert Owen and Education

Francis J. O’Hagan

5 Robert Owen and Religion

Robert A. Davis

6 Owen and the Owenites: Consumer and Consumption in the New Moral World

Noel Thompson

7 Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian

Margaret Escott

8 Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Conflict

Ben Maw

9 Robert Owen and ‘The Greatest Discovery Ever Made By Man’

Geoffrey Powell

10 Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society

Malcolm Chase

11 Robert Owen and Wales

Chris Williams

Afterword: Looking Forward: Co­operative Politics or Can Owen Still Help?

Stephen Yeo

Select Bibliography

Abbreviations

The Contributors

Introduction

Noel Thompson and Chris Williams

The present volume comes from papers given at a colloquium held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of Robert Owen at the University of Wales’s Gregynog Hall in August 2008. Gregynog is just six miles from Newtown, Montgomeryshire, where Owen was born and brought up and where he died at the Bear’s Head Hotel on 17 November 1858 and was buried with his parents beside the abandoned church of St Mary. With the possible exception of New Lanark there could have been few more appropriate venues for such a conference, and ambience, papers and personalities combined to do justice to the life and work of this remarkable man.

The colloquium papers illustrate both the complex character of his achievement, legacy and personality and how he in turn both shaped and reflected the spirit of the age in equally complex ways. New Lanark is the most powerful physical legacy of that shaping. Like many in this volume Davidson and Arnold argue for the centrality of New Lanark to what Owen achieved and what he communicated to future generations. They tell the story of its physical retrieval from dereliction to the status of a world heritage site in 2001; a transformation that required the same combination of business skills, idealism and perseverance that Robert Owen himself deployed in his original transformation of the New Lanark community. It is a retrieval of this monument to Owen’s achievement which also keeps alive, in its rejuvenated and living community, many of the ideals which Owen himself embraced.

New Lanark, as it was and as it is, reminds us of the potent forces unleashed by the revolution in industrial organization and technologies that drove the rapid industrialization of this period and the genius of Owen in harnessing them both for the conventional purpose of profit but also the concomitant creation of what might be termed a welfare community. For if profit was a consequence it was not the motive force of what he did. Similarly if New Lanark, as the world heritage site it has become, now aims to pay its way in a demanding world, its restoration has been driven by other ideals, and other imperatives; ideals manifested in New Lanark’s social enterprise and social housing. Its status as a site of global historical significance has encapsulated and preserved for the future the physical embodiment of what it sought to achieve: a living community where the social takes precedence over the acquisitively individual.

The inspiration which Owen gave reconfigured the way in which many viewed the world; what it was and, more importantly, what it might become. And not only did it inspire many who sought to create a new moral world at home but also those, like Owen himself, who sought to transplant the moral values of communitarianism, often with disastrous consequences, to the New World of the Americas. Chase’s essay focuses on the export of Owenism to South America through the agency of Thomas Powell (like Owen a native of Newtown) and the Tropical Emigration Society (TES). Drawn by prospects of abundance, despair at what could be achieved in the old immoral world and frustration with the authoritarianism of Owen, the society looked to Venezuela as a suitable location to realize their aspirations. Powell had been involved in the early co-operative phase of Owenism and then went on to play a prominent role in Montgomeryshire Chartism in the late 1830s. Following a period of imprisonment for his political activities, he threw his energies into the TES as its founding secretary and editor of its journal the Morning Star, and shortly after, in 1845, a colony was founded with a population of around 250.

As Chase makes clear, the disaster which followed was as total as it was predictable: a hostile climate, lack of resource, virgin forest and an absence of effective leadership made for death, despair and dissension. Broken by the experience Powell himself stayed on in Trinidad, dying there in 1862. Chase’s chapter tells us much about the nature of Owenism and its appeal: its millenarian nature, the desire for a new world in the physical as well as the figurative sense; the failing faith in the capacity to build a New Jerusalem in a land that seemed neither green nor pleasant and lacking the potential to be either (particularly for those artisans in declining trades); the importance it gave to the acquisition of land and, above all, the appeal to many wouldbe communitarians of the exotic, the other, where with the constraints of the old had been removed and all things became possible, at least in the imagination. As Chase shows these were the psychological, political and socio-economic imperatives which fuelled an interest in emigration, and the possibilities it held out, throughout Owenism’s history.

Less dramatically, but in many ways more constructively there was what Owen contributed to the social reforms of the period. Marx and Engels might use the epithet of ‘utopian’ but the former in Capital, with more than a touch, surely, of self-directed irony, acknowledged what Owen had contributed in a very real and practical sense. Not only had he ‘maintained the necessity of the limitation of the working day in theory but actually introduced the 10 hours’ day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed at as a communistic utopia; so where his Combination of children’s education with productive labour and the Co-operative Societies of working-men, first called into being by him. To-day the first Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.’¹ And in particular there was what he achieved as an educationalist and the inspiration that this gave to others.

O’Hagan in his essay discusses the educational legacy of New Lanark where Owen demonstrated a new and potent relationship between education, work and society; something which, for many commentators, represents his most significant and lasting achievement. Certainly, for Owen, education was seen as the primary driver of the social transformation he hoped to effect. As O’Hagan points out, ‘at the heart of Owen’s educational programme … was the determination to create a disciplined docile population for factory, home and the shared spaces of social circulation.’² And this he argues explains its appeal to those concerned with the fundamental tensions which industrialization was creating in the new social order. A New View of Society was, after all, aimed at political and cultural elites.

This is in no way denies the radical nature of what Owen proposed: an education that integrated the utilitarian and instrumentalist with the promotion of self-knowledge and self-realization and, in consequence, the development of a curriculum that embraced natural history and science together with music and dance. And Owen’s was a legacy which influenced, and had significance for, adult, early and citizenship education. If Owen was, as Hazlitt has suggested, a man of one idea, or in the patois of Isaiah Berlin a hedgehog rather than a fox; then that idea was one which profoundly shaped the thinking of many about what humankind was and what it might be made to become. Just how profoundly revolutionary was this vision of what education might be was again something specifically recognized by Marx. Writing in Capital he opined that Owen had ‘shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.’³

As Escott’s contribution makes clear, Owen was not someone who stood aside from politics and the political process where he felt it might be used to practical, legislative or proselytizing effect to advance the cause of social reform. This essay looks at Owen’s engagement with British parliamentary and electoral politics, both as a lobbyist and as a putative parliamentary candidate – an experience which largely served to confirm his underlying belief that ‘any government founded upon popular elections has within it the seeds of continued irritation, divisions and corruption’.⁴ It was, though, in his capacity as lobbyist that this engagement was most intense and apparent: involvement in the movement for factory reform; petitioning of the House of Lords to create model communities similar to New Lanark; petitions in relation to the distressed condition of Ireland in the early 1820s; contributions to the deliberations of select committees; interventions in debates surrounding the key political issues of the day – grain shortages, high prices and the restoration of cash payment. All provided an opportunity not just to mark out his position on these matters but also to advance his own more general plans as to how a new society might be created. Elections and electoral politics in particular furnished a variety of platforms and media to engage with the political community and to disseminate his ideas beyond the circle of the Owenite faithful. These Owen used to the full.

But it was on the minds of men and women that Owen left the most lasting imprint; an imprint sufficiently profound to provoke the critical categorization of ‘utopian’ which Marx and Engels bestowed. Most obviously there was the efflorescence of Owenite socialist political economy in the 1820s and 1830s and the practical expression of this in co-operative societies and labour exchanges. This was an ideological awakening that found expression in tracts, pamphlets, books and above all the working-class press and, for a period, posed one of the most formidable and profound challenges to classical political economy that it was to experience before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Not until the late-nineteenth-century socialist revival was there such an upsurge of critical and constructive thinking that challenged the fundamentals of capitalism’s economic rationale and its associated value system. Aspects of this challenge are considered in Maw’s contribution, in which he discusses what he sees as the unintended aspects of Owen’s ideological legacy. Thompson also looks at the impact that Owen had on contemporary socialist thinking on how it negotiated the perils and sought to exploit the possibilities of abundance.

Maw’s essay focuses on one of the pivotal periods in Owen’s career, when he assumed de jure if not de facto leadership of the upsurge in working-class Radicalism of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Often seen, not least by Marx, as someone who failed to grasp the irremediable nature of class antagonism under capitalism, Maw sees Owen’s thought as nonetheless establishing the ‘key building blocks of new ideas about class and class conflict’.⁵ Thus his environmentalism and moral determinism and his thinking in terms of systems and the actions of social groups rather than individuals could be, and were, articulated in social analyses with class at their core: analyses that were to be developed and disseminated by organizations and media associated with Owenism and co-operation in the politically and economically charged atmosphere of the early 1830s. What emerged in consequence, as Maw sees it, was what can legitimately be termed a popular, anti-capitalist political economy that found expression in the working-class press and through trade unions and co-operative societies. Such a political economy was articulated with particular force and coherence by figures such as Bronterre O’Brien and James Morrison, and in papers such as the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Pioneer, whose direct experience of working-class organizations was to give both an edge to their class analysis and a more determinedly and rounded democratic view of their role in transforming the existing order than that of Owen himself.

Thompson’s contribution considers the place of consumption in early nineteenth-century socialist thought, and in particular that of Robert Owen. Like later writers the Owenite socialists sought to reconcile the socially atomizing potential of private consumption with the desire to improve the material well-being of the working classes. Mechanization, and the industrial expansion which it fuelled, had persuaded Owen that the age of scarcity had ended and that of abundance had dawned. What was needful were social and economic arrangements which would allow the realization of its potentialities in ways that would not be divisive, self-serving or self-regarding. The resolution of this tension was to be effected by way of the prioritization of social consumption. Social opulence was to be the counterpart of personal restraint; something that was to be reflected in the quality of the social and cultural infrastructure which characterized socialist communities, both real and imagined. In an age whose priorities are quite the opposite, with material consequences with which future generations must live (or die), Thompson argues the need for a return to the Owenite vision of a social opulence that a prioritization of social consumption might deliver.

But of course the influence of Owen’s ideas has extended far beyond the early part of the nineteenth century and their longevity, impact and contemporary relevance are discussed in two essays in this volume. Claeys examines how, in the light of the collapse of Marxian socialism, we should view Owen’s reputation vis-à-vis the later socialist movement and where this leaves the binary divide between ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism. Here Claeys challenges the Marxian critique of Owen’s political economy: in particular its unhistorical character, its inability to elucidate the nature of capitalist exploitation and its failure to recognize the irremediable nature of class antagonism.

As Claeys notes, despite this critique, all shades of socialist opinion in Britain, from MacDonald to Cole to Hyndman, acknowledged the remarkable and distinctive contributions which Owen had made to the cause of the working class. And, if later British commentators made a distinction between their socialism and that of Owen and the Owenites, it was not with reference to any ‘utopian’/‘scientific’ dichotomy but with regard to the different explanatory and conceptual frameworks which they used and the different modus operandi they proposed for the delivery of socialist progress. This is made particularly evident by Claeys in his discussion of Alfred Russel Wallace and the latter’s view of Owen.

Claeys also, and rightly, raises the issue of the relevance of community and scale to our society, with its present discontents, threatened public services and threatening public space. Owenite communitarianism celebrated the virtue of civic responsibility, public service and fellowship. Like Morris some fifty years later, Owen saw fellowship as creating the possibility of a full and rounded existence, while its absence made for social death.

Yeo’s ‘Afterword’ seeks to do two things: to mediate a political conversation between the early nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries and to consider critically the traditional historiographical view of the third quarter of the nineteenth century as a a particularly flat plain between two peaks. As to the first, he illustrates how the power of the co-operative movement as a set of associations has remained recognizable across time; a power which, along with its associational ethos makes possible and legitimate the exploration of a contemporary co-operative politics and what it might look like; a politics (emphatically lower-case) that could be used to challenge the acquisitive culture of contentment that has taken us to within a few steps of the abyss. It is in this context that Yeo celebrates the intellectual achievement of Greg Claeys in having made more accessible and usable the Owenite inheritance upon which those who would forge a co-operative politics can draw.

As to the flat socialist landscape of third-quarter Victorian Britain, this can now be seen as populated by a rich associational culture; one embraced and developed by those drawing on an Owenite legacy or inspired by its values to engage in active, working, productive and above all ‘social’ associations – trade unions, co-operatives, friendly and building societies and educational associations. This is something which Yeo sees as carried forward, in muted and transmuted forms, through the twentieth century into the growth of the New Mutualism of the New Labour years; and views it too as an Owenite-rooted legacy whose retrieval could lay the basis for aspirations for a fully social life.

But if we are to take seriously Owen’s own emphasis on the determining influence of upbringing and environment, we must touch base, as we did in the conference, with Wales, the market town of Newtown and the rolling hills of Montgomeryshire. For only by doing so can we fully appreciate the early influences that helped shape his personality and thinking. Williams’s essay examines Owen’s relationship with Wales during his lifetime: the impact of Owenite communitarianism on Wales, which inspired amongst other developments the communities of Garn Lwyd and Pant Glas, and the evolving relationship between Wales and Owen or, perhaps more accurately, the changing Welsh perception of Owen, in the 150 years since his death. Building on the work of Donnachie, Powell and others he seeks to identify the nature of Owen’s intellectual and other debts to the town and rural community in which he was born and brought up and the nature of any distinctively Welsh cultural imprint which this left. The significance of this is difficult to gauge but certainly neither Owen nor, more interestingly, his subsequent critics, were to make much of it. Moreover Newtown, his birthand last resting-place was slow to acknowledge and embrace his memory. In significant part, it would seem, as a consequence of his perceived atheism. However, that was to change at the turn of the century when New Liberals, Welsh nationalists and the Labour movement were able to unpack Owen’s social thinking in ways consistent with their respective political credos. Subsequent generations have done likewise; the multifaceted character of Owen’s political economy lending itself to such ideologically disparate appropriations of his legacy.

Williams, like others before him, rightly notes Owen’s Nonconformist roots. And religion and the Bible had a particular place in his early life. Just how profound that influence was and how Owen subsequently engaged with religion, religious practice and religious institutions is considered by Davis. His discussion of Owen’s position on religion is set in the context of the historiographical reassessment of religious institutions and practice of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain that has occurred in the last four decades; something which has involved a more nuanced treatment than has previously been the case. Discussion of this aspect of Owen’s life and thought has portrayed him as a figure in the traditional narrative of the inexorable progress of Enlightenment rationalism; a reading to which his autobiographical Life lends credence. For Davis, however, Owen’s thinking can be seen rather as the product of a complex interaction with the language and habits of religious adherence. Certainly, as Davis makes clear, Owen was profoundly influenced by his exposure to Enlightenment thinkers, particularly in the context of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Moreover his rejection of the notion of free will and therefore of the concept of moral responsibility represented an attack on religious systems that have that as their core. Further, in the 1820s he began to attack more overtly the philosophical assumptions of religious belief and to see it as a fundamental source of sectarianism and intolerance. Yet as Davis sees it, Owen, from an initial deism, ultimately looked to the renovation of religion and the accommodation of the religious impulse within a rational belief system – ‘a religion of truth’ – scientifically grounded in an understanding of nature; one ultimately yielding a signal improvement in the human condition. Moreover the religious language of conviction, conversion and millenarian transformation came to be secularized and rationalized and then used as a means of articulating Owen’s social philosophy. In such a context Davis sees his final embrace of spiritualism not as an aberration but as a naturalistic and scientific explanation of religious claims to the existence of an afterlife.

Powell’s chapter also touches on Owen’s understanding of the nature of religion and religious thought but with a specific consideration of his epistemology. His focus is on Owen’s understanding of the misconception of reality, and the more general bearing this had on his thinking. For Owen, the existing order was characterized by misconceptions consistent with the ‘rank insanity’ of those who possessed them. Religion, private property and marriage were at the root of these. They generated the contradictions that characterized modem industrial society: private property was at the root of poverty in the midst of plenty and religion preached love but engendered hatred amongst those of differing religious persuasions. Reconciling such contradictions required a distortion or occlusion of vision that represented a form of insanity. How then could the capacity to see things as they were be restored, insanity dispelled and the possibility of a new order created?

That was the role of Owen. A man who saw the world clearly as it was and as it might become; a secular Messiah who used millenarian and religious language to envision a material world characterised by abundance, from which the socially and morally corrosive effects of poverty could be removed. As Powell points out, despite the millenarian rhetoric of total transformation, Owen was concerned that the new moral world must emerge from a transformation of humanity’s perception of the world rather than the revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions; a transformation of perception that would involve, in the terms of Piaget, the elimination of a pervasive egocentrism. Humanity must see the world clearly and not through a glass darkly.

But achieving this, as Owen increasingly recognized, was profoundly problematic. Marx saw the clarification of vision as coming pari passu with the unfolding of the historical process itself. But it is to Piaget that Powell looks and to his ‘decentred thinker’ with the capacity to think rationally, to understand the interests of the community and live by internalized principles; a capacity hardwired into the psyche through the child’s experience of social groups where there is mutual respect and the recognition of a common interest. For Powell it is Piaget who points the way ‘to secur[ing] Owen’s educational route to restoring the clarity of vision’ upon which his new moral world was predicated.⁶

While this book begins with the contribution of Ian Donnachie, whose splendid volume provides the most recent biographical treatment of Owen, and one that does full justice to his Welsh roots, it could equally well have ended with it. This essay both assesses our current understanding of some of the controversies and issues surrounding Owen and also points to the opportunities for future scholarship in its assessment of those that have yet to be resolved.

More specifically Donnachie addresses the multiple reputations which have been constructed for Owen. There can be little doubt that the substance of his reputation was created at New Lanark; a reputation, indeed an international one, that derived from its social transformation in microcosm at a time when turbulent economic times, and a prolonged conflict with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, threatened social destabilization. It was New Lanark that attracted the attention of the elites but it was also this that laid the basis for his ideas on educational and factory reform which were in turn to establish a reputation with which those social elites came to be less at ease. This was the reputation that attached to Owen the advocate of communities and producer co-operatives and the Owen who excoriated the prevailing ethos of competition. This was a reputation which, whether legitimately or not, was to see Owen transmuted into the ‘Father of Socialism’ by later generations of socialist and other writers and into someone whose ‘socialism’ was to receive the sustained critical attention of other socialists.

Donnachie’s essay raises some of the unresolved and important issues still surrounding Owen’s career. How for example to explain his undoubted success in Manchester as manager of the Drinkwater mills? What explains the speed with which his career progressed on arrival at New Lanark: power, sex and money were, as Donnachie sees it, germane to this but in what ways and in what combinations? What allowed, and continued to allow him access to political and social elites? What prompted his attack on religion or rather sectarianism? Was it the inevitable corollary of Enlightenment rationalism or fired by other pressures and considerations? And then there is his stance on the position of women and gender equality. As Donnachie’s piece makes plain, there are, for the future, still many questions to be answered if a more complete picture and understanding of Owen is to be furnished. But if the flow of scholarship which characterizes the volume continues unabated, we can confidently anticipate that such a picture will have emerged when we come together, as some of us shall, and perhaps at Gregynog, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Owen’s birth in 2021.

Notes

1 Karl Marx, Capital (London, 1976 edition), Vol. 1, p. 413n.

2 P. 81 below

3 Marx, Capital , p. 614.

4 P. 138 below

5 P. 156 below

6 P. 192 below

1

Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues

Ian Donnachie

Reputations

Robert Owen is an iconic figure in the annals of social reform and is widely celebrated in many parts of the globe where his ideas, transported from New Lanark, took root. In his time Owen was highly controversial, a situation partly of his own making. Thanks to a flood of speeches, pamphlets, books and other propaganda, allied to his numerous interventions in issues of the day, he was often victim to extreme responses from his audience. Indeed, after he went public and became a personality on the national and then international stages, he was endorsed or vilified in equal measure for nearly half a century until his death in 1858.¹

Whatever we say about Owen, whatever burning issues we raise about his ideas and agenda there is no question he had a reputation, indeed reputations, for an enormous variety of ideas and schemes in many contexts throughout Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, the USA, and even in Latin America. The continuing contemporary interest in Owen is reflected in ongoing scholarship and a continuous stream of publications revisiting and reassessing his remarkable  career.²

First, it can reasonably be claimed that Owen was most famous for New Lanark and, apart perhaps from his more dubious sobriquet, particularly in library catalogues, as the ‘Father of Socialism’ (to which we will come), or his association with infant schools, this was the greatest of his accomplishments. While there are major questions to be asked about what Owen actually achieved at New Lanark given that much was already in place from the regime of his father-in-law David Dale, there is no question that his twentyfive years there helped make him an international celebrity. He was director of one of the largest factories in the world and, more to the point in Scottish parlance, the laird of New Lanark. In fact, he was a great deal richer and more powerful than most lairds. Indeed, such was his fame within a few years of publishing A New View of Society (1813–16) that he was