(Early) Robert Owen and the Transition Problem
One of my papers, “Synthetic Philosophy: A Restatement,” just got published on-line at Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoae018. It is dedicated to Dan Dennett’s memory (at the suggestion of Walter Veit). This paper is aimed at changing the (meta-philosophical) self-understanding of philosophy today and going forward. That’s pretty ambitious for me.
Today’s post continues my reflections (recall this post) on Robert Owen’s A New View of Society (1813-1816). In particular, with the help of my students I noticed something neat about Owen’s approach to the transition problem his proposals for change face. By this I mean the challenge of how to move from an unjust or otherwise bad status quo to an ideal or vastly improved polity and, in particular, with a population raised under bad institutions, that is, the status quo.
Now, initially at the start of A New View, Owen himself seems to restrict himself to 75% of the population of the British Isles (about fifteen million people) who are the “poor and working classes.” His view on their education and situation is very gloomy. And this matters because Owen is on the far end of the nurture is destiny side. In fact, for both categories of people the situation is dire:
You might suspect that Owen’s view of the top 25% of society (the aristocracy and middle classes) is much better. Because later in the first essay, he seems to appeal to their public spirit, “It will therefore be the essence of wisdom in the privileged class to co-operate sincerely and cordially with those who desire not to touch one iota of the supposed advantages which they now possess; and whose first and last wish is to increase the particular happiness of those classes, as well as the general happiness of society.” So, one might assume that Owen solves the transition problem by educating and training the poor and working classes with the help of the public-spirited social elites.
In fact, for that purpose in New Lanark (which is the model that is supposed to be emulated nationally), the children end up spending more time with suitably supplied and educated teachers in relatively closed (school) environments than at home with their parents. As Owen recognizes, the teachers themselves are part of the bottleneck in solving the transition problem, and so he proposes that older children (who have undergone some training and education) train and educat the younger ones. But that still leaves a kind of regress problem with the class of teachers and their supervisors drawn from the public spirited social elites.
The problem is that it is not self-evident Owen can count on such public spirit. First, because they themselves may lack the proper education in the truth. As Owen puts it (when discussing the upper classes), “It is indeed impossible that children in any situation can be correctly trained, until those who surround them from infancy shall be previously well instructed,” (third essay). Owen does address this first problem because in context he suggests that “servants,” who are drawn from the poor and working classes and who spend a lot of time instructing the wealthy young (“the character of children in all families is formed by the servants,”) could be previously trained in the truth and, thereby, convey it to the young.* And, second, because to help Owen in his aims would undermine the relative status of the wealthy in society.
So, where are we? If we allow Owen his assumption that there is a way to isolate the children of the poor and working classes from corrupting influences from the environment, he may be able to bootstrap his way into a self-sustaining situation where the vast majority of the population is educated in the proper principles, including even some children of the wealthy where the parents delegate the education of their children to others. But since he has to announce publicly his intentions and plans there will be many among the social elites who may resist this general course of education for Brittain.
As regular readers know, inspired by Serene Khader’s (2018) Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic, I came to see there are (at least) three species of the transition problem: the first version [A] turns on the challenge of finding or developing the right sort of people (with the right education or dispositions, etc.) to get us from here to there and then to have the skills and temperament to make the new circumstances work out well. The second version [B] is to create mechanisms such that the incentives of policymakers and social veto-powers line up with the goals to be pursued and the true interests of people/constituents and how to get from here (under bad institutions) to there (the institutions with the right mechanisms). The third version is a collective action problem [C] that a population raised under bad institutions may rationally prefer a bad status quo if getting to the better state involves high costs to them. Of course, in practice these three versions can be blended in various ways. (See my contribution to this symposium on a fine book by Scott Scheall.)
In A New View, much of Owen’s argument is focused on [A]. For Owen there are some people who are untrainable (about that some other time cause it’s interesting), but they are not prominent in the overall argument. Because Owen treats men as largely homogeneous and largely homogeneously trainable in the truth, he doesn’t confront many objections; Owen doesn’t really discern [C] and that’s partially because his views on gender and feminism are not especially sensitive.
Owen does, in fact, have an argument that addresses [B].** It’s worth emphasizing because often he writes as if he expects the truth to have automatic uptake or that the lack of uptake is simply due to ignorance. But from the first page, when he introduces the expected profit of his proposal, he actually appeals to the self-interest to what we may call the capitalist class throughout. It’s not elaborated however. The passage that is most explicit about the significance of it is worth quoting:
Imperfect, however, as these proceedings must yet be, in consequence of the formidable obstructions enumerated, they will yet appear, upon a full minute investigation by minds equal to the comprehension of such a system, to combine a greater degree of substantial comfort to the individuals employed in the manufactory, and of pecuniary profit to the proprietors, than has hitherto been found attainable. (Third essay.)
So, we can state that Owen’s proposal is meant to be incentive compatible to working poor and capitalist. The poor will be trained to become not just more ordered and happier, but also endlessly more productive and, therefore, themselves wealthier —because unit labor costs will go down and what they produce much cheaper and their expected income will also keep raising [recall that Owen expect that this will allow escape from the Malthusian trap] —, while simultaneously the proprietary class will make high returns on investment. (This is compatible with Smith’s economics although Smith expects that over time rate of profit should fall.) So, Owen expects the ascending capitalist class to be supportive of his reform program not from public spirit, but from ordinary self-interest.
That’s all I wanted to say. However, Owen himself recognizes that not all veto-players will be supportive. Crucially, among other pillars of the old-regime, the clergy of the national church are not bought off. So, even by his own lights he can’t feel too secure that he has solved the transition problem. Of course, when, shortly hereafter, he switches to socialism he raises whole new transition problems for his schemes.
*I thank my students for discussion, especially Davit Hovhannisyan.
**Among my students, Jenny Li deserves special credit for being alert to this argument.