A deep faith in the tendency of small groups united by a common purpose to regulate their members’ conduct was the cornerstone of the Owenite communitarian Utopia. However many social problems might simply dissolve with greater production and a more just distribution, it was always felt that some regulation of human behaviour would still be required. But this small burden, it was argued, could be assumed by the community as a whole, without the need for complex institutional mechanisms. If this confidence were misplaced, however, laws and lawyers, judges and courts, prisons and armies would eventually render the new world little more than a pale imitation of the old, with only the name of ‘socialist’ to distinguish them. But if it were well founded, ‘government’ and ‘society’ would become synonymous, and natural order would supersede the artificial constraints of existing governments. Later forms of socialism inherited much of this moral optimism regarding the abolition of conflict, while tacitly shifting the context of its operation to the sphere of the nation-state. To Owenism, however, this combination of assumptions was contradictory. The community was central because only here was ‘community’ possible. Here family and sect alike extended to all, and mutual supervision and regulation would ensure that more alien and oppressive forms of social control would not be necessary.

Explaining how such natural principles of order operated was one of the chief aims of the new social science. Four aspects of this ideal of communitarian government will especially concern us here.