Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

The Industrial Revolution offered promises of material abundance. In nineteenth century Britain, a series of major cooperative thinkers seized on these possibilities. In effect, they turned the mainstream economics of scarcity on its head and together shaped a humane social science. This book moves toward a reconstruction of nineteenth century British cooperative thought. The analysis is rich in insights still relevant to the present--insights concerning employment relations, persistent inequality, and low levels of human development.

Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?

This volume describes the various movements and thinkers who wanted social change without state intervention. It covers cases in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The first part discusses early egalitarian experiments and ideologies in Asia, Europe and the Islamic world, and then moves to early socialist thinkers in Britain, France, and Germany. The second part deals with the rise of the two main currents in socialist movements after 1848: anarchism in its multiple varieties, and Marxism. It also pays attention to organisational forms, including the International Working Men's Association (later called the First International); and it then follows the further development of anarchism and its 'proletarian' sibling, revolutionary syndicalism – its rise and decline from the 1870s until the 1940s on different continents. The volume concludes with critical essays on anarchist transnationalism and the recent revival of anarchism and syndicalism in several parts of the world.

Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in “science.” Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to “the New Man” inspired more searching for the path to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Arab socialism, African socialism. None worked, and some exacted a staggering human toll. Then, after two centuries of wishful thinking and bitter disappointment, socialism imploded in a fin de siècle drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes. It was an astonishing denouement but what followed was no less astonishing. After the hiatus of a couple of decades, new voices were raised, as if innocent of all that had come before, proposing to try it all over again. Joshua Muravchik traces the pursuit of this phantasm, presenting sketches of the thinkers and leaders who developed the theory, led it to power, and presided over its collapse, as well as those who are trying to revive it today. Heaven on Earth is a story filled with character and event while at the same time giving us an epic chronicle of a movement that tried to turn the world upside down—and for a time succeeded.

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the founder of British socialism, and one of the most influential reformers in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century. This book contains all Owen's key writings on the ideal community, socialism, religion, and the capitalist economic system.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and international debates on the theory of “labor money” or “labor notes.” These debates exist in a triangular context of market socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this book eschews Marx’s critique of “labor money” that limits the debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical relationships.