"It happens that partial insights into the good and the evil of institutions create sects of reformers who seek to eradicate one institution by another. They would substitute civil society for the family and for the state. Communism or socialism undertakes to do this, and the failure of this view of the world is illustrated in a great variety of phases in the history of New Harmony, both in the experiment of the Rappites and in the longer and fuller experiment of Robert Owen and his successors. The Rappites, as pointed out by the author of this history, were religious communists. Rapp himself was prophet, priest, and king…The second form of community, that of Mr. Owen, which came to be established at New Harmony, was in some respects the opposite of the religious community that had preceded it." It was a civil society opposed to the family, the state and the church with strict regulations controlling the private lives of its citizens which "contradicted the ideal of the civil community, smothered individual initiative and arrested the training of the population into civil freedom." The citizens of Indiana suspected and opposed all measures proposed by Robert Dale Owen in the legislature, including the cause of public free schools. "This hostility of the people of Indiana to measures which were really greatly for the benefit of the whole State is a very interesting feature of this history…"
George B. Lockwood
(1905), 2006, CD-ROM, Graphic Images, Searchable, Adobe Acrobat v6, PC or Mac, 472 pp.
ISBN: 9780788427152
101-CD2715
