Utopian and Scientific
The early English and Irish socialists have often been unfairly dismissed as emotional, unscientific thinkers.56 Owen, Thompson, and Wheeler exposed important inconsistencies within classical political economy.
Unlike Adam Smith, they refused to take the moral sentiments as a given, asking instead, how they were shaped by nature, culture, legal, and economic precedent.Unlike Malthus and Ricardo, they challenged the claim that workers could never earn more than a subsistence wage. Workers could demand a larger share of the honey they produced, whether by threatening a collective sting or by changing the very structure of the hive. Early communitarian experiments seldom yielded sweet results, but they revealed obstacles to cooperation that later efforts would seek to overcome.
Thompson and Wheeler developed an explicitly feminist socialism. They argued that men and women represented groups whose interests were sometimes at odds and that gender roles themselves required reform. Efforts to understand both the ideals of family obligation and the concept of collective interests tangled socialists and feminists together from the start. The knots and tangles would vary from place to place, and the tapestry, unfolding over time, would tell a complicated tale.