Hark! don’t you hear the Factory Bell? Of wit and learning’tis the knell!
Introduction
In 1833, the New England mill worker and schoolteacher Thomas Man published Picture of a Factory Village, a poetic indictment of the factory system as a new form of social tyranny.Footnote 1 The volume opens with a stark woodcut (Figure 1): a factory building looms, rigid and symmetrical, its tower crowned by a bell marked “ERECTED 1828.” Beneath it, a crowd of laborers rushes toward the door—men, women, and children alike. One is kicked forward by an overseer’s boot. The bell overhead tolls not just for work, but, as the caption warns, for the death of thought: “Of wit and learning ’tis the knell!” For Man, the factory bell did more than regulate labor—it foreclosed the moral and intellectual development of the human species. It was the sound of time alienated, of mental life subordinated to the demands of production. As an emblem of impersonal domination, the bell marks a historical rupture: the reorganization of society around an abstract compulsion—what Philadelphia’s shorter-hour reformer William Heighton called the “unjust abstraction”;Footnote 2 that is, a “tyrant capital” in “conflict with the natural rights of society.”Footnote 3
Figure 1. Image from Thomas Man, Picture of a Factory Village (Providence, 1833).
Over half a century earlier, Adam Smith had warned that the division of labor risked reducing the modern worker to being “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”Footnote 4 By the 1830s, such fears had hardened into social reality in northern cities. The permanence of wage labor, the volatility of unemployment, and the rise of economic dependence posed a novel crisis—what contemporaries called the “social question.”Footnote 5 On both sides of the Atlantic, it split the republican tradition from within, confronting political thinkers with a new challenge: how to reconcile the promise of liberty with the unfreedom of capitalist social relations.
The social question in America is often cast as a product of the Second Industrial Revolution—of Gilded Age monopolies, permanent class divides, and violent postwar strikes. But its conceptual roots reach deeper, into the unsettled terrain of the antebellum republic. This article turns to the antebellum period, when the first stirrings of industrialization unsettled older republican ideals. In the factories and workshops of New England and Philadelphia, reformers began to confront the corrosive effects of wage labor and destabilization of democratic life. Here, decades before the rise of the Gilded Age order, workingmen reimagined the meaning of freedom, debated the ends of republican government, and began to interrogate the social purpose of their collective labor. This new perspective was forged in a period of mass migration, when the presence of Fourierites, English Chartists, Owenites, and German socialists, among others, brought together concerns across the Atlantic world.Footnote 6
In the manufacturing centers of antebellum America, this conflict came to a head in the fight for the ten-hour workday. American reformers identified and diagnosed the problem as the “non-recognition and non-guarantee” of a fundamental right: “the right of labor.” Without it, they argued, all other rights became “to a very great extent unavailable and worthless.” In pamphlets, petitions, and polemics, labor reformers accused the law of siding with capital, perpetuating a “destructive war” of “capital against labor … and man against man.”Footnote 7 In the debates over the shorter working day, both laborers and employers faced each other with opposing claims before the law. Lowell’s workers asked, if labor is free, why should the employer dictate its limits? Why should the machine run past ten hours, against the will of those who tend it? Juridical solutions in antebellum America only deepened a growing suspicion among reformers that a “selfish legislation” could not guarantee the unity of the polity.Footnote 8 These labor reformers saw a civil society divided against itself, where a republic could not stand.
As pressure on domestic production in antebellum America gave rise to a dependent wage worker, debates across workingmen’s clubs, newspapers, and pamphlets displayed a growing anxiety over a novel “social tyranny” and the “tendencies of modern society to sink the masses in poverty and ignorance.”Footnote 9 But the social tyranny they identified bore a peculiar impersonal character. As Man put it, “the factory system … [fed] like a vampire from [the laborer’s] veins.” Even capitalists, as Karl Marx observed, who felt “satisfied and affirmed in their self-alienation,” were lulled by an illusory comfort, for they too moved at the mercy of capital’s command.Footnote 10 Boom–bust cycles, rapid innovation, and job precarity exposed the instability of the entire social order. These historically unprecedented changes put into question the long-standing belief that American workers would be spared the unhappy fate of their European counterparts—as Man noted, “Great Britain’s curse is now our own.”Footnote 11
What emerged by the mid-nineteenth century was a new kind of transatlantic politics—what I call a social-democratic politics—grounded in the recognition of a common social condition across national borders; that is, beyond the confines of a republican polity. Republicans who took a position on these questions, like the English Chartist George Julian Harney or the French socialist Louis Blanc, were often referred to as “Red Republicans,” “socialist-democrats,” or “democratic-socialists.”Footnote 12 Their aim was the creation of “a new social system,” or, as one radical Chartist wrote, a democracy “not only in government, but throughout every industrial department of society.”Footnote 13 To rein in the ungoverned transformation of social life, nineteenth-century social democrats demanded greater control over the conditions of production, arguing that the republic itself had been taken hostage by capital’s unchecked command. This emerging grammar of politics did not merely adapt republican ideals; it redefined freedom through the lens of social cooperation. Admittedly, this goal required the political empowerment of labor, which meant that the republic remained the political battlefield. The republic, in other words, remained the necessary means toward a newly specified end: social democracy.
Antebellum reformers were not simply extending the republican tradition, but actively reworking its conceptual foundations. Faced with the compulsion of industrial capitalism, they struggled to reconcile inherited ideals of liberty and political independence with the realities of wage labor and transformed social relations. In this context, republican language no longer served as a stable grammar of political meaning but became the terrain of ideological struggle. What emerged was a redefinition of freedom as the collective capacity to shape the conditions of social life. That conceptual movement is traced across the arc of this article: from the fractures within Jeffersonian thought to the shorter-hours petitions, the Owenite critique of social relations, and finally the contested emergence of the social republic. These were not isolated episodes but linked efforts to clarify the ends of republican government under novel conditions—and to repurpose the republic as a means toward democratic control over production itself.
The focus here is on the first half of the nineteenth century—before the revolutions that would convulse Europe, and before the American Civil War forced its own crisis of republican meaning. I examine how labor reformers in Philadelphia and New England articulated a new political consciousness in response to the unprecedented conditions of early industrialization. Shorter-hour advocates reached beyond republican thought into normative claims found in the “radical science” of political economy via an Owenite critique of society.Footnote 14 They then supplemented Owen’s apolitical approach to change with propositions by Chartists and Parisian radicals—namely the democratic control of production under a novel “social republic,” akin to what the French called the “république démocratique et sociale” in 1848.Footnote 15 Drawing from transatlantic currents, American reformers reconceived the republic as an instrument of social transformation—a means to extend the reach of political power into the sphere of social production and exchange, or what the associationist L. W. Ryckman called an “Industrial Revolutionary Government.”Footnote 16
This approach intervenes in recent historiographical trends that place nineteenth-century social reformers under the broad rubric of republicanism. Building on the work of Quentin Skinner, scholars have recentered liberty—as non-domination—as a core ideal in Anglo-American political thought, recovering its critical force in the face of arbitrary power.Footnote 17 This has brought renewed focus on the emancipatory potential within the republican tradition, especially in its critique of domination. However, such frameworks can obscure how reformers grappled not only with political tyranny but also with capitalism’s historically unprecedented transformation of social relations. To frame their concerns solely in terms of domination is to miss the deeper challenge they confronted: how to think about freedom under the new, impersonal compulsion of capital. As Bruno Leopold argues, the social question prompted conceptual innovation, not merely political adjustment.Footnote 18 Likewise, Alex Gourevitch shows how working-class thinkers transformed republican categories to articulate a vision of freedom grounded in collective agency and economic self-determination—a vision crystallized in the call for a “Cooperative Commonwealth.”Footnote 19 To read these figures simply as a continuation of the republican tradition is to miss the generative tension in their thought—their effort to carry liberal and republican ideals beyond their classical contours, toward a new politics of nineteenth-century social democracy.
Labor reformers redefined liberty in response to the new social relations and productive capacities. I treat the political imagination of antebellum labor reformers as dynamic, reinscribed through the struggle over the “meaning in use” of shared political values in a period of rapid social change.Footnote 20 Their politics did not unfold along a simple, linear path from republicanism to social democracy; rather, they reworked inherited concepts under strain, testing the limits of republican independence and expanding the conceptual terrain of social rights. Central concerns such as independence, the common good, and the rights of laboring citizens persisted, but their content and application transformed. Reformers reframed freedom as the fulfillment of the liberal promise of free association; that is, of the generative and open-ended productive capacities of the human species and its self-transformation—a positive sociability.Footnote 21 Theirs was a politics of transition—emergent, unstable, and generative—born in the shell of republican language but propelled beyond it by the force of new realities. This article positions itself within the history of political concepts, foregrounding the unstable space between continuity and rupture in which the early language of social democracy was forged.
The following sections trace a conceptual transformation: from the fault lines within early republican thought to the political innovations of labor reformers who pressed its language and institutions beyond inherited meanings.
The republican hypothesis: splits in republican politics
The modern American republic was founded on a vision of civil society bound by a common good. James Madison’s republicanism held that competing interests could be politically organized in ways that made conflict productive rather than divisive and destructive. The social equilibrium of the republic, he believed, should prevail over the pull of faction or class. Harmony, not domination, would characterize republican rule. Yet, from the outset, the scope and structure of the republic’s mediating power were debated.
Thomas Paine, a radical republican, argued that men retained the “natural right to land” as well as a share in socially generated property, which could be regulated to “serve the common good.” But like Madison, Paine also believed that unbounded commerce was “the greatest approach toward universal civilization,” contributing to political liberty because—as Joyce Appleby notes—it “served as a solvent of political authority based upon will or sovereignty.” In this view, property and commerce were not threats to the republic but its foundation: essential components of a dynamic civil society, and of the broader project of freedom.Footnote 22
This belief—that commercial society would act as an antidote to political tyranny—was soon put to the test. In 1806, during the Philadelphia Cordwainers conspiracy trial, journeymen shoemakers were prosecuted for organizing to regulate local pay rates. The case marked the first legal confrontation over the political legitimacy of labor combinations. The journeymen shoemakers taken to court by the city’s master artisans were accused of selfishly promoting their interests at the expense of the common good—a criminal act “injurious to the general welfare.”Footnote 23 For the prosecution, these workers represented a threat to the social fabric: a “pernicious combination,” which was “not only injurious to themselves, but mischievous to society.”Footnote 24 The journeymen, by contrast, defended collective organization as a form of democratic participation—one that ensured that their contributions were fairly valued. Yet for Jared Inersoll, the Federalist prosecutor, allowing workers to combine was the first step toward social collapse: “the whole community will be formed into hostile confederacies, the prelude and certain forerunners of bloodshed and civil war.”Footnote 25 In this formulation, organized labor threatened not just order but the very possibility of republican governance.
It would be tempting to cast this clash as a straightforward conflict between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans—a reprise of the Hamilton-versus-Jefferson divide. But such a reading obscures the deeper shifts underway. Even Jefferson came to see that the conditions underpinning his agrarian republican vision were dissolving. “How are circumstances changed!” he wrote in 1816. “Manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.” The republic he once imagined—anchored in a society of landed freeholders—now seemed inadequate to the demands of commercial production. Dependence on British manufacturing, he recognized, placed Americans under “the will of a foreign nation.” In response, Jefferson cautioned future reformers not to tie liberty too closely to any one social form, “since in so complicated a science as political economy, no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances.” Liberty, under these conditions, had assumed “a new form.”Footnote 26
These tensions played out again in the 1809 New York Cordwainers trial—this time not between rival parties, but among Jeffersonians. Prosecutor Thomas Addis Emmet, a renowned United Irish exile, faced off against fellow exile William Sampson, who defended the journeymen.Footnote 27 Both invoked the authority of political economy, but with opposing conclusions. Citing Adam Smith, Sampson argued that “the master tradesmen are in permanent conspiracy against the workmen.” This collusion, he explained, went unnoticed until workers organized in response. Only then did masters “sound the alarm, and spread the cry of treason and conspiracy.” Emmet, by contrast, asked whether combinations among journeymen were consistent with “sound political economy.” He insisted that masters acted “naturally” on behalf of humanity, while labor unions violated the common good. Sampson rebutted this logic as “an unnatural effort … to sustain monopoly on pretence of putting down monopoly.”Footnote 28 Each side claimed to speak for the republic.Footnote 29 Which side truly did?
The Cordwainers trials revealed a fracture within the shared language of republicanism itself. The deeper rupture was not simply between master artisans and journeymen (between “employers” and “workers”), or even between “bourgeois” and “plebeian” versions of republicanism. It was a clash, rather, over the meaning of the republic and the social subject it was built to serve. Each side claimed to defend the public good. Both claimed the mantle of Jeffersonian republicanism. In truth, their conflict marked the emergence of a new kind of social antagonism that republican institutions could not easily contain. As one leading reformer put it, the new society turned “each individual’s pursuit after happiness [into] one continual struggle against the happiness of all around him.”Footnote 30 Within that republic, was any citizen truly free?
By the 1820s, the same commercial society once envisioned by Paine and Smith as an emancipatory force was generating new crises. Despite the uneven and slow pace of American industrialization compared to Western Europe, antebellum society produced the fastest-growing economy in the world.Footnote 31 Commerce had presented opportunities for the extension of artisan production, but the revival of foreign trade after the War of 1812 led to falling commodity prices and to unstable social conditions. The volatility of boom-and-bust cycles and the devastating Panic of 1819, the first major financial crisis in the United States, exposed new forms of dependency and social risk. The novel and unsettling development of large-scale urban unemployment laid bare social inequalities that, until then, had been associated with European society.Footnote 32 While this economic depression was followed by a boom period starting in 1823, its gains did not reach many of the city’s journeymen and unskilled workers.Footnote 33 The next wave of crises—spanning the late 1820s to the Panics of 1837 and 1839—brought mass unemployment, financial collapse, and widespread disillusionment. These upheavals destabilized laborers’ faith in American exceptionalism.Footnote 34 It is in this period that innovations in social reform pushed against the limits of inherited republican ideas and transformed their content.
Throughout northeastern towns, radical artisans soured on greater commercial expansion, a course that seemed to advance the riches of a few at their expense. The reversal in outlook by labor reformers on the benefits of commerce marked a significant turning point, which is often overlooked in the stories of this period. After all, the leading voices of labor reform aligned themselves with Paine, who had been a full-throated liberal champion of commerce.Footnote 35 Deeply committed to the free and open development of human sociability, Paine opposed government limitations on commerce since the “mutual dependence and reciprocal interests” in civil society naturally progressed towards the common good. Like Adam Smith, Paine imagined that the “pacific system” of commercial cooperation, with nations working together for mutual prosperity, would eventually replace a world of wasteful imperial warfare.Footnote 36 Both expected that unleashing human sociability would result in a beneficial exchange of free labor within a peaceful global reciprocity. This was the promise of liberal association.
But by the late 1820s, such hopes seemed out of step with reality. The expansion of commerce and exponential increase in productive powers appeared to perpetuate monopoly, exclusion, and conflict. And it was no longer clear that the republic, as originally conceived, could serve the ends of liberty. New problems demanded new means. The common good would have to be redefined—and so too would the political order meant to sustain it. Society would have to be thought anew.
The shorter-hours movement and the radical science of labor
Workingmen experienced their social decline as an expulsion from the republican polity. They complained that increasing dependence on others led to a “weakening of the intellectual power.” With “avenues of knowledge … closed against them,” they were “condemned” to poverty, condemned to a “society of each other.”Footnote 37 In response to these historically unprecedented conditions, shorter-hour reformers offered a reinterpretation of the American Revolution. They reinscribed the purpose of the republic.Footnote 38 In the interpretation of this revolutionary history and the application of its lessons in practice, workers went beyond sociological distinctions rooted in their economic standing or insights born solely out of workers’ experience as producers. The development of labor politics required workers to participate in intellectual debate; that is, to become thinkers.Footnote 39
At Fourth of July celebrations in the Northeast, reformers revived eighteenth-century revolutionary idioms to justify demands for the ten-hour day. They argued for “citizenship time” as a fulfillment of the founding vision. “But what has the ten hour system to do with this day? Why, it is a part of the Declaration of Independence, ‘the pursuit of happiness.’”Footnote 40 Newspapers turned to Benjamin Franklin’s utopian projection of labor and leisure: “[I]f every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.”Footnote 41 Franklin imagined the perfectibility of the species through individual genius and collective flourishing—society freed from the shackles of necessity. Reformers regarded the advent of time-saving machinery and national-scale labor coordination as making Franklin’s four-hour day more plausible than ever. If anything, the ten-hour day seemed a modest demand. In an upset of that eighteenth-century vision, the manufacturing era belied this promise. Labor-saving technologies brought speed-ups and stretch-outs, intensifying and extending working hours. Reformers asked, “how can it be expected [laborers] will make any progress in learning while they are tied both mind and body to their work, until they almost become part of the machinery itself?”Footnote 42
To grasp the nature of this new unfreedom, labor reformers turned to the “radical social science” of political economy, and its critique by Owenite socialists.Footnote 43 Among them were William Thompson and John Gray, whose emphasis on social emancipation through economic reorganization found its way into American labor thought. At the center was Welsh reformer and textile magnate Robert Owen (Figure 2). Owen insisted that the factory system had outpaced the institutions of society, and a conscious reorganization of production was necessary to redirect otherwise wayward forces:
man is a being formed to be irresistibly controlled by external circumstances, and to be compelled to act according to the knowledge which these circumstances produce in him; that a knowledge of this fact will compel him to make himself acquainted with the nature of circumstances, so as to understand the effects which they will produce on human nature, and through the knowledge, compel him to govern all circumstances, within his control, for the benefit of his own and succeeding generations.Footnote 44
Figure 2. William Henry Brooke, Robert Owen (1834).
Owen’s critique centered on the “social being” of man—that is, on the social forms and practices necessary to reconstitute man’s individual well-being and that of the entire species.Footnote 45 To investigate man’s social nature, he turned to the science of the Third Estate; that is, to what Owenites referred to as the “social science of utility,” “the application of which becomes the art of social happiness.”Footnote 46 He asked, what principles organize labor, capital, and wealth? Do they direct man’s productive forces to serve the material needs of mankind? If not, what new principles could provide a more adequate direction to society’s potential? Though Owenite thinkers disagreed on solutions, they shared a point of departure: the historically specific, material existence of man.
In Owen’s view, political economists were unable to harness the dynamism of modern industry.Footnote 47 Proponents of low wages as a “solution” to social instability were as misguided as those who agreed with Malthus that overpopulation was the true culprit. Quite the opposite: since the French Revolution, the world had “passed a boundary never before reached in the history of man,” moving from scarcity to “permanent abundance.”Footnote 48 But legislators lagged behind the new productive forces, which “have been increased in Great Britain alone, since the days of Adam Smith, more than one hundred times.”Footnote 49 According to Owen, this progress had become self-contradictory. Man’s productive power had turned against him.Footnote 50 “Superabundance” reigned over man, rather than aiding in the satisfaction of his needs.
American labor circles eagerly debated Owenite ideas. Labor societies featured lectures that spanned from cooperation and physiology to philosophy and factory reform.Footnote 51 In the pages of the Voice of Industry, workers defended their “unreserved and undisputed right to think,” for which “[our forefathers] sacrificed every thing, even life itself.”Footnote 52 The principle of intellectual independence, valued as an end itself, drove laborers to attend lectures even after exhausting shifts.Footnote 53
Addressing Philadelphia’s journeymen in 1827, Owen warned that, in the prevailing system, machinery is in direct opposition to man. It could instead be brought in “to aid labor.” But under competition, machines become “tyrants.” They never tire, never grow hungry, and never falter—driving laborers to physical ruin. “You [Americans], in your insane course, are following close in [the] footsteps [of English workers].”Footnote 54 His warning resonated.
Like their Owenite counterparts, American reformers imagined that reducing working hours could increase social wealth, create employment, and serve the common good. While critical of contemporary political economy, they upheld Adam Smith’s vision of universal opulence and erred on the side of abundance over a critique of luxury.Footnote 55 For them, Smith’s followers had simply fallen below his insight.
Among the leading antebellum voices was William Heighton—English immigrant, editor of the Mechanics’ Free Press, and founder of the Mechanics Union (1827) and the first Workingmen’s Party (1828).Footnote 56 Heighton argued that commercial competition created a divided society, wherein technological advancement enriched employers but failed to liberate workers. Drawing from John Gray’s Lecture on Human Happiness (1825), Heighton declared that “the means of creating wealth sufficient to supply every individual … with the greatest abundance” were already at hand. He proposed a radical principle: as the speed of production increases, working hours should decrease in direct proportion:
instead of our having to labour as at present from ten to sixteen hours per day for a mere subsistence, [we have a right to expect] that, in exact proportion as scientific improvements and inventions increase, our labour may in the same proportion be diminished … until the development and progress of science has reduced human labour to its lowest term.Footnote 57
Gray had insisted that society’s “unnatural limit on production” arose not from exhausted resources or satisfied needs, but from a destructive compulsion—competition itself. “Abolish this … limit,” Gray wrote, “and everything that deserves the name of wealth shall instantly become accessible to all: for we should then have as much wealth as we have the POWER OF CREATING!!!”Footnote 58 Owenites argued that the potential for abundance already existed, but it was wasted. The challenge was harnessing it consciously.
The Owenite critique raised questions about the historical trajectory of private property: “Man,” Gray wrote, “is the natural proprietor of the produce of his own labour … if he is not, what foundation is there for any property at all?” The modern republic protected bourgeois property as the basis of liberty, yet, as Gray argued, “the institutions of society [were] wretchedly unfit for the purpose for which they are intended.”Footnote 59 Clearly, he insisted, “Their object is to promote the happiness of man; [and] their effect is to perpetuate his misery.” The expansion of the polity on the basis of bourgeois property ownership thus left the problem intact. Man, Gray observed, “becomes the universal foe to man, and triumphs in the fall of him whom nature tells him that he ought to love.” This self-contradictory course of mankind’s productive powers required “an entire change in the commercial arrangements of society,” not merely a broader distribution of property. Both employers and laborers, Owen argued, lived under restraints “not designed by any class or by any individuals.” They were the result of the combined activity of society, which subjected man’s productive capacities to a destructive compulsion. And while these conditions were the result of human activity—not divine punishment—they imposed a historical regression on the species.
While English Chartists rallied for parliamentary reform and the extension of suffrage—that is, for the inclusion of workingmen into the polity—Owen’s project was more sweeping. Political reformers, from the Owenite perspective, “are not radical enough,” failing to address “the causes of social evil” rooted in the social relations of capital.Footnote 60 Only through a system of global cooperation, Owen contended, could “society … enjoy the benefits of all … discoveries and improvements.”Footnote 61 This was the promise of association: a “unity of interests” grounded in the species’ transformative potential, in its capacity for collective becoming.Footnote 62 He envisioned social reorganization at a global scale.
One Chartist critic warned that to implement “Mr. Owen’s philanthropic views … before the working classes are politically emancipated, is only putting the cart before the horse, and will end in an abortion.”Footnote 63 Without the franchise, the critic argued, Owen’s proposals would remain utopian.Footnote 64 While leading Chartists dismissed his antipolitical stance, by the mid-nineteenth century a faction heeded Owen’s call for a total transformation of production and demanded to go beyond the Charter. Radical Chartists argued that the republic was necessary but insufficient. “Henceforth,” wrote George Julian Harney in 1846, “mere Chartism will not do, ultrademocracy, social as well as political, will be the object of our propaganda.”Footnote 65 The reason, Harney explained, was simple:
In demanding representative institutions, universal suffrage, freedom of the press, trial by jury, and the usual order of “Reforms,” advocated by mere political agitators, the people of Continental Europe were ignorant of the all-important fact that such “reforms” are utterly valueless, unless associated with such social changes as will enable the great body of the community to command the actual sovereignty of society.Footnote 66
Owen’s contributions and the debates around his proposals exposed the underlying disagreements among the English republicans and parliamentarians on the social question. After a period of defeat and state repression of the Chartist movement, Harney sought to redirect its energies through the language of “social democracy.”Footnote 67 The republic without the goal of social revolution would become self-contradictory; that is, a “despotism … only more odious because [it is] veiled under forms and names associated with Republicanism.”Footnote 68 In other words, the republic could go in one of two directions: it could suppress the underlying class war in defense of the political order—despotism—or it could function as a spearhead for the social revolution.
To his credit, Owen was not entirely ignorant of the obstacles standing in the way of his cooperative vision. Upon his return to England from the United States in 1828, he moved closer to working-class experiments. At the “Builders’ Parliament” in Manchester, he persuaded the 273 delegates in attendance to adopt a plan for a “Grand National Guild of Builders” that would take over the nation’s building industry from general contractors—a surprising proposal from someone long averse to conflict.Footnote 69 When cotton spinners’ union organizer John Doherty called for the creation of a “union of all trades,” Owen played a key role in founding the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (GNCTU), a compromise between Owenite and trade unionist aims, committed to freeing “the workingmen completely from the tyranny of the capitalists.”Footnote 70 Within the GNCTU, Owen sought to put his economic theories into practice, promoting cooperative “labor exchanges” where producers could bring their goods directly to market.Footnote 71 But, by 1834, a decisive split had formed: Owen clung to moral suasion, while Doherty and others pressed for political confrontation. In a statement published after the break, the GNCTU declared that, faced with the intransigence of capitalists who continued to defend institutions that no longer served society, “radical reforms in all things artificial [had] become indispensable after a certain period of time.”Footnote 72 They had come to believe that labor could not organize production cooperatively without first confronting capital politically. By the 1830s, American shorter-hour reformers had reached the same conclusion.
American reformers likewise sharpened the edge of Owen’s critique. While Owen emphasized harmony and cooperation between capitalists and laborers, Langton Byllesby rejected the notion that social change could be achieved without conflict. “History does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogatives.”Footnote 73 Social reform, in other words, required political confrontation.
But in clarifying the ends of liberty—not merely its protection from domination, but its realization through social association—Owen gave sharper definition to a political struggle already underway. When courts ruled against the ten-hour day, reformers returned to republican idioms, reviving the language of liberty and self-rule to denounce what they now saw as a new form of tyranny: the organized political power of capital itself. In their hands, Owen’s social vision transformed into a political demand. Cooperation, they insisted, would not emerge naturally; it had to be fought for. For shorter-hours reformers, the republic remained the necessary means, but its content—its institutional forms and democratic practices—had to be reimagined. Its legitimacy now hinged on its capacity to realize a positive promise: the unleashing of society’s transformative potential, a veritable regime of complete abundance.Footnote 74
The political obstacle: selfish legislation and civil war within the republic
Speaking not only as citizens, but also as rightful property owners of their labor, American workers demanding the legal restriction of the working day aimed to mitigate capital’s corrosive effects on social cooperation. Across New England meetings in the early 1830s, Boston carpenter and leading shorter-hours reformer Seth Luther called on the “producing classes” to recognize themselves as the source of “all the wealth” and asked why they “enjoy[ed] so small a portion of it themselves.” Luther noted that employers were “dependent on” workers “for the protection of that property, which,” he argued, “they have obtained from your bones, and sinews, and heart’s blood.”Footnote 75
Connecting the fate of American and English workers, Luther observed that the New England cotton mills imported the worst features of manufacturing English towns. “America’s ‘Manchester’” had implemented “a cruel system of exaction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes,” which benefited “those who produce nothing [but] who enjoy all … [and] exultingly claim [the laborers’] homage for themselves.” Luther had briefly worked for the mills, but it was as a Boston house carpenter that he helped found the Boston Trades’ Union (BTU) in 1834. The new union included carpenters, masons, and stonecutters, who made up most of the construction industry. Luther traveled to deliver his Address to the Working Men of New England from Boston to Portland and authored the BTU’s Ten-Hour Circular, published and widely distributed in 1835. He believed that a class confrontation between labor and capital was necessary because capital, “which can only be made productive by labor, is endeavoring to crush labor, the only source of all wealth.”Footnote 76
Harking back to the conspiracy trials against labor combinations, Luther pointed out that the organization of citizens for the purposes of extinguishing fires, or protecting their loved ones from danger, were deemed legal and legitimate, “But if poor men ask Justice, it is a most horrible combination.”Footnote 77 What this accusation against labor combinations conveniently overlooked, he argued, was that “[t]he Declaration of Independence was the work of a combination, and was as hateful to the traitors and Tories of those days as combinations among working men are now to the avaricious monopolist and purse proud aristocrat.”Footnote 78 Luther returned to the language of radical republicanism in his calls for political action. He warned American laborers that without their self-organization, there was little hope to overcome the obstacle of social tyranny. If social cooperation had a future, laborers would first have to use the reins of the republic and wage a political battle against capital.
After the Panic of 1837 halted labor’s momentum, a renewed campaign emerged in the early 1840s focused on legislation.Footnote 79 Workers targeted the state’s defense of manufacturing property, noting how officials granted mill owners access to land and water to expand production, but refused to limit factory operations even after ten hours of labor.Footnote 80 Legislators claimed that they had no “business with private mill property or any private property,” a position that workers challenged directly in their petition drives for the shorter working day. As they saw it, the state could allocate public resources for railroad companies and private mills “under the pretense that ‘the public good demands it,’” but “when the laborers ask the same power to remedy an evil which is gendering oppression, disease and poverty, and increasing vice and crime in the community,” when they asked that the law protect their sole property—their labor—the Legislature chose to protect the rights of employers instead. The “public good,” it seemed, had been redefined to serve capital.Footnote 81
The first petitions in Massachusetts were organized by operatives in Fall River and other small mill towns in 1842.Footnote 82 The petition drive gained momentum in late 1844 and early 1845, when a great number of women laborers took leadership of the campaign.Footnote 83 In Lowell, Sarah Bagley and the New England Female Labor Reform Association organized mass petition drives beginning in 1844,Footnote 84 building on earlier efforts from Fall River and smaller towns.Footnote 85 Bagley, also the first female editor of the influential Voice of Industry, became a central figure in the campaign.Footnote 86
Their 1845 petitions laid the terms bare: there was a “disparity between Capital and Labor … the latter [was] almost entirely within the control of the former,” and “thereby subject[ed] the honest laborer to the will of the capitalist.” Workers called on the legislature to “forbid the running of machinery … more than ten hours per day,” echoing Owenite arguments that machines should serve labor, not dominate it. Workers justified this measure by citing the introduction of “special contracts” by employers, a legal loophole that allowed them to hire a “special” reserve of operatives who could labor more than the rest. Only by shutting down the machines could the ten-hour day be guaranteed.Footnote 87
The legislature refused. In their responses, officials echoed the discussion over the English Factory Acts when they explained to petitioners that without such capital advantages, laborers could experience a closing of “every mill in the State.”Footnote 88 They argued that compelling the factories in Massachusetts to run their machinery for only ten hours, “while those in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and other States in the Union, were not restricted at all,” would be “the same as closing our mills one day in every week.”Footnote 89 Though corporations were technically “creatures of law, and in most cases even in terms, they are made subject to future enactment and control,” the state maintained that labor contracts—not public regulation—should determine work hours.Footnote 90 The broader question—whether labor–capital relations served society—was excluded from debate.
Reformers were outraged. Lawmakers defended labor’s subordination by insisting that labor was in “an equality with capital, and indeed control[ed] it.”Footnote 91 As one petitioner asked, “If labor controls capital, how can capital abuse labor?” Bagley dismissed this as the logic of “Corporation Machinery.”Footnote 92 Others demanded that working people elect their own representatives.
The republic showed its fault lines. Was there one republic or two—a republic of capital and a republic of labor? One operative observed, “Property, life and character, are in the hands of the law,” but the law itself was “in the hands of the rich.”Footnote 93 The conflict was peculiar. Factory owners, after all, were merely asking the courts to uphold existing law—the same law that protected their property rights. But as Owenites had already shown, the institution of property itself had become self-contradictory. In a class society, the rights of labor and the rights of capital stood opposed. The republic, as Marx later described it, was where the workingmen would have “to win the battle of democracy.”Footnote 94 Reformers concluded, simply, “Labor should control capital.”Footnote 95
By demanding democratic control over capital, northern reformers aligned themselves with a wider transatlantic reckoning over the social question. These currents were embodied by immigrants like John Cluer, a former Chartist and Lancashire weaver who settled in Lowell in 1844 and became an instrumental figure in the ten-hours movement. For Cluer, American capitalism imposed a new kind of bondage—“commercial feudalism.”Footnote 96 The path to freedom, he believed, lay in political confrontation.
Cluer, a teetotaler Chartist, arrived with copies of the Northern Star and letters from English workers. Alongside Bagley, he traveled throughout New England promoting shorter hours and organizing local workers’ groups.Footnote 97 Cluer’s most important contribution to American labor reform was his strategy for a “Second Independence Day”; that is, a “general turn out”—or general strike—by workers across industries and throughout the nation. In a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, he urged workers to stand “against the great system of organized capital.” In closing, he denounced the “evils of factory labor, as it exist[ed]” for “subvert[ing] the [nation’s] republican institutions,” and proposed the following resolution: “RESOLVED … the Fourth of July 1846, shall be the day fixed upon by the operatives of America, to declare their INDEPENDENCE of the oppressive Manufacturing power … provided the manufacturers shall practically signify an unwillingness to mutually adopt the Ten Hour System.”Footnote 98
Cluer’s strategy drew directly on William Benbow’s “National Holiday,” a general strike envisioned as a lever for seizing democratic control over the nation’s government and resources.Footnote 99 Benbow, a London Chartist, had adapted the Comte de Volney’s critique of a “society against itself,” fusing it with Paine’s vision of popular liberty and the right of rebellion.Footnote 100 Volney had found that “all the political vices and disorders that prevail” originated in the conflict between “men who do nothing, and who devour the substance of others; and men who arrogate to themselves particular rights and exclusive privileges of wealth and indolence.” “The people,” Benbow argued, faced the “indolent classes” as a “nation apart.”Footnote 101 His proposal was a call to action—a plan to seize the reins of the republic and bring anarchic production under democratic command.Footnote 102
In the split among the London reformers, the radical Chartist George Julian Harney had aligned himself with Benbow, convinced that only a general strike could redirect the course of political leadership.Footnote 103 After introducing their proposal at the Chartist Convention of 1839, Harney and Benbow toured the country to rally support for the Grand National Holiday—only to be arrested and charged with sedition.Footnote 104 Cluer’s call in America was, in essence, a renewed attempt to put that strategy into motion.
His three-part plan reflected both transatlantic inheritance and local adaptation. First, he called for a convention bringing together employers and laborers across all industries to negotiate new working terms. If this failed, reformers would turn to legislative intervention. And if the law proved ineffective or unwilling, the final recourse would be a nationwide general strike to place workingmen in command of their social conditions. Cluer’s approach, grounded in republican ideals and sharpened by industrial pressures, anticipated what French workers would soon call the république démocratique et sociale, the democratic and social republic.Footnote 105 Across the Atlantic, Harney—now editor of the Red Republican—embraced this same vision (Figure 3). In March 1848, electrified by the revolutions on the Continent, he traveled to Paris to meet members of the Provisional Government.Footnote 106
Figure 3. Red Republican, no. 1, 22 June 1850.
Cluer’s renewed independence movement reclaimed the legacy of the republic for the purposes of the social revolution. Other reformers had arrived at similar conclusions. At the 1845 convention of the New England Workingmen’s Association, its president, the American Fourierist and associationist L. W. Ryckman, introduced a resolution to “organize as promptly as possible, a permanent Industrial Revolutionary Government,” modeled “upon … the confederation of the States in 1776.” Ryckman referred to the eighteenth-century affiliation of the independent North American states set up by the Articles of Confederation; that is, before the ratification of the new Constitution in 1789. It was an attempt to go back, in a Lockean fashion, to the moment when government was being instituted. This Labor Confederation
shall be pledged, to direct the legal political action of the workingmen so as to destroy the hostile relations that at present prevail between capital and labor, and to secure to all the citizens without exception a full and complete development of their faculties by a thorough education, physical, mental, and moral, and the practical enjoyment of the only inherent and inalienable right of man—the right to labor.Footnote 107
The Labor Confederation would target unemployment through reorganizing production relations, breaking up what the Lowell Convention called “monopolized machinery,” or “machinery in the hands of a few, which works against the producing classes instead of working for them.”Footnote 108 Notably, this “revolution in Industry” did not call for a mediating body of capitalists and laborers under an existing republican government; rather, Ryckman’s “Industrial Revolutionary Government” placed laborers at the helm of a new state, one that would abolish class domination altogether. Only “a complete union among the worthy toilers and spinners” in “a concert of action” would generate “the great tide of reformation” towards a truly emancipated future, a “freedom for all!”Footnote 109
In the decade that followed, the ten-hour system became part of the party platforms of both Democrats and Whigs. But work by David Zonderman and Bruce Laurie on labor reform in Massachusetts has shown how the shift to supporting pro-shorter-hours candidates in the 1850s increased the influence of professional politicians, moving the conversation away from working people’s circles. This outcome had been foreseen by the laborers who assembled in Boston’s Faneuil Hall in May of 1848 to “congratulate each other on the late auspicious events in Europe” and “express their views in relation to reform in [their] own country.” The meeting adopted resolutions urging workers to use their organized force to clear “the halls of legislation of the hirelings who basely pander to the interest of capital” and “try for once the experiment of trusting the management of their political affairs to men of their own class, who know their interests.”Footnote 110
They had glimpsed a new kind of republic—one governed not by capital, but by labor itself.
Conclusion: beyond the republic
As revolutions rippled across Europe and labor unrest spread in the United States, the 1840s exposed the fault lines within the modern republic—between its promises of liberty and the realities of wage labor. By the mid-nineteenth century, the crisis of capital had become global. From Philadelphia to Manchester to Paris, shorter-hours reformers, Owenite socialists, and radical republicans alike confronted the erosion of liberal association under the new social relations of capital. The old grammar of political rights strained beneath the weight of a new social unfreedom.
In France, the social question reached center stage during the upheavals of 1848. When the workingmen of Paris demanded shorter hours and full employment, they brought the contradictions of the new republic into stark relief. In February 1848, Parisian citizens provoked a wave of Continental revolutions when they deposed the Orléans monarchy and founded the French Second Republic. The new experiment was at risk from the outset: on the morning of 25 February, a delegation of workers, with a mass of armed citizens on their side, forced open the doors of the Hôtel de Ville to demand the right to work.Footnote 111 A laborer—known to us only as the machine mechanic “Marche”—pounded his rifle on the floor while chanting “le droit du travail” and delivered the following proclamation: “Citizens, the organization of work, the right to work in an hour! Such is the will of the people. It awaits!” Visibly shaken by the confrontation, Adolphe Lamartine—the republican head of the Provisional Government—began to object in rhetorical flourishes, only to be cut off by a worker’s pointed rejoinder: “No more poetry!” Louis Blanc, the resident socialist in the Provisional Government, interjected with a promise that in the coming months the state would decree the right to work. But Blanc pleaded for patience, given the enormous task that lay ahead. It was only with this tentative promise that the democratic government was able to carry on with its duties.Footnote 112 Such was the dissonant arrival of the democratic republic in 1848 Paris, a harbinger of the months that followed, when the demands for the social republic further divided the nation’s leaders.
On 2 March 1848, French workers secured the reduction of the working day—to eleven hours in Paris and twelve hours in the provinces. In their shorter-hours petition to the government, we find a familiar interpretation of freedom. Rennes railway workers declared, “an hour for us, is enormous; it is life, it is liberty, it is study and the development of the intelligence.”Footnote 113 However, within American northern reform circles, the revolt by working people in Paris during the bloody June Days of 1848 raised difficult questions about the contest between the “political revolution” and what the American Fourierist Charles Dana now called the new and different “social revolution,” aiming “to destroy the moneyed feudalism and lay the foundations of social liberty.”Footnote 114
Social revolution erupted in Paris not because the republic failed to arrive, but because its arrival revealed its limits. It was Karl Marx, writing amid the upheaval, who became the theorist of this rupture. His account of the split between the democratic and social republic captured a central contradiction of bourgeois society: that political democracy could expand—even extending the vote to workingmen—while the domination of capital was simultaneously reconstituted through the social relations of a formally free people. This was the non-identity that Marx exposed: that political emancipation, pursued in isolation, could ultimately reinforce the very unfreedom it claimed to abolish. The United States provided a stark example. Here, the expansion of suffrage for white workingmen coincided with the rapid consolidation of manufacturing capital. The political forms of republican democracy, in other words, appeared increasingly as the expression of one side of a divided society. As Harney warned in 1850,
A social revolution in America is a necessary complement to the political revolution of ’76. Should not such revolution or reformation come to pass, the future of America cannot fail to be a copy of Europe at the present time—the community divided into two great classes: a horde of brigands monopolizing all the advantages of society, and a multitude of landless, profit-ridden slaves, deprived of even the name of citizens.Footnote 115
The contradiction Marx diagnosed—the deepening of democratic forms alongside the intensification of capitalist domination—was not confined to Europe. It echoed across the Atlantic world. In industrializing cities, from New England to Lancashire, social reformers encountered the same rift between liberty and social dependence. The social question was posed in different idioms but with the same stakes. In England and the United States, as in France, the call for social freedom increasingly demanded a confrontation with capital.
The history of American social reform thus unfolded along a similar trajectory to pre-Marxian socialism in England and emerging social-democratic politics in France. In 1840s England, the ideas of neo-Jacobin republicans and utopian socialists of the Owenite variety had found a new political synthesis in radical Chartists like Bronterre O’Brien, editor of The Poor Man’s Guardian, ally of both Harney and Benbow.Footnote 116 O’Brien saw Owenite socialism as giving the working class the aspiration that they should “be at the top instead of at the bottom of society—or, rather that there should be no bottom at all.”Footnote 117 He translated and published Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (1836), arguing that because the American and French revolutions had left the “institutions of property” intact as “germs of social evil to ripen in the womb of time,” the great democratic gains had been subverted by counterrevolution from “within and without.”Footnote 118 He argued, echoing Harney, that the next revolution had to be social as well as political.
Louis Blanc represented a similar synthesis—albeit a less revolutionary variation. His vision united the social-utopian ideas of Owen, Fourier, and Cabet and the radical republican politics of Babeuf. Blanc’s Organization of Labor (1839) offered a blueprint for the social republic. He envisioned a transformed state—a “supreme regulator of production … invested with great strength”—that would act “so that competition should be destroyed.” The government, as “founder of the social factories,” must also “provide them with laws.” In this vision, the state would legislate mutual cooperation: “In our system, the State would by degrees render itself master of all industry, and instead of monopoly, the result of our success would be competition defeated, and—association.”Footnote 119
In France, the social republic carried a dual meaning. It was both the highest expression of democratic sovereignty and the means to eliminate class divisions through democratic control of production. In the United States, where republican institutions were already established, the legal architecture of the republic reinforced capitalist social relations. Yet reformers did not discard the republic; they insisted on its unrealized promises. Republican law had guaranteed political liberty by disciplining labor on behalf of capital. The task, as they saw it, was not to abandon the republic, but to take its reins so that it could serve a higher purpose than the protection of bourgeois property. Some, like L. W. Ryckman, sought to reclaim the revolutionary legacy of 1776 itself. Imagining a confederation of labor modeled on the founding political union, Ryckman and his allies proposed an industrial reorganization that would abolish the antagonism between labor and capital and place production under democratic control. In this vision, laborers would no longer petition the state—they would lead it.
Nineteenth-century social-democratic reformers demanded that working people take responsibility for their productive capacity so that cooperation could serve the common good. Society was already in the process of self-transformation—that much they understood and accepted. The task they undertook was to direct this change consciously. Across these contexts, the challenge was not merely to preserve the republic, but to reclaim and deploy its power toward a novel social emancipation. Social-democratic reformers did not seek a redistribution of property within existing republican forms; they argued that what was needed was a new basis of association—cooperative, collective, and directed toward the full development of human capacities, what the early twentieth-century socialists called an “industrial democracy.” This is what gave their vision its radical charge: they saw in the creative potential of society the possibility of forging a new nature—a positive sociability anchored in the transformative potential of the human species.
This was the original task of “socialist democracy,” as Harney called it: to wrest the republic from its captivity to capital, reforge it in the name of labor, and—in the shared work of transformation—crack open the shell of the old world to make space for the new. In this sense, social democracy did not seek to perfect the republic; it pointed beyond it—toward political forms not yet born, and toward a vision of freedom rooted in our shared capacities to “begin the world over again.”Footnote 120
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Thomas Bender, Efraim Carlebach, Paul Cheney, Jeannette Estruth, Andreas Fahrmeir, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Stefanos Geroulanos, Alex Gourevitch, Steven Hahn, Laurent Jeanpierre, Jonathan Levy, Andrew Needham, Gisèle Sapiro, Andrew Sartori, Nathan L. Smith, James Vaughn, and David Zonderman for the insightful comments and conversations which have helped her to develop this work. Earlier drafts have benefited from the engagement of participants at the Political Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago; the Global Nineteenth Century Workshop at New York University; the Global History Conference at Freie Universität; the History Research Seminar at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main; the Crossroads of Intellectual History conferences at both the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, New York University, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
