If we look at this system as a whole, we find as the starting-point a criticism of existing social circumstances in a proletarian community. We find, further, as the basis upon which the system stands, the social philosophy of the eighteenth century. We see, as its demands, the overthrow of the capitalistic economy and the replacing of private production by communal operation. We find, finally, as the means for accomplishing this, as the roadway that leads to the object desired, the enlightenment of mankind. How he then exerted himself to carry out his plans in detail, how he created a New Lanark, and how his plans were entirely frustrated--all that interests us now as little as does the fact that Owen reached large practical results, in the shortening of the hours of labor and in the limitation of work by women and children, through improvement and amelioration of work in his manufactories, in which a new race began to rise in intellectual and moral freshness. Just so little are we interested in the fact that he is the father of English trade-union agitation. We would only look at his significance for the social movement, and this lies especially in the fact that he first, at least in outline, created that which since has become the proletarian ideal. For this point must be made clear to us, that all the germs of later socialism are contained in Owen's system. If I now, after having sketched the fundamental ideas of Owen's system, may attempt to condense the essence of the so-called utopian socialism into a few sentences, I would specify this as essential: Owen and the others are primarily socialists because their starting-point is proletarian criticism. They draw this immediately out of spheres in which capitalism asserts itself, out of the manufactory as Owen, out of the counting-house as Fourier. They are, further, socialists for this reason, not only that their starting-point is proletarian, but also because their object is socialistic in the sense that it would put joint enterprise in the place of private operation; that is, a new economic order which does not longer provide for private operation and the sharing of the profit between master and workman, but is based upon communal effort, without competition and without employer. But why, we ask ourselves, are they called socialistic utopists? And how are they to be distinguished from those theorists whom we shall learn to call scientific socialists? Owen, St. Simon, and Fourier are to be called utopists for the reason that they do not recognise the real factors of socialism; they are the true and legitimate children of the naïve and idealistic eighteenth century, which we, with right, call the century of intellectual enlightenment.