The powerfully unsettling challenges posed by the French Revolution to British society resulted in a veritable explosion of proposals for amelioration. These included constitutional and political reform to feminism, pleas for religious freedom, appeals for the rights of animals and colonized native peoples, and much else.Footnote ¹ Schemes for the reorganization of the property system, inspired in particular by republicanism and aimed primarily at mitigating inequality and the effects of luxury and refinement, were mooted in various quarters. More socially oriented reformers extended such principles into private life. Not uncommonly, they urged a “return to nature” and to “simplicity” by contrast to the artificiality and corruption of supposedly “civilised” society.Footnote ² At least in its first edition in 1793, the philosopher William Godwin's famous Enquiry Concerning Political Justice epitomized such aspirations.Footnote ³ Others, however, were moving in parallel directions. To Godwin's friend Dr. John Frank Newton, a member of an occult group led by the Platonist Thomas Taylor who regarded Plato as an orphic poet, such ideals entailed vegetarianism.Footnote ⁴ To Benjamin Franklin's acquaintance, the radical Thomas Bentley, they required disposing of everything “which was not indispensible with a bare existence,” which included burning his wife's best clothes.Footnote ⁵ By contrast to the emergence of a growing evangelical backlash against the libertinism of the preceding period, some also assumed that dramatic alterations in personal relations might be heralded by dawning events.Footnote ⁶ Another friend of Newton's and Godwin's, the freethinker James Lawrence, promoted a scheme of free love, female rule, and the protection of maternity based on purportedly South Asian practices representing the “system of nature.”Footnote ⁷ Most prominently, Godwin and his wife, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, also pushed toward experimental and deeply unconventional approaches to marriage and the family, and would pay dearly for their breach with conventional morality.Footnote ⁸

This essay considers one of the most singular individuals to grace the reformers' pantheon in this period. The career and ideas of “Walking” John Stewart, and his peculiar role in these explorations of social, as opposed to political, radicalism, have gone almost unnoticed. To his friend Thomas De Quincey (who wrote three essays on him), Stewart was, if “half-crazy,” “one of the lions” of London in his day and “in many respects, a more interesting man than any I have known.”Footnote ⁹ He is now, however, almost utterly forgotten, his works largely inaccessible, scattered not only across the globe but literally under the ground.Footnote ¹⁰ In Stewart, a radicalism of philosophic outlook and personal demeanor were combined in a manner that contemporaries found ridiculous and perplexing as well as grandiose and enchanting, in somewhat equal degrees. Some of his book titles—The Roll of a Tennis Ball through the Moral World, for instance—seemingly betray an erratic and perhaps slightly unhinged genius.

Yet Stewart's eccentricities have greatly overshadowed his more substantial significance for the history of ideas. His development indeed casts light on two phases of radical thought in this period. First, he illustrates during the 1790s a form of social radicalism in which a widely conceded utilitarian plea for minimizing pain and violence in society was carried, through an adaptation of Hindu and Buddhist principles, to an unusual philosophic and also personal extreme. For Stewart, we will see, was very much a man to live out his principles in practice. Here his role has been noted previously but inadequately explored. Second, Stewart can be interpreted as representing a crucial transitional phase between the more utopian republicanism of the 1790s and the communitarianism of the Welsh-born cotton-spinner turned philanthropist Robert Owen, from which British socialism would emerge between 1820 and 1850. Stewart, like Owen, came to conclude that small-scale townships of a Moravian or Shaker type, like those that had been successfully attempted in the American colonies and young United States, presented the ideal prototype of future social organization. Like Owen, Stewart wedded an antagonism to popular democracy and what he regarded as the excesses of the French Revolution to essentially utopian principles of personal association to create a new hybrid form of social radicalism. And, much more directly than Owen, he projected a radical approach to sexuality of a kind associated in this period with Godwin and Wollstonecraft, “free love” only appearing in socialism in a slightly later period. The curious eccentricities for which he has chiefly been remembered, then, should not obscure the interesting and hitherto completely unnoticed theoretical role he played in this transition.

“The only man of nature that ever appeared in the world” and “the first philosopher to restore man to reason, truth, and nature, without breaking the necessary clue of social order in religious mysteries”—to take only two of his characteristically bombastic self-descriptions, “Walking” John Stewart was born in London on 19 February 1747 of Scottish extraction, the son of a linen-draper.Footnote ¹¹ Enrolled at Harrow, where he was “the first player at every game, and the leader of every enterprise, such as robbing orchards, fighting the towns'-people, and riding jack-asses into London,” he moved on to Charter House at age twelve, where he was denounced by his teachers as “a dunce, or unlearned blockhead,” and expelled at the age of sixteen. He then went to India as a “writer” in the East India Company service with the aim of accumulating a fortune of £3,000 before returning home.Footnote ¹² His adventures here were the stuff of legend. Stewart published the first English-language account of Tibet, which was read before the Royal Society, of which he was a member, in 1777.Footnote ¹³ He left the company's employment (which he “despised”) after only two years, however, and became a general under the Mysore ruler Hyder Ally, one of Britain's great Indian enemies in the 1780s. Wounded several times, he was subsequently employed by Tippoo Saib, and only narrowly escaped being murdered by him. He then became the prime minister to the Nabob of Arcot, one of the great rulers of southern India and a key ally of the East India Company.Footnote ¹⁴ Sometime later, he traveled through Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Egypt, and Abyssinia, mastering, eventually, eight languages, always traveling by foot and unarmed, and eventually arriving in London dressed as an Armenian, with a long beard.Footnote ¹⁵ Pedestrian journeys followed in the Americas (where he reached Paraguay), Scotland, Lapland, Germany, Italy, and France, increasing Stewart's conviction that “human energy increases in the ratio of travels” and that “he who knows all nations must become the highest energy of intellect and manhood.”Footnote ¹⁶ Japan and China alone, of his chosen destinations, he could not penetrate, being refused admission as a foreigner. But he had certainly earned the title De Quincey later bestowed upon him, of being the first circumambulator of the globe.

Stewart believed that his extensive travels had “purified his mind from all the prejudices of instinct, custom, and opinion.”Footnote ¹⁷ As the best-traveled man of his epoch, he could—and did—claim to be its wisest, prompting even sympathizers to comment that his “conceit taxes comprehension.”Footnote ¹⁸ India and Britain, however, became the two poles defining his experience. India he regarded as having provided “the origin of all arts and science.”Footnote ¹⁹ But, for all his vaunted cosmopolitanism, Stewart never wavered from the opinion that Britain was “the only nation of thought and sense” and that her inhabitants were imbued with a “spirit of comradeship . . . that distinguishes the British peoples from all others.” A lengthy sojourn in Paris, where he met William Wordsworth in 1792, ended badly when Stewart lost two-thirds of his fortune (£4,000 earned in five years) by abandoning his property at the onset of the “mad revolution.”Footnote ²⁰ For a time, he was dependent upon the charity of a Southwark tradesman who had married his sister. When the Nabob of Arcot's debts were settled, however, he received £14,000, which when invested in annuities yielded £900 per annum. He went to America in 1791, the second year of the “era of intellectual existence,” when he traveled on to Canada, and again in the mid-1790s, when he apparently lectured in Philadelphia in 1796, and in New York. Here Stewart persuaded the noted deist Elihu Palmer to advertise some of his works, and he floated plans for a proposed daily newspaper in Palmer's journal, The Prospect.Footnote ²¹ An epitaph was left to Stewart inscribed in 1807 on a rock in the Hudson River, honoring the publication of his Opus Maximum, which Stewart described as the only “work, either ancient or modern, that deserves the character of genius, or authorship, in totality,” and “the most momentous revelation of moral and physical truth ever offered to mankind.”Footnote ²²

Returning to Britain early in 1800, Stewart proposed a set of lectures on “mental capacity,” a prospect derisorily dismissed by the budding reformer and fellow vegetarian Joseph Ritson.Footnote ²³ In London he now adopted a settled life. He rose daily at six and retired at eleven at night, and walked two hours before breakfast and three before dinner, usually among the cows in St. James's Park (where milk could be had fresh). Each walk was begun with his coat buttoned up, and it was slowly unbuttoned as he progressed and then rebuttoned gradually as he reached home. He often subsisted on one meal per day, drank nothing more stimulating than small beer, and abstained from coffee and tea, while indulging in the occasional warm mud bath. Though a vegetarian, living only on what De Quincey called the “Brahminical diet” of bread, milk, and fruit, he hosted many well-attended dinners and also held a daily conversazione, often in company with Thomas Taylor, another friend of Godwin and Wollstonecraft.Footnote ²⁴ Musical soirees, usually devoted to Handel, were added, always ending with the “Dead March in Saul,” the sign that guests should depart. He still made occasional excursions, once going to Edinburgh to ask the philosopher Dugald Stewart a question. In later years, he reduced such excursions to a daily “shuffling, slow perambulation” through the area of the Haymarket and Charing Cross, resting in a recess at the side of Westminster Bridge. Stewart wore a white hat, as well as a red handkerchief with a corner provocatively exposed, in the hope that strangers would enquire into his opinions. Six feet tall, “handsome and firm,” he became an oft-remarked sight on the streets of London. He irritated his insurance company by living twenty years too long, with the result that his annuities were paid nearly four times over.Footnote ²⁵ He died on Ash Wednesday, 20 February 1821, in his “Epicurean” apartments in Northumberland Street, Strand, hung with mirrors, with a profusion of candelabra to provide brilliant illumination, and decorated with Chinese paintings. At his death, he left £1000 to the University of Edinburgh. He never married, having “found it necessary to happiness to withdraw myself from all family connexions.” But he continued to indulge in “female dalliance” (possibly often again in St James's Park) until the age of sixty, when he concluded that “the discharge of semen at that age” was “the discharge of vitality.” Venereal disease he prevented by applying “a strong lotion of coarse soap” after intercourse.Footnote ²⁶ He ascribed his longevity to his diet, to dressing warmly at all times, avoiding drafts, and in all pleasures adopting the Epicurean maxim of “enduring lesser to avoid greater evils.” It took him thirty years to quit smoking, but here too he eventually triumphed.Footnote ²⁷ Only deafness in old age seems to have defeated him.

This extraordinary life was rendered still more interesting by Stewart's choice of friends. Initially there were few of these, for it was “not till many years of controversy that they left off laughing” when Stewart unveiled his first principles of matter.Footnote ²⁸ The heady effects of the French Revolution, however, unleashed conventional restraint and encouraged discussion on every topic. Ideas that might have been tedious or unacceptably eccentric a few years earlier now became fit subjects for speculation. Around 1791–92, Stewart, the “man of nature,” “the first to discover the perfectability of human nature,” became intimate with the most famous radical of the day, Thomas Paine. Both could be found “frequently lounging at the White Bear, Piccadilly,” where they lodged in 1791.Footnote ²⁹ Here Joseph Ritson, among others, called upon him, referring to Stewart as “Citizen Bruin.” But upon being presented with one of Stewart's pamphlets, described to him as “the first political production of the age,” Ritson resolved to have nothing more to do with him, and remarked that “he does not deserve the name of citizen.”Footnote ³⁰ Stewart's other acquaintances included John Horne Tooke, Joel Barlow, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin,Footnote ³¹ and nearly everyone else in the circle of London reformers active in the early 1790s. Scots such as John Oswald, another vegetarian who had also traveled through south Asia studying its religions, were also among his friends.Footnote ³² In the United States, he made a deep impression on Elihu Palmer, who recorded that Stewart's “enquiries into the nature of the human mind, the qualities of the material world, and the connections subsisting between the parts and the whole” had “never been equalled by any individual” in either ancient or modern times.Footnote ³³ “The most eloquent man . . . I have ever known,” according to De Quincey (echoing Wordsworth), Stewart was assuredly an entertaining raconteur, in part because, as an American friend remarked, his conversation had “less eccentricity than his writings.”Footnote ³⁴ But he was inordinately proud of the latter, inviting his friends, whom he typically addressed in letters as “Dear fellow part of our human integer, Nature,” to bury copies of some of his works in order to ensure that these survived the coming Apocalypse. Some readily complied.Footnote ³⁵

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Stewart's writings were certainly remarkable by any standard. His literary and philosophic output was summarized in the phrase “the Stewartonian philosophy, or unity of self and nature.”Footnote ³⁶ Critics would dismiss him as possessing “a mind filled with a strange medley of incomprehensible ideas, unlicked, shapeless.”Footnote ³⁷ Even sympathizers thought the “singular dullness” of his works rendered them “eminently unreadable.”Footnote ³⁸ Yet Stewart published, evidently nearly always at his own expense, a sequence of works from 1790 until about 1818 exploring many of the great philosophical issues of the day. His key doctrine was often described as “materialism,” but this did not correspond to that general denial of a “soul” that many associated with the idea. One theme was his focal point: the essential “unity of Self and Nature” through the constant “chemical” mutation of matter. The corollary of this was that moral actions provoked corresponding eternal reactions in the disposition of matter, or “infinite retribution of good or evil,” with good reproducing good, and evil, evil.Footnote ³⁹ Thus for Stewart all nature needed to be treated with tenderness out of mere self-interest, because the matter that formed human beings might mix with animals after death, and by mitigating the pain of animals human sufferings could also be reduced. Avoiding violence to animals was therefore a central element of Stewart's philosophy rather than a humanitarian afterthought.

In quasi-millennial terms, as if announcing a secular revelation, Stewart inaugurated the commencement of the “aera of intellectual existence” with his first main work, The Apocalypse of Nature wherein the Source of Moral Motion Is Discovered (1790), and dated both his subsequent books and humanity's prospects in general from its publication. Stewart's system described the progress of the only true course of human “perfectuability” (his term) from its current state to that of the “child of Nature.” This “improved system of the philosophy of materialism,” sometimes also called ontonomy, or the science of nature, was, Stewart claimed, indebted to Hume, Voltaire, Bolingbroke, and particularly Mirabeau. De Quincey also linked it to Spinoza.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its foundational belief, loosely termed the “transmutation of matter,” was that all sentient creation was interwoven through the constant reorganization of organic or atomic matter. The “great moral science of pain and pleasure” thus demonstrated that acts of good and evil reverberated throughout the Creation and produced like effects upon all forms of existence.Footnote ⁴¹ Matter, in this system, rather than merely being construed as dead or inert, was thoroughly moralized, and ethics was thus provided a physical as well as a metaphysical basis.

Seen from this viewpoint, Stewart claimed, personal identity was nothing more than

Despite the obvious loss of memory, then, pleasant or painful sensations were passed along by the dispersion of matter to millions of persons. All individuals had existed through all eternity, Stewart thought, “passing through the several stages of inanimate, vegetable, and animal states,” and suggesting that “some part of me was probably some part of Alexander.”Footnote ⁴³ “It is matter that feels and not form,” he wrote in 1808, adding that

According to Stewart, thus, atoms from the human body

The moral conclusion to be drawn was that

“Matter and its dispersed atoms travel with the mind, and, in the course of a few days or weeks, is dispersed over the whole face of the globe,” he wrote in 1810. In 1812, he estimated that the human body emitted half a pound of matter an hour that “must attach itself to millions of beings”; a year later, he reiterated that his discoveries in the “laws of chemical science” proved that “the matter of the human body is incessantly dispersed in life and death . . . to suffer the good or evil of its own previous agency.”Footnote ⁴⁷ With this knowledge, he thought, death lost all its terrors, for each would “live again in the multiplied life of his friends, his relatives, his countrymen, his species.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Given such a scheme, Stewart insisted that it was in the interest of each “to augment the good and diminish the evil of every subordinate stage of sensitive life into which it must circulate or transmute both in time and futurity with the loss of Memory or Personal Identity,” the implication being that some forms of pleasure and pain resulted from “the consequence of their own previous action.” Consequently, Stewart condemned slavery as an “atrocious crime” and contended that minimizing pain also meant opposing boxing, duelling, and cruelty to animals.Footnote ⁴⁹ All moral and religious systems, thus, were to be ranked by their opposition to violence against both animals and humans, and their attempts to minimize superstition.Footnote ⁵⁰

There was clearly a Hindu or Buddhist component in this conception of spiritualized utilitarianism, which reflects an idea of karma or a type of reincarnation.Footnote ⁵¹ Certainly Stewart did not claim originality for the idea, which he thought had been “discovered five thousand years ago by the Chinese” and “adopted by the Egyptians.”Footnote ⁵² He strongly admired many aspects of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, suggesting at one point that Asians had fewer wants and luxuries than did Europeans, and would soon advance beyond them in education, until finally “some Asiatic hero shall arrest its horrors, and restore the sinking and barbarized European world.”Footnote ⁵³ But Stewart's system, summarized as aiming “to effect the greatest possible good by the least possible evil,”Footnote ⁵⁴ could also be bent in a contemporary utilitarian direction, albeit with the loss of its mystical allure, utility being described by him as “the only possible measure or criterion of Truth or Good,” “the only standard of truth or good,” “the greatest possible good to the whole of sentient life . . . to effect the purpose of universal good by giving organism to human society.”Footnote ⁵⁵ His views have thus been linked to those of Helvétius in their promotion of a greatest happiness principle.Footnote ⁵⁶ There are echoes, too, of Hume, Priestley, and Bentham, and of Godwin's utilitarianism, here, though Stewart maintained that where Godwin had trodden tentatively he had himself gone much further (and started earlier, before Godwin's chief work had appeared).Footnote ⁵⁷

These were truths, nonetheless, which Stewart insisted only the few could discern. The multitude was better left to the ordered obligations of their superstitions. Stewart once wrote that he did not intend his “sacred revelation of reason” to “at all supersede or interfere with the dispensation of church mystery,” but he wished it rather to be treated as an “auxiliary to religion.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, friends noted that he disliked talking about religion “because he did not wish to shake the religious opinions of any person, considering they operated like law, as a restraint upon irregular passions.” In any case, he concluded that only philosophers became atheists anyway.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nonetheless, Stewart's principal claim to fame became, as De Quincey put it, that he was “as deliberate and resolute an Atheist as can ever have existed,” even if paradoxically he was a man “religious by temperament and the tendency of all his feelings” who clearly aimed to supplant religion with an ideal of humanization based upon a mixture of sympathy and self-love.Footnote ⁶⁰ His travels had confirmed to Stewart that in all countries “morality followed an inverse ratio of religion . . . where there was most religion there was least morality.” China thus expressed the extreme of religiosity and Britain, “where every gentleman is almost an Atheist” and “virtue is carried to its acme,” that of skepticism.Footnote ⁶¹ Taking Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding and its opposition to religious fanaticism as his starting point, Stewart's ideal of what the Analytical Review termed “mystical atheism”Footnote ⁶² was certainly understood as aiming to destroy religion by ending any hope or fear of reward or punishment in a future state.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, at the moment of the greatest ferment in radical ideas of the epoch, the journal commented in 1794 that Stewart sought to be “acknowledged as the founder of a new sect, without religion, without civil government, without private property, without domestic attachments.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Much of the controversy of the day focused of course upon demands for the extension of the suffrage by Paineite reformers, or radicals, and resistance to these by so-called loyalists. Here, despite his friendship with Paine, Stewart was, like Godwin, not a radical in the political sense of the term. At the outbreak of the Revolution, he admittedly rejoiced over France's “triumph over the most formidable enemy of humanity, abhorred and cruel priestcraft,” and noted that “mankind are coming of age, and breaking from the leading strings of priests and kings.” He also saw the democratic component of the British constitution as playing a key role in preventing the “influence of the Crown from establishing too great a disproportion between the interest of the country, and the interest of partial offices.”Footnote ⁶⁵ His limited enthusiasm for French developments waned quickly, however, as events seemingly propelled Britain, too, in a revolutionary direction. In 1794 he intervened, like Godwin, at the crucial moment of the trials for treason of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall by publishing several tracts highly critical of the “Jacobinical Reformers.” These were chiefly the leaders of the London Corresponding Society, notably Thelwall, whom he derided as “moral Aliens of the British temperament” and “philophagi,” or “friend-eaters.” Describing the existing crisis as “the contest of social existence” in which “the power of numbers” was pitted against “the power of property,” he urged his readers to avoid public assemblies and to discountenance “the inferior class of demagogues” as well as the “dangerous enthusiasm” of the Dissenters.Footnote ⁶⁶ He now condemned publishers of inflammatory handbills, while still recommending despotism for the “tyger-monkey nation,” France, albeit not the “popular despotism” of the Jacobins, or the “tyrannical, jealous, and vindictive” dictatorship of Robespierre.Footnote ⁶⁷

Stewart was now certainly perceived as seeking to “preserve his countrymen from the corruption of Jacobinical principles within, and from external invasion.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Around the same time, he recommended that liberty of the press be restricted to the Greek language alone.Footnote ⁶⁹ Napoleon did not impress him either, however; by 1810, he condemned “the universal empire of revolutionary police terror . . . constructed by the French, and put into the hands of a tyrant.”Footnote ⁷⁰ But neither did the prospect of plebeian rule in Britain, and Stewart warned that imitating the American constitution in Britain “would cause so much democracy and confusion, that property and personal liberty would both be endangered, till despotism came to its protection.”Footnote ⁷¹ The great danger to modern progress and social order, he thus proclaimed in 1812, was “the democracy of free countries,” where the “will of the people will always triumph over the reason of the people.”Footnote ⁷² In 1813, he termed democracy “the whirlpool of anarchy and despotism,” arguing that the exclusion of the propertyless from civil power was absolutely necessary.Footnote ⁷³ Later, he would have some correspondence with the Anti-Jacobin Review.Footnote ⁷⁴ But he also defended the Poor Laws as alone giving Britain “a right to the name of society” and worried that oppressive property owners would bring about their abolition.Footnote ⁷⁵ He several times also commended a radical reform in the revenue laws, urging “all taxes to be levied on opulence and competence, and not on industry and poverty,” with assessment commencing only on £500 of revenue for a married man, £300 for a single man, and increasing from 1 to 10 percent in the ratio of property.Footnote ⁷⁶ He also lamented that the effects of the division of labor, enforced by the oppressive avarice and policy of the rich, meant that the poor were “reduced thereby to a piece of mechanism, or mere animal state of existence.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Stewart, therefore, was not a political reactionary as such; he would later write that in “all countries where despotism reigns, thought can have no action, and, consequently, sympathy no power,” and he would condemn “the violence of despotic princes” as helping “to make life a state of perpetual anguish.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Stewart claimed that he had suspended rather than renounced his reforming principles, but he still insisted in 1794 that curtailing civil liberties, including freedom of the press, if needed to preserve the monarchy, was justified.Footnote ⁷⁹ He urged, however, that Britain and the powers confederated against France cease their war against her and adopt a wholly defensive strategy. They should, he thought, abandon such conquests as had been made to date, and form an army of propertied owners of an acre of land, a house, or goods worth £500, to protect the constitution.Footnote ⁸⁰ He hoped the French, in turn, would restore security of property and person, and “give power to the will of the majority,” warning that a failure to stop the war would result in “the dissolution of society over all Europe, and its consequent subjection to Asiatic tyrants.” Defending both luxury (as underpinning sensibility, and sensibility, philosophy) and the desire to accumulate property, he nonetheless insisted that at the present time “the most perfect community or nation is that in which property is most generally diffused.” He disputed with Paine the virtues of “cheap” American government, and he termed himself “the democrat of nature,” aiming at “the perfectability of manhood at its most elevated point, on the scale of intellect.”Footnote ⁸¹ Paine he derided in 1794 as “a very common Man, of but very common sense,” whose Common Sense had “seduced America to a disastrous separation from its parent stock” prematurely, and whose Rights of Man had “poisoned the minds of the plebeian inhabitants of great cities . . . by theoretic doctrines, calculated for the perfectability, and not the predicament of Civil Society.”Footnote ⁸²

Yet Stewart did not believe that democracy was impossible in principle. He thought it could function only where “Opinion and Interest assimilate the great mass of individuals,” as in Switzerland (despite its low level of intellectual achievement).Footnote ⁸³ Siding with Helvétius against Rousseau respecting “the necessity of civil discipline in limited and well-poised aristocracy and monarchy,” he argued that mixed government alone (with a preponderant power in the landed interest), not “popular or democratic governments” introduced by revolution, could ensure peace and tranquillity, assisted by a press that cultivated moral truth.Footnote ⁸⁴ Governments based upon “partial considerations of fluctuating and local profit,” where commerce predominated, he later wrote, were bound to tend less to public prosperity. By 1807, he had come to lament the “alarming progress of luxury” that had helped to subvert the landed interest.Footnote ⁸⁵ On any larger scale, he insisted, it always was and always would be “the great enemy of civil liberty.” In Britain, the aristocracy were “the life or heart of the body politic” so long as they were “controlled by the yeomanry, or great body of small proprietors.” Their political influence, Stewart insisted, responding to Sir Francis Burdett, William Cobbett, and others, had no need of reform, even if the “progress of luxury and vice among nobles and people” was worrisome.Footnote ⁸⁶ Here we might position Stewart among the republican critics of commerce whose trajectory has been most clearly charted by J. G. A. Pocock.Footnote ⁸⁷ In America, he thought, elective government would prevail as a consequence of the character of its revolution. But he insisted that the experiment defied the axiom that “republican principles ennoble the mind, and generate virtue.” To the contrary, Stewart anticipated Tocqueville in thinking that the Americans had sunk fast into “one uniform disposition of contracted selfishness and plebeian baseness of character.”Footnote ⁸⁸

But Stewart, no doubt regarding consistency as a virtue of the small-minded, stated at the same time that in moral philosophy—possibly as a result of his own influence—the Americans had made “more progress in the knowledge of man, than the European world has done in the whole epocha of human existence.”Footnote ⁸⁹ His views on the United States underwent substantial change in this period, in fact. Stewart dedicated his 1803 “stupendous Essay of intellectual energy,” the Opus Maximum (that appears only to have been published in the United States), to the Americans. He now praised in particular “the establishment of sects and new societies” and “the establishment of the society of perfectible life which has lately taken place in America,” noting that

Four-fifths of Americans in 1803, thought Stewart, were “in a state of true felicity.” And as the years advanced, so did his confidence in the new nation. In 1810 he still warned of the “alarming example of the defect of public virtue” in the United States. But in 1812 he described it, suitably protected by Britain, as the future “asylum of man, and the salvation of all nature.”Footnote ⁹¹

Stewart thus remained from the mid-1790s a staunch supporter of the British constitution as the best in principle, and he maintained that every virtuous man should be “a zealous Tory, to guard the constitution,”Footnote ⁹² pending a gradual education of the populace toward a new ideal. This apparent political conservatism was, however, increasingly combined with an explicitly utopian approach to social organization even before similar schemes inspired by Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice were broached.Footnote ⁹³ Though the land nationalization schemes of Thomas Spence had been circulating for some years, neither Spence, Godwin, Paine, nor any other prominent reformer in this period envisioned communitarianism of the type Stewart proposed as a more general model for future social development.Footnote ⁹⁴ Stewart thus represents the recasting of a non-Christian sectarian form of communitarian experimentation, doubtless inspired by Plato, Thomas More, and utopian republicanism, but equally by contemporary Christian communitarianism and its Anabaptist and other heretical precursors. These strands were in turn intermingled with his own peculiar schemes, and perhaps most interestingly, a pre-Godwinian hostility to monogamous marriage and separate families.Footnote ⁹⁵ A similar trajectory of these ideals would result in the establishment of British Owenite socialism in the 1820s. The remainder of this essay will assess this connection.

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Stewart's curious combination of ideas dates from an earlier period, however, than those of any other of the founders of socialism. It marks him as a pioneer on this path, if perhaps also a follower of some of the more extreme literary expressions of eighteenth-century utopian, Platonic, Spartan, or Morean republicanism, for instance, as expressed in James Burgh's Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government, and Police, of the Cessares, A People of South America (1764).Footnote ⁹⁶ Stewart early on fixed upon the small-scale community as his ideal type, and there are clear echoes of Thomas More evident here in his efforts to avoid the extremes of both the overly restrictive family and the unduly large township. Around 1791, in one of his first major works, the quasi-millenarian tract The Apocalypse of Nature,Footnote ⁹⁷ Stewart described his model grouping as a “cohabitation” of not greater than one hundred men and one hundred women. Here, he suggested, “they should live in one house, eat at the same table, participate in labour and pleasure in common, and cultivate a general volition as their guide.” Twenty such entities could be termed a community, twenty communities a province, twenty provinces a commonwealth, and twenty commonwealths a union, with twenty unions encompassing the world's population. In this state, Stewart happily proclaimed, “law would be liberty, wisdom virtue, and volition happiness.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Besides utopian republicanism and his own earlier experiences, Stewart's sojourns in the United States clearly helped inspire this scheme. After the turn of the century, he still warned that the French Revolution proved “the danger of reform in the constitutive power of society” and the persistent virtue of hereditary monarchy.Footnote ⁹⁹ But in America he visited or, more likely, heard about, various communities, notably of Moravians and Shakers, both of which would attract Robert Owen's attention slightly later.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These were doubtless the “sects and new societies” praised in the Opus Maximum.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Clearly, Stewart, again like Owen, was willing to overlook the religious practices or beliefs of these groups in favor of crediting their social achievements. Indeed, he remained suspicious of their religiosity, writing in 1803 that in “all the revolutions of mankind, religion has perpetually taken the lead” and that the “pious sectarians” of Moravians, Methodists, Quakers, and others had formed the “advanced phalanx, or covering party, behind which the unprincipled demagogues lead on the dissolute, the desperate, and ignorant rabble.”Footnote ¹⁰² Yet Stewart, like Rousseau, felt that only a small-scale society could represent the common will adequately and permit community of goods to be practiced. Thus, Stewart in 1803 proposed that the subjects of a monarch should not discuss politics, nor should their assemblies dictate policy to their monarch. He also suggested that

In Stewart's view, all societies needed to progress through seven stages: the savage, pastoral, agrestic (rural), scientific, civic, confederate, and perfectibility. He now daringly suggested that in “the progress of society towards perfectibility, the virtue of chastity would be brought into doubt by the oscillation of judgment, by establishing communities of persons in American settlements.” Similarly, he supposed the justice of private property had been “brought into doubt by the operations of judgment in establishing societies in a community of property,” such as the Quakers, Moravians, Pennsylvania Dunkards, and Shakers had practiced. Here he gave preference to the Dunkards, in particular, as retaining community of goods, unlike the Quakers, who had thus “left an open breach in their system, for the introduction and establishment of another God beside the Lord.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It seems doubtful that Stewart had more than a passing acquaintance with their practices, which he nowhere details as a reflection of personal contacts. He praised their reputed proximity to the primitive church and their opposition to violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The “moral democracy” of the Quakers he found particularly admirable (but curiously not their pacifism) by contrast to the “religious aristocracy” of the Methodists. Such sects, he thought, might limit the income of their members (to say £1,000 per annum), putting the rest into a common treasury with the aim of mutual prosperity and charity, noting that this was “perhaps as far as it would be prudent or possible to go, in the present mixed state of things.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

If political corruption resulted principally from inequality of property, then it was the primitive sectarians, not the votaries of Robespierre, who had solved the great problem of modern politics. Yet Stewart could hardly endorse the particular religious basis of these communities, even if, for the majority, he might have regarded such practices as necessary. He also does not seem to have anticipated a leading role for women of the type played, for example, by the Shaker leader “Mother” Ann Lee. And the sexual politics of the communal groups he admired was often greatly at variance with his own proposals; the Shakers, in particular, were noted for their complete sexual abstinence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He probably did not know of earlier more libertine moments in the history of the Moravian movement,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but he would rather have associated them with a much more puritanical approach to marriage and sexuality. In this sense, it would be the later “complex marriage” ideal of John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida community that would inherit Stewart's dispositions. We probably cannot ignore the possibility that the sexual aspects of Stewart's ideal were simply a projection of his own libertine erotic fantasies, perhaps in combination with some “Orientalist” themes of the sort developed by James Lawrence. Yet Stewart denigrated the “horrid customs all over Asia of imprisoning their females, torturing their parts of generation, to make them marriageable at the age of seven and eight, and mutilating their feet, as in China.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He also favored equal education for women “conducted in the same manner as male education, differing only in the locality of universities and professional sciences,” adding that “they should pursue the same studies as independent gentlemen.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

It was their size, attitude toward property, and sense of collective endeavor that thus rendered attractive the American “experimental” communities about which Stewart enthused. As with Owen, who commenced developing the principle as manager of the cotton-spinning mill at New Lanark from 1800 to 1824, one of these was also a manifest economy of scale. Around 1803, by which time Owen had begun to advertise his successes in these areas, Stewart suggested that the laboring classes “should be instructed, as to their domestic economy, to live in barracks, that their expenses might be diminished, and their comforts increased; they might be lodged, warmed, and fed at a cheaper rate than if they lived in a separate cottage.” In such societies, Stewart added, they “would meet with recreation and instruction, and have the convenience of being exonerated from the care of their children, which might all be left in the charge of a few old matrons, while the parents were all employed in their productive labours.”Footnote ¹¹¹ If successful, such communities might send deputies to a national council “and in this manner a central meeting might be formed from all parts of the world . . . which would not fail to draw all mankind into its vortex of perfectuability of thought and sense.”Footnote ¹¹² In 1803, at the same time that Owen was expounding upon similar themes, he also offered an extensive condemnation of “the evils of all civilized life.”Footnote ¹¹³ The chief of these was

This social radicalism became a leading theme in Stewart's later writings. We see here that Stewart substantially anticipated the language of the “social system” and “new moral world” that Owen would popularize. In 1808, well before Owen had begun to reject “competition” as such, Stewart argued that “every individual community and confederation of mankind must be organized in co-operation of humanization, and not the competition of civilization in the feuds and wars of local and selfish interest,” and contended again that individuals would be best associated in residences or barracks of about one hundred people each.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This scale of organization, considerably smaller than Owen's later recommended minimum of five hundred persons, he defended with the view that “thought and sense can alone develop themselves into virtue, through the medium of humanization, or a state of domestic society, consisting of such numbers as can enter into social conversation, or about a hundred persons of both sexes.” Here, most controversially, both wives and property were proposed to be in common, but this was to be combined with “a perfect equality of individual freedom.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Cities would be abandoned, and the “agrestic” peoples would reunite with the pastoral, a balance of urban and rural life again strikingly similar to Owen's famous 1817 “Plan” for the resettlement of the poor on the land. Stewart warned at various times of the dangers of luxury, voluptuousness, and the decline in health of urban dwellers, and he also contended that the peasantry had been much better off under feudalism than they were at present.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He remained, however, critical of the American constitution, and indeed any other attempt to implement what he now described as “impractical theories of personal liberty and equality in a state of society founded on the competition and security of unequal property and natural inequalities of mental and bodily force.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ These views may have been linked to the physician Charles Hall's vehement attack on civilization, competition, and inequality, which had been published five years earlier and whose key role in the formulation of a critique of commercial society and in the subsequent origins of socialism has long been recognized.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Hints of some of the Scottish Enlightenment's more ambivalent treatments of modernity, such as the work of Adam Ferguson, were also present. Stewart's hostility to the effects of individual family life, whose tyrannical results he assailed at length in 1813, also appears undiminished in this period.Footnote ¹²⁰ This in turn was linked to his search for the means of providing and sustaining a communal identity and promoting, in the Dissenting and Godwin-Owen vernacular, what was usually termed “universal benevolence.” In 1810, he hoped that a new system would produce

This system, he thought, could be created “through small fraternities of tribes, where all property, power, and will, being associated and subjected to the public will of the community” would “make one family of all mankind.”Footnote ¹²²

Two years later, too, he recommended that one

By 1813, Stewart had begun to proclaim that the highest state of social organization would involve a community of goods, overseen by a majority of the elders of the community.Footnote ¹²⁴

Echoes of Plato, Thomas More, and various Christian sectarians—and possibly also of some of the Spenceans—thus came increasingly to the fore in Stewart's writings, even if the scale, conception, and combination of details of his own peculiar heresy differed. Though no association of their proposals has ever been broached previously, Stewart in wedding these themes strikingly anticipated the development of Owen's ideas in the same period.Footnote ¹²⁵ Owen began publicly to pronounce his first principles in A New View of Society (1813–16). His much more dramatic 1817 “Plan” proposed to rehouse the urban poor in co-operative communities of from 500 to 1,500 people working the land and sharing the benefits thereof in common, and superseding the existing systems of poor relief, private property, and economic competition.Footnote ¹²⁶ He may have known Stewart, but it does not appear that the latter's perambulations ever took him to New Lanark.Footnote ¹²⁷ Besides their interests in social reform, both had an abiding concern with education, which both agreed should be simplified and combined with gymnastic exercises, though Stewart did not wish the plebeian classes to have more than a limited education, because he thought this would sap their obedience.Footnote ¹²⁸ Both mixed a Toryish, antirevolutionary practical political outlook with sympathies toward utopian social transformation—in Owen's case, and most likely Stewart's too—Godwinian pantisocracy (and both knew Godwin personally). Both were particularly struck with the structure, moral outlook, and inner workings of the Quakers, as well as the Shakers and other communitarian sects. Both were hostile to the existing marriage system, though Owen would not publicly disclose his objections to it for some years, and “free love” would not become a characteristically Owenite theme until the later 1830s.Footnote ¹²⁹ Stewart, like Owen, also opposed what he termed the “state of discordant and destructive competition” that was the basis of modern society, turning in this direction, as we have seen, a number of years before Owen.Footnote ¹³⁰

Yet the two also had significant differences of opinion. Stewart, who wished to defend freedom of the will, described as a “silly” and “imbecile doctrine” the foundation-stone of Owen's system, the theory of philosophical necessitarianism, or the idea, as Owen popularly described it, that human character was formed for rather than by the individual, by external circumstances, in other words, rather than voluntarily.Footnote ¹³¹ But he did engage to a degree with Owen and his followers in a work published in 1818, describing them as benevolent but ignorant, debating their interpretation of necessarianism and preferring a doctrine of “free human agency.” Warning that these errors would “do more mischief than the most malevolent designs of wicked fools,” Stewart lamented that “the benevolent Mr. Owen” had prematurely announced the end of the reign of religion.Footnote ¹³² It is not impossible that Owen's later adoption of the phrase “the new moral world,” describing his own utopia, was indebted to Stewart's repeated discussion of “the moral world,” and even that Owen's own materialism owed something as well to Stewart. The combination of community of goods with a system of government based upon age also strikingly anticipates the scheme Owen would settle on by 1817 and outline most clearly in The Book of the New Moral World (1836–44).Footnote ¹³³ Somewhat later, Robert Southey's ruminations on utopianism did link the two, if obliquely.Footnote ¹³⁴

These linkages remain obscure, however, given the continuing absence of stronger evidence associating the two. Owen was often less than transparent about the specific sources of his ideas, and he could have reached a position similar to Stewart's through an evaluation of the same communitarian experiments to which he was also deeply sympathetic, as well as from an extension of the New Lanark experiment to a larger scale. Given their mutual acquaintances, his knowledge of Stewart's proposals seems more likely than not. Yet what is most interesting about this relationship is the fact that Stewart reached a position very similar to Owen's quite independently, and earlier, than Owen himself. The trajectory of utopian republicanism in this period thus presented one outcome that both men embraced as a logical consequence of the developments of the era. That outcome was a regime of enhanced sociability, wedded to greater social equality and fundamental experimental innovations in gender, family, and sexual relations, tinged with quasi-millenarian moral expectation, by contrast with the growing individualism, inequality, and fragmentation of commercial society, and its ossified personal relationships.

■ ■ ■

Stewart's efforts to “wage war with God, in a jargon unintelligible to man” certainly did not go unnoticed.Footnote ¹³⁵ But critical reception of his works was mixed, to put it politely, though Stewart could not have cared less, terming reviewers “scientific blockheads.”Footnote ¹³⁶ A typical comment in the 1790s was that

The Literary Journal observed of Stewart's Opus Maximum that its author possessed the “happy knack of translating English into nonsense,” and noted that Stewart “strives to be the first of the new school of philosophers, the spawn of French deism and politics.”Footnote ¹³⁸ The Monthly Mirror described his Moral or Intellectual Last Will as “[m]ad, past all hopes from head-shaving, blistering, bleeding or hellebore.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Isaac Disraeli's anti-Jacobin novel Flim-Flams! or the Life and Errors of My Uncle and His Friends (1805) also satirized Stewart at length, portraying him as a “tall bronzed lean-bodied gentleman” who made “such amazing strides” that he seemed to be an inhabitant of Jupiter, and who possessed a contempt for both chairs and libraries.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ There does not seem to have been much appreciation of his views in radical circles during the 1790s or in the early years of the new century either. Radicalism (as it would become around 1820), many might have conceded, had enough problems with being tainted by association with sedition and “French principles” to embark upon wild metaphysical speculation of the sort Stewart most enjoyed, and the apparent personal eccentricity that seemingly accompanied it. In any case, Stewart's own politics were hardly plebeian.

It might be tempting, then, to dismiss Stewart as simply an idiosyncratic but marginal figure. This, however, would be mistaken. In an era of complex intellectual flux, he represents one of the more intriguing attempts to come to terms with the meaning and implications of the French Revolution's challenges to existing definitions of religion and polity, as well as emerging trends toward inequality in commercial society, a growing opposition to violence toward animals, an increasing experimentation in personal relations, and a search for the answers to many of these problems, as in the cases of Lawrence and Oswald, outside the boundaries of European thought. Stewart's ideas have been described as interesting because they present “an image, surprisingly free from literary influences, of the floating ideas of his time.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Yet his efforts to confront modernity are in fact considerably more illuminating than his scant reputation indicates. What has gone utterly unremarked, in particular, in the few brief accounts of Stewart, is the proximity of his intellectual course of development to Owen's between about 1800 and 1820. Both disliked the French Revolution and democracy generally; both were materialists, and vehemently anticlerical; and both had imbibed something of the spirit of pantisocracy, or “equal government of all,” which was intended by some Godwinians to be combined with “Aspheterism” (Coleridge's term), or the abolition of individual property. Both Stewart and Owen were friends with Godwin, and both settled upon a form of communitarianism modeled in particular upon sectarian émigrés to the United States as their ideal type of society, specifically in opposition to the growing inequality and oppression of the poor in commercial society. Stewart, thought De Quincey, had ultimately to be treated as a “sublime visionary.”Footnote ¹⁴² True; but his particular vision took him beyond Godwinian individualism and Spencean land nationalization toward the much more communitarian, secularist schemes of Owen and the Owenites that would be branded as “socialism” by the mid-1820s. His significance, then, lies at least partly in being a herald of the reawakening, adaptation, and secularization of the Christian communal impulse for large-scale social reform, which would principally assume an Owenite form in the coming decades.