This text by the Welsh thinker and industrialist Robert Owen (1771-1859) is a radical proposal for socialist reform. Owen ran a mill based on socialist principles, guaranteed his workers’ jobs, and provided for their children’s education. He envisioned self-governing communities in which workers owned the means of production, essentials were distributed, and women had equal rights. This text is an 1821 a proposal for a cooperative based on these principles in Scotland. The most famous of his initiatives was New Harmony, a community established in Indiana in 1825. It survived only four years, but is regarded as a foundational experiment in the tradition of utopian socialism.

Indeed, Owen’s ideas inspired Jewish refugees from Nazi Vienna, who fled to Scotland in 1938 and established an intentional community to care for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in which the staff lived together with students, received no payment for their work, and distributed resources according to need. Their experiment far outlived the one at New Harmony. The first community, called Camphill Special School, grew into an international movement of over 130 Camphill and Camphill-inspired communities around the world. The mission to provide a shared sense of home for abled and disabled community members has sustained the movement for eighty years.