Robert Owen / New Harmony

In Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman situates Joseph Smith’s economic Zion within the wave of nineteenth-century communitarian and utopian experiments — and Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana is his lead comparison. Bushman notes that Joseph’s revelation calling for equality of property (“it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another: Wherefore the world lieth in sin”) “could be read as a criticism of the capitalist order more far-reaching than Robert Owen’s plans for New Harmony… which self-consciously aimed at creating a new moral order within industrial society,” or than the Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm. The framing places Joseph among a “large company of utopian community builders” — Bushman counts 137 communitarian experiments undertaken in the United States between 1787 and 1860, all seeking “to improve the world by forming miniature societies on ideal principles.”

Context: Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a Welsh industrialist and social reformer who founded New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825 as a secular cooperative community meant to model a more equitable industrial society; the experiment dissolved within a few years but remains an emblem of early-nineteenth-century utopian socialism.

Where this appears

• Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling — Bushman’s comparative frame for Joseph’s economic Zion, alongside Owen’s New Harmony, Brook Farm, and the 137 American communitarian experiments of 1787–1860.