Communitarian Connections: Josiah Warren, Robert Smith, and Peter Kaufmann

THE CONCEPT OF A UTOPIAN WORLD, an alternate world to the one ordinarily lived in, has been man's goal for centuries.Among the thousands seeking a perfect society in the nineteenth century were the three men to be discussed here: Josiah Warren, Robert Smith, and Peter Kaufmann.Smith joined the Shakers, Kaufmann joined the Harmonists (Rappites), and Warren participated in the Owenite debacle.The three knew each other well, and many of their letters have survived.Smith and Kaufmann were close friends for a time; Smith was godfather to Kaufmann's son Peter Robert.The two also worked together in Philadelphia in the early 1820s on the Labour for Labour scheme which was to reform the life of the working man.That they were unwittingly laying the groundwork for the later organization of labor was an unexpected bonus.However, the Labour for Labour scheme came directly from Josiah Warren's experiment with the Time Store in Cincinnati as correspondence between Smith and Warren shows.Josiah Warren is well-known to most Utopian scholars.He wrote several books about his schemes and was well-acquainted with most of the better-known reformers of his day.Born in Boston in 1798 of Puritan stock, he married at twenty and went off to make his fortune on the frontier in the 1820s.Cincinnati was the western frontier when he settled there, working as a music teacher and orchestra leader, a profession he continued when he joined Robert Owen's New Harmony in Indiana