Kerschagl’s essay argues that Robert Owen did not simply supersede Daniel Defoe but belatedly completed social-economic ideas Defoe had announced under less favorable conditions. Its opening claim frames the comparison:
daß Owen mehr als hundert Jahre später ähnliche Gedanken wie Defoe gehegt und zum Teil auch verwirklicht hat.
English translation: that Owen, more than a hundred years later, entertained ideas similar to those of Defoe and in part also put them into practice.
Defoe had access to rulers and the clearer political mind, yet William III’s brief reign, the transitional character of the following regime, and Hanoverian estrangement blocked reform. Owen lived in a postwar age of reconstruction and industrial experiment. He drew patrons from Canterbury to Louis Blanc, but his impatience and provocativeness repeatedly drove them away. Thus “Künder” and “Vollender” names an uneven temporal relation: Defoe anticipates; Owen tests, exposes, and sometimes institutionalizes.
The essay then builds a sequence of contrasts around fates, media, and institutions. Both men died in modest circumstances after sacrificing security or fortune, but Defoe remained chiefly a writer of projects, while Owen made projects into communities, exchanges, and factories.
Defoe war Schriftsteller und Projektant, Owen aber ein ausgesprochener Experimentator.
English translation: Defoe was a writer and projector; Owen, by contrast, was a decided experimenter.
New Lanark, New Harmony, the Labour Exchange, and Queens Wood mark Owen’s restless practical drive, which Kerschagl sometimes treats as nearly pathological. Yet he refuses to dismiss failure: reduced working hours and the ban on labor by children under nine would have been unimaginable in Defoe’s age. Defoe’s influence, by contrast, operated through pamphlets, journalism, and public notoriety; prison and pillory helped make him known beyond scholarly readers.
Kerschagl’s central conceptual move is to distinguish shared social concern from divergent economic logic. Defoe is the mercantilist reformer, trusting public authority to regulate prices, wages, insurance, salaries, workhouses, and commerce. Owen is the cooperative reformer, expecting renewal from production and consumption associations, model settlements, and self-help.
Defoe war für Staatsintervention, Owen für Selbsthilfe.
English translation: Defoe was for state intervention; Owen for self-help.
This allows the provocative suggestion that Defoe may stand nearer socialism than Owen, because Defoe assigns reform to the state rather than to voluntary association. The money question sharpens the split: Defoe remains within monetary mercantilism, while Owen’s 1832 exchange sought to replace ordinary money through labor valuation. Kerschagl treats this not merely as eccentricity but as a more consistent pursuit of labor-value theory than Marx’s later money theory.
Defoe lebte in dem typisch merkantilistischen Gelddenken
English translation: Defoe lived within the typically mercantilist mode of thinking about money.
Other oppositions complicate the genealogy. Defoe welcomes population growth if full employment is secured; Owen worries about growth chiefly because of employment, making both, in Kerschagl’s phrase, precursors of Keynes. Defoe’s religious tolerance remains grounded in sincere belief and religious education; Owen moves from anti-revelatory rational religion toward universal moralism and finally spiritualism. In communication, Defoe’s nearly three hundred pamphlets reached audiences books could not, making him more immediately public than Owen.
dem „Mann auf der Straße“ Defoe zu seiner Zeit viel stärker bekannt war
English translation: Defoe was far better known to the "man in the street" in his own day.
Despite these contrasts, Kerschagl insists on deep continuities: both sacrificed for ideas, valued education as a condition of prosperity, supported women’s equality, opposed slavery, and believed reform could be quickly realized—Defoe through dissemination and knowledge, Owen through example and moral transformation. The historiographical point is corrective, moving beyond the reduction of Defoe to Robinson Crusoe and Owen to utopian schemes:
Aus einer objektiven und echten Geschichte der sozialen Ideen sind aber beide Männer gleichermaßen nicht wegzudenken.
English translation: From any objective and genuine history of social ideas, however, neither of the two men can be omitted.
The final section widens the frame to John Law. Law is the most systematic economic theorist; Defoe the socially sensitive pamphleteer formed by petty trade; Owen the industrial-age reformer who wanted workers to share in new wealth. Their differences are sociological as well as doctrinal:
dieses soziale Milieu ihre Denkweise weitgehend beeinflußt hat.
English translation: this social milieu largely influenced their way of thinking.
Kerschagl’s relevance lies in showing how economic ideas travel through genre, class position, patronage, failed experiment, and delayed realization. The closing anecdote—Gentz rejecting Owen’s wish to give workers prosperity and education because independent masses would be harder to govern—turns the comparison into a verdict on modern social reform:
Die Zeit hat zwischen Gentz und Owen entschieden . . .
English translation: Time has decided between Gentz and Owen . . .
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