In 1828 The London Magazine endorsed the March of Intellect for the benefit of the ‘general intellect of the country’, a country which, thanks to mass education, would understand the need to reform a decaying legislative system. Though often going unacknowledged, a good part of the British academic landscape as it stands today emerged out of the epistemic acceleration of the industrial revolution. In the same year the London University (later University College London) was founded. In 1826, Henry Brougham, future Lord Chancellor, founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to help those without access to schooling. 1823 saw the establishment of the London Mechanics’ Institute (later to become known as Birkbeck College). The response to the employment of machines and workers’ subsequent unemployment was also the demand for more education about machines, which took the form of initiatives such as the Mechanics’ Institute Movement. 5Īs a campaign for progress in both literacy and technology, the March of Intellect was part of the so-called ‘Machinery Question’, that is, the public debate in England on the massive replacement of workers by industrial machines in the first half of the nineteenth century. 3 The expression ‘March of Intellect’ was introduced by the industrialist and utopian socialist Robert Owen in a letter to The Times in 1824, remarking that in recent years ‘the human mind has made the most rapid and extensive strides in the knowledge of human nature, and in general knowledge.’ 4 The campaign triggered a reactionary and not surprisingly racist backlash: The Times started to mock the ambitions of the working class under headlines such as ‘The March of Intellect in Africa’. Initiated as a campaign in England during the Industrial Revolution, the March of Intellect, or ‘March of Mind’, demanded the amelioration of society’s ills through programmes of public education for the lower classes. Nonetheless, by dint of his visionary pen, they became an accidental manifesto for the progressive camp and the invention of the future.
Carl marx general thoughts series#
Heath’s series of satirical engravings was originally commissioned by the Tories to voice their sarcasm regarding a potential democratisation of knowledge and technology across all classes. In the background the goddess of justice lies in ruins summoning the automaton: ‘Oh Come and Deliver Me!!!’ Upon closer observation, the caricature appears to ridicule the belief that the technologies of industrial automation (already looking like robots) might become a true agent of political change and social emancipation under the command of public education. 1 The automaton’s belly is a steam engine, its head is made of books of history, philosophy and (importantly) mechanics. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.Īn 1828 caricature by cartoonist William Heath from the series ‘March of Intellect’ depicts a giant automaton advancing with long strides and holding a broom to sweep away a dusty mass of clerks, clergy and bureaucrats, representing figures of the old order and obsolete laws.
And one of the first fruits of extended intelligence has been the conviction, now fast becoming universal, that our system of law, so far from being the best in the world, is an exceedingly bad one and stands in the most pressing need of revision and reform. … The public mind has infinitely advanced: in despite of all the sneers at the phrase of the ‘march of intellect’, the fact is undeniable, that the general intellect of the country has greatly progressed. It is nearly twenty years since the first impulse was given to the general intellect of this country, by the introduction of a new mechanical system for teaching reading and writing, by cheaper and more efficacious methods than those previously in use. William Thompson, An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, London, 1824. Give men and women equal civil and political rights. … The only and the simple remedy for the evils arising from these almost universal institutions of the domestic slavery of one half the human race, is utterly to eradicate them. The general intellect of the whole community, male and female, is stunted or perverted in infancy, or more commonly both, by keeping from women the knowledge possessed by men.
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