[7] Warren felt that the reasons for its failure were the authoritarian nature of the community and the socialist idea of holding all property in common.
[8] From this experience, he came up with the idea of individual sovereignty which can be expressed as "the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one's own body and life".
Warren also realized that individual sovereignty must extend to economic matters and that owning property in common[8] had been detrimental to New Harmony.
[17] While Modern Times, in theory, was designed to operate as a self-sufficient labor-for-labor exchange, in reality the residents soon had to go out to work in the outside world in order to procure money to purchase a good deal of the things that were needed to live.
[18] Modern Times became a town with no government, laws or police, and which could be referred to as anarchistic, yet there was no crime or violence during its 13 year history.
Vern Dyson wrote that "the economic panic of 1857 undermined the business enterprises of the village and the civil war completed the task of annihilation".
[22] Charles Codman, who was a resident of Modern Times, wrote many years later that the lack of a charismatic leader who was able to spread the ideas about Modern Times to a wider audience and the fact that a good deal of the settlers were not dedicated to the ideals of equitable commerce, led to its inability to continue as a utopian village.
[23] Finally, Wunderlich wrote that the Civil War presented the residents of Modern Times with a situation and choices that were contrary to their personal beliefs.