Robert Owen

Robert Owen (born May 14, 1771, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales—died November 17, 1858, Newtown) was a Welsh manufacturer turned reformer, one of the most influential early 19th-century advocates of utopian socialism. His New Lanark mills in Lanarkshire, Scotland, with their social and industrial welfare programs, became a place of pilgrimage for political leaders, social reformers, and royalty. He also sponsored or encouraged many experimental “utopian” communities, including one in New Harmony, Indiana, U.S.

Early life

Owen was the second youngest of seven children of Robert Owen, the postmaster of Newtown, and Anne Williams. He attended local schools until the age of 10, when he became an apprentice to a clothier. His employer had a good library, and Owen spent much of his time reading. His reading of books on religious controversies led him to conclude at an early age that there were fundamental flaws in all religions. Excelling in business, by the time he was 19 he had become superintendent of a large cotton mill in Manchester, and he soon developed it into one of the foremost establishments of its kind in Great Britain. Owen made use of the first American Sea Island cotton (a fine, long-staple fibre) ever imported into Britain and made improvements in the quality of the cotton spun. On becoming manager and a partner in the Manchester firm, Owen induced his partners to purchase the New Lanark mills in Lanarkshire.

Success at New Lanark

There were 2,000 inhabitants of New Lanark, 500 of whom were young children from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children, especially, had been well treated by the former proprietor, but their living conditions were harsh: crime and vice were bred by demoralizing conditions; education and sanitation were neglected; and housing conditions were intolerable. Owen improved the houses and—mainly by his personal influence—encouraged the people in habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. He opened a store that sold sound-quality goods at little more than cost and strictly supervised the sale of alcoholic beverages. His greatest success was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. In 1816 he opened the first infant school in Great Britain at the New Lanark mills and gave it his close personal supervision. The schools, which eschewed corporal punishment and other traditional methods, emphasized character development and included dancing and music in the curriculum.

Although Owen initially was regarded with suspicion as an outsider, he quickly won the confidence of the people, especially because of his decision during an embargo against the United States during the War of 1812 to pay wages to the workers while the mills were closed for four months. The mills continued to thrive commercially, but some of Owen’s schemes entailed considerable expense, which displeased his partners. Frustrated by the restrictions imposed on him by his partners, who emphasized profit and wished to conduct the business along more ordinary lines, Owen organized a new firm in 1813. Its members, content with a 5 percent return on their capital and ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy, bought out the old firm. Stockholders in the new firm included the legal reformer and utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker William Allen.

Philosophy of social reform

In 1813 Owen published two of the four essays in A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based. Having lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion, he developed his own creed that he took to be an entirely new and original discovery. The chief point in Owen’s philosophy was that human character is formed by circumstances over which individuals have no control. For this reason, people are not a proper subject of either praise or blame. These convictions led him to the conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of human character was to place people under the proper influences from their earliest years. The nonresponsibility of individuals and the effect of early influences were the hallmark of Owen’s entire system of education and social amelioration.

For the next few years, Owen’s work in New Lanark was to have a national as well as a European significance. According to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, the results achieved by Owen were singularly good. Children brought up on his system were generally felt to be graceful, genial, and unconstrained; health, plenty, and relative contentment prevailed; and the business also was a commercial success.

In 1815 Owen convened a meeting of manufacturers and successfully lobbied them to support the removal of import taxes on cotton. However, his proposal to reduce the number of hours that children could work in the mills was defeated. His agitation for factory reform met with little effect, and by 1817 his work as a practical reformer had given way to the still vital ideas that were to make him the forerunner of socialism and the cooperative movement. Owen argued that the competition of human labour with machinery was a permanent cause of distress and that the only effective remedy lay in united action and the subordination of machinery to people. His proposals for the treatment of pauperism were based on those principles.

Owen recommended that villages of “unity and cooperation” be established for the unemployed. Each village would consist of about 1,200 persons on 1,000 to 1,500 acres (400 to 600 hectares), all living in one large structure built in the form of a square, with a public kitchen and messrooms. Each family would have its own private apartment and the entire care of their children until the age of three, after which they would be raised by the community. Parents would have access to them at meals and all other proper times. Owen believed that such communities could be established by individuals, by parishes, by counties, or by the state; in each case there would be supervision by duly qualified persons. Work and the enjoyment of its results would be shared collectively.

The size of the projected community had been suggested by that of the village of New Lanark, and Owen soon advocated an extension of the scheme to the reorganization of society in general. His plan would establish largely self-contained, mainly agricultural communities of between 500 and 3,000 people that would be equipped with the most modern machinery. As the communities increased in number, he wrote, “unions of them, federatively united, should be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and thousands,” until they embraced the whole world in a common interest.