Robert Owen

Robert Owen (Newtown, Wales, 1771 – Newtown, 1858) was a Welsh businessman, philanthropist and social theorist, regarded as one of the founders of utopian socialism and of the co-operative movement. He matters because he combined practical industrial management with a plan for social reform that aimed to improve the lives of workers without revolution or class struggle.

The son of a local postmaster, he left school at ten to become an apprentice draper. He worked in London and, at about eighteen, moved to Manchester, where by nineteen he was running a textile works. In 1800 he took charge of the New Lanark mills in Scotland and turned them into a model enterprise. He shortened working hours, regulated child labour, promoted education for the children and sold goods in the company store at prices close to cost. His early writings, among them A New View of Society and The Formation of the Human Character (1814), grew out of this experience and examined how industrial life shapes the character of people.

In 1825 he bought the Harmony community in Indiana, renamed it New Harmony and set out to build a utopian society there. The project collapsed within about two years and cost him much of his fortune. Back in Britain in 1828, he became the leading figure of the emerging labour movement. He promoted co-operative societies, launched a labour exchange that used labour notes in place of money and, in 1834, helped found the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. It dissolved within months, under pressure from employers, government repression, internal divisions and lack of funds. After this setback he withdrew from trade unionism and devoted his last years to announcing a 'New Moral World', giving his name to a periodical of the same title.

His thinking starts from the idea that human beings are shaped by their surroundings: character forms through circumstances and education rather than through a fixed nature. From this came his faith in reason, his insistence on education from early childhood and his conviction that the social environment had to be rebuilt so that human goodness could flourish. He rejected revolution and proposed co-operation as an economic alternative to capitalism. His legacy includes the co-operative movement, Owenism and modern educational thought, and Engels placed him among the utopian socialists alongside Saint-Simon and Fourier.