Owen, Robert

Owen, Robert (1771–1858). Cotton magnate and utopian socialist. Born in Newtown (Powys), Owen became a partner in cotton firms in Lancashire and at New Lanark (Strathclyde), where he managed the mills and village (1800–25), gaining a reputation as a successful and humanitarian businessman. His experience led him to publish A New View of Society (1814–18), in which he advanced propositions that character was formed by environment, and that a system of villages of co-operation rather than unplanned large industrial towns was conducive to social progress. Attacked for his secularism and millenarianism, he accepted the labour theory of value and favoured state intervention to offset the effects of depressions in his Report to the County of Lanark (1820); he espoused factory reform, the legalization of trade unions, a national system of education, and co-operation. Described as the ‘Father of British Socialism’, Owen could be regarded also as a protagonist of scientific management.

John Butt