Owen, Robert

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OWEN, ROBERT

OWEN, ROBERT (1771–1858), English socialist.

The founder of British socialism, Robert Owen was born on 14 May 1771 at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales. He was the son of Robert Owen (1741–1804), a sadler, ironmonger, and local postmaster, and the former Anne Williams (c. 1735–1803), a farmer's daughter. Apprenticed in 1781 to a Stamford cloth merchant, James McGuffog, Owen joined a similar London retail firm three years later. Moving to Manchester, he borrowed one hundred pounds from his brother William and commenced cotton-spinning. In 1792 he became manager of the largest local cotton mill, owned by Peter Drink-water, and in 1800 assumed the management of the New Lanark mills on the River Clyde south of Glasgow, having first married the owner's daughter Caroline the previous year.

At New Lanark, Owen proved astonishingly successful both at refining the cotton-spinning process and improving the lot of the labor force. His profits, some 40 percent of about 12 percent return on capital per annum, brought a fortune, while his wish to experiment socially on the 1,800-strong workforce brought an increasing reputation as a reformer. Owen reduced working hours from eleven and three quarters to ten and three quarters per day, made cheaper and better goods available at the company shop, introduced infant education in the "Institute for the Formation of Character," opened in 1816, and did much to improve life in the workers' quarters. Seeking to widen the scope of his ambitions, he published A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–1814), which proposed a system of national education to reduce idleness, poverty, and crime among the "lower orders," and urged the discouragement of "gin shops and pot houses" and state lottery and gambling, as well as penal reform, an end to the monopolistic position of the Church of England, and the collection of statistics on the value and demand for labor throughout the country.

Such proposals, particularly for an extension of factory reforms, fell on deaf ears, however. In the years 1815 to 1817 Owen then turned to the wider question, in the midst of a postwar depression, of solving the rapidly burgeoning problem of poverty. He now proposed, thus, to relocate the urban poor into "villages of union" motivated by a "mutual and combined interest," in the countryside, where employment would include both manufacturing and agriculture, and the proceeds would be shared in common. Increasingly hostile to the "individual system" of "buying cheap and selling dear," which he first derided at length in the Report to the County of Lanark (1820), Owen proposed instead the "social system" of enhanced cooperation and community life. This, by the mid-1820s, gradually came to be called "socialism" for short. Having in Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System (1815) described industrialization as likely to cause immense suffering to the working classes, Owen now sought a practical experiment to prove the worth of his principles. He acquired a readymade community in the United States, constructed in Indiana by a German Protestant sect, the Rappites. Owen renamed it New Harmony and moved

there in 1824. Unfortunately, insufficient attention was paid to the selection of members, and Owen tired quickly of having so many quarrelsome associates. By 1828 the community had collapsed.

Returning to Britain, Owen became briefly involved in the early 1830s in an effort to construct "exchange bazaars" in London and Birmingham, where artisans were to trade goods on the basis of labor and material costs alone, eliminating the profit of retail middlemen. In 1833 and 1834, he was also briefly involved with an effort to construct a single union of trades, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

The last great phase of Owen's efforts came in the period from 1835 to 1844, when he set about publishing his mature program (The Book of the New Moral World, 7 parts, 1836–1844), and established a large-scale organization, with some fifty branches, to raise funds for a new community. Land was acquired at Tytherly in Hampshire, and an elaborate (and unduly expensive) central edifice constructed. But the soil was poor, and too little was invested in agriculture to ensure an adequate return. After the community failed, Owen turned to spiritualism, but was increasingly ignored in the last decade of his life.

Owen's reputation is often bifurcated into a successful capitalist phase at New Lanark and a failed socialist career thereafter. Though the writings of John Gray (1799–1883), William Thompson (1775–1833), and others were more incisive, his impact on popularizing the socialist ideal in Britain and the United States is undisputed and was extended to later generations by writers such as Fabian Frank Podmore (1856–1910), his most important biographer.

See alsoFourier, Charles; Socialism; Utopian Socialism.