Robert Owen

Robert Owen was born in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, on 14 May 1771 and died there on 17 November 1858. Apprenticed to a draper at ten, he became a mill manager in Manchester while still in his early twenties. In 1799 he and his partners bought the New Lanark cotton mills on the Clyde, and from January 1800 he managed them. New Lanark became famous: Owen improved housing and sanitation, restricted child labour, opened a village store selling goods near cost, and in 1816–18 opened the Institute for the Formation of Character with an infant school, often described as one of the first in Britain. Visitors, including royalty and reformers from across Europe, came to see it.

Disputes with partners over the cost of his reforms led to new partnerships and, eventually, his withdrawal. In 1825 he bought the town of New Harmony, Indiana, for a communal experiment, which dissolved by 1827. Back in Britain he promoted the National Equitable Labour Exchange (1832), where goods were exchanged for labour notes, and briefly led the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which collapsed in 1834. A later community at Queenwood (Harmony Hall) in Hampshire, begun in 1839, also failed. In old age he turned to spiritualism.

• Character is formed by circumstances. In A New View of Society (1813–16) Owen argued that people do not form their own characters; environment, education and institutions do. Punishment and blame are therefore misdirected. Society can produce rational, cooperative and happy people by changing their circumstances.
• Factory reform. He campaigned for limits on child labour and working hours and supported what became the Cotton Mills and Factories Act 1819, though the act was weaker than he wanted.
• Villages of co-operation. His 1817 plan for the relief of the poor, developed in the Report to the County of Lanark (1821), proposed self-supporting communities of several hundred to a few thousand people combining agriculture and manufacture, with common kitchens and schools.
• Labour as the measure of value. Owen held that labour is the natural standard of value; the labour exchanges were meant to let producers trade directly according to the time their goods embodied, bypassing money and middlemen.
• A 'New Moral World'. In later writings he attacked private property, traditional religion and conventional marriage as sources of irrationality and conflict, and envisaged a world of federated cooperative communities.

Owen is a founder of British socialism and a patron saint of the co-operative movement. His followers founded co-operative societies in the 1820s and 1830s, and several founders of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers (1844), whose principles became the basis of modern consumer co-operation, were Owenites. His store at New Lanark prefigured the idea of trading at fair prices and returning surplus to members.

New Harmony is one of the best-documented failures of an intentional community and is still studied for its lessons: rapid recruitment of members without shared commitment, unclear property arrangements, the founder's long absences and frequent constitutional changes. Owen's ideas also influenced infant education, factory legislation, and the labour-note and time-banking schemes that reappear in mutual credit and complementary-currency experiments. Marx and Engels classed him among the 'utopian socialists' — admired for his critique but criticised for relying on benevolent patrons and model communities instead of political struggle.

• Paternalism. New Lanark was a benevolent autocracy: workers benefited but did not govern. Critics see in Owen a reformer who wanted to remake people from above.
• Community failure. New Harmony and Queenwood failed within a few years, through disputes, insufficient productive labour and financial losses, suggesting that cooperative communities need more than good intentions and capital.
• Labour notes. The labour exchanges ran into the problem of valuing different kinds of labour and attracted goods that were hard to sell, closing within about two years.
• Hostility to religion. His public attacks on religion in 1817 and after alienated many potential supporters and made his movement a target.

• A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–1816)
• Report to the County of Lanark (1821)
• The Book of the New Moral World (1836–1844)
• Overview: 'Robert Owen', Wikipedia