Robert Owen, (born May 14, 1771, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales—died November 17, 1858, Newtown), 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 statesmen and social reformers. 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 youngsters of Robert Owen, the postmaster of Newtown, and Anne Williams. He attended native faculties till the age of 10, when he grew to become an apprentice to a clothier. His employer had a superb library, and Owen spent a lot of his time studying. His studying of books on non secular controversies led him to conclude at an early age that there have been elementary flaws in all religions. Excelling in enterprise, by the point he was 19 he had turn out to be superintendent of a giant cotton mill in Manchester, and he quickly developed it into one of many foremost institutions of its sort in Great Britain. Owen made use of the primary American Sea Island cotton (a fantastic, long-staple fibre) ever imported into Britain and made enhancements within the high quality of the cotton spun. On turning into supervisor and a accomplice within the Manchester agency, Owen induced his companions to buy the New Lanark mills in Lanarkshire.
Success At New Lanark
There have been 2,000 inhabitants of New Lanark, 500 of whom have been younger youngsters from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The youngsters, particularly, had been properly handled by the previous proprietor, however their residing circumstances have been harsh: crime and vice have been bred by demoralizing circumstances; training and sanitation have been uncared for; and housing circumstances have been insupportable. Owen improved the homes and—primarily by his private affect—inspired the folks in habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. He opened a retailer that bought sound-quality items at little greater than price and strictly supervised the sale of alcoholic drinks. His biggest success was within the training of the younger, to which he devoted particular consideration. In 1816 he opened the primary toddler college in Great Britain on the New Lanark mills and gave it his shut private supervision. The faculties, which eschewed corporal punishment and different conventional strategies, emphasised character growth and included dancing and music within the curriculum.
Although Owen initially was regarded with suspicion as an outsider, he rapidly received the boldness of the folks, particularly due to his choice throughout an embargo towards the United States in the course of the War of 1812 to pay wages to the employees whereas the mills have been closed for 4 months. The mills continued to thrive commercially, however a few of Owen’s schemes entailed appreciable expense, which displeased his companions. Frustrated by the restrictions imposed on him by his companions, who emphasised revenue and wished to conduct the enterprise alongside extra extraordinary strains, Owen organized a brand new agency in 1813. Its members, content material with a 5 p.c return on their capital and able to give freer scope to his philanthropy, purchased out the previous agency. Stockholders within the new agency included the authorized reformer and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker William Allen.
Philosophy Of Social Reform
In 1813 Owen revealed two of the 4 essays in A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, by which he expounded the ideas on which his system of academic philanthropy was primarily based. Having misplaced all perception within the prevailing types of faith, he developed his personal creed that he took to be a completely new and authentic discovery. The chief level in Owen’s philosophy was that man’s character was shaped by circumstances over which he had no management. For this purpose, man was not a correct topic of both reward or blame. These convictions led him to the conclusion that the nice secret in the precise formation of man’s character was to position him below the right influences from his earliest years. The nonresponsibility of man and the impact of early influences have been the hallmark of Owen’s complete system of training and social amelioration.
For the subsequent few years, Owen’s work in New Lanark was to have a nationwide in addition to a European significance. New Lanark grew to become a spot of pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal personages, and, in response to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, the outcomes achieved by Owen have been singularly good. Children introduced up on his system have been usually felt to be sleek, genial, and unconstrained; well being, lots, and relative contentment prevailed; and the enterprise additionally was a business success.
In 1815 Owen convened a gathering of producers and efficiently lobbied them to help the elimination of import taxes on cotton. However, his proposal to cut back the variety of hours that youngsters might work within the mills was defeated. His agitation for manufacturing facility reform met with little impact, and by 1817 his work as a sensible reformer had given option to the nonetheless important concepts that have been to make him the forerunner of socialism and the cooperative motion. Owen argued that the competitors of human labour with equipment was a everlasting reason for misery and that the one efficient treatment lay within the united motion of males and the subordination of equipment to man. His proposals for the therapy of pauperism have been primarily based on these ideas.
Owen really helpful that villages of “unity and cooperation” be established for the unemployed. Each village would include about 1,200 individuals on 1,000 to 1,500 acres (400 to 600 hectares), all residing in a single massive construction constructed within the type of a sq., with a public kitchen and messrooms. Each household would have its personal personal residence and your complete care of their youngsters till the age of three, after which they might be raised by the neighborhood. Parents would have entry to them at meals and all different correct instances. Owen believed that such communities could possibly be established by people, by parishes, by counties, or by the state; in every case there can be supervision by duly certified individuals. Work and the enjoyment of its outcomes can be shared collectively.
The dimension of the projected neighborhood had been steered by that of the village of New Lanark, and Owen quickly advocated an extension of the scheme to the reorganization of society typically. His plan would set up largely self-contained, primarily agricultural communities of between 500 and three,000 folks that might be outfitted with essentially the most trendy equipment. As the communities elevated in quantity, he wrote, “unions of them, federatively united, should be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and thousands,” till they embraced the entire world in a typical curiosity.
The Community At New Harmony
Owen’s plans for the treatment of pauperism have been obtained with appreciable favour till he declared his hostility to faith as an impediment to progress. Many of Owen’s supporters believed that this motion made him suspect to the higher courses, although he didn't lose all help from them. To perform his plan for the creation of self-contained communities, he purchased 30,000 acres of land in Indiana from a non secular neighborhood in 1825 and renamed it New Harmony. Life in the neighborhood usually was properly ordered and contented below Owen’s sensible steerage for a time, however variations in opinion in regards to the type of authorities and the function of faith quickly appeared, although a historic consensus exists that an admirable spirit prevailed amid the dissension. Owen withdrew from the neighborhood in 1828, having misplaced £40,000—80 p.c of his fortune. The different chief Owenite neighborhood experiments have been in Great Britain—at Queenwood, Hampshire (1839–45), by which Owen took half for 3 years; at Orbiston, close to Glasgow, Lanarkshire (1826–27); and at Ralahine, County Cork (1831–33). He was indirectly concerned with both of the latter two communities.
Leadership Of The Trade Union Movement
In his “Report to the County of Lanark” (a physique of landowners) in 1820, Owen declared that reform was not sufficient and {that a} transformation of the social order was required. His proposals for communities attracted the youthful staff introduced up below the manufacturing facility system, and between 1820 and 1830 quite a few societies have been shaped and journals organized to advocate his views. The progress of labour unionism and the emergence of a working-class viewpoint precipitated Owen’s doctrines to be accepted as an expression of the employees’ aspirations, and, when he returned to England from New Harmony, he discovered himself thought to be their chief. In the unions Owenism stimulated the formation of self-governing workshops. The want for a marketplace for the merchandise of such retailers led in 1832 to the formation of the National Equitable Labour Exchange, which utilized the precept that labour is the supply of all wealth.
The unprecedented progress of labour unions made it appear attainable that the separate industries and ultimately all trade may be organized by these our bodies. Owen and his followers carried on ardent propaganda all around the nation, and this effort resulted within the transformation of the brand new National Operative Builders Union right into a guild and the institution of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (1834). Although the passion of the unions and the numbers of labourers becoming a member of them have been exceptional, decided opposition by employers and extreme repression by the federal government and courts ended the motion inside a couple of months. It was two generations earlier than socialism, first popularly mentioned at the moment, once more influenced unionism. Throughout these years Owen’s neighborhood concepts maintained a maintain, and in the end they supplied the premise for the worldwide shoppers’ cooperative motion. After 1834 Owen devoted himself to preaching his concepts on training, morality, rationalism, and marriage reform. At the age of 82 he grew to become a spiritualist.Owen’s autobiography, The Life of Robert Owen, was revealed in two volumes in 1857–58 (reprinted 1971).