Robert Owen

Owen is famous as the father of Utopian Socialism, the creation of infant childcare programs, and the co-operative movement still in effect in Britain.

Robert Owen was born and raised in a small town in Wales. His formal education ended when he was ten and he went to work in a draper's shop. He worked his way into the management of a cotton mill in the large British city of Manchester. When he was a young man, he married a girl whose father owned a textile mill in Scotland; with the backing of his partners, he took over its operation. The working conditions in the mill were not good. There were over 500 child labourers, drunkenness and theft were common, and the workers lived in crowded and unhealthy conditions. They were paid in tokens which could be redeemed only in the company stores. Owen set out to change this state of affairs by paying his workers in money, setting up shops where high value goods were sold with a small mark-up, and passing on the savings to workers. He controlled the sale of liquor and set up childcare for young children.

His model community was prosperous and was a model for other communities. He went on to develop plans for other ideal communities to be managed in a similar manner and which were established at New Harmony, Indiana, in the United States and Orbiston in Scotland. Both failed miserably due to mismanagement.

Main Ideas

• No one is responsible for his own actions because his whole character is formed independent of himself; people are products of their environment. Therefore, he supported education and labour reform.
• All religions are based on foolish ideas that make man a weak imbecilic animal, a furious bigot and fanatic, or a miserable hypocrite.
• He supported the practice of subcontracting production to people living in their own homes, rather than the factory system.

Famous Works

• A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character
• Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race
• The New Moral World

Famous Statements

• The character of man is formed for him, and not by him!

Interesting Trivia

Although he was an atheist, in his later years he began to follow spiritualism and insisted he could communicate with great minds of the past by means of electricity.