Robert Owen Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a successful nineteenth-century Welsh industrialist, philanthropist, and social reformer who invested his large fortune in creating a workers’ utopian community in America. Owen believed that factory workers were helpless victims of capitalist society. Nonetheless, his writings held out the hope that rational human beings could and would change their circumstances.

Owen was born in Newtown, Wales, on May 14, 1771. At the age of ten, he was sent to work in London. After his apprenticeship to a draper, he quickly moved up from a shop assistant to managing a cotton-spinning mill in Manchester. Owen then served on Manchester’s board of health in 1786 and witnessed the inhumane working conditions of many factories, which reinforced his belief that bad social institutions corrupted human beings. He saw the factory workers as innocent victims of an industrial system that drove them to drunkenness and impropriety.

In 1812, Owen became the predominate manager and owner of the cotton mills at New Lanark, the largest textile factory in Scotland. He enhanced New Lanark’s existing reputation as one of the more humanely managed factories in the British Empire by improving employment conditions for child laborers, who numbered nearly three thousand of the mill’s roughly fourteen thousand workers. He stopped the practice of hiring pauper children, reduced the children’s working hours, and saw to their education. He also required supervisors to maintain “books of character” on all factory workers. No pubs were permitted in the village, and fines were imposed for drunkenness. Within a short time, public interest in Owen’s philanthropic paternalism grew, and the village and factories of New Lanark received thousands of visitors, including cabinet ministers and foreign dignitaries.

Despite his success at New Lanark, Owen was dissatisfied with the slow progress of reform. By 1817, he became convinced that the entire economic and social systems were corrupt, including the institutions of marriage and organized religion. He published his first utopian plan in a Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor (1817). He called for the creation of workers’ communities, where all shared equally in the wealth produced. In 1824, Owen left New Lanark and sailed for America, hoping to build a model community of unity and mutual cooperation in New Harmony, Indiana. Despite Owen investing nearly his entire fortune on the social experiment, New Harmony ended in disaster, and he left America.

After returning to England, Owen gained a new following among the literate working classes. For a few months in 1834, he led the national federation of trade unions and continued to draft proposals for a new society. The so-called Owenites, encouraged by their benefactor, publicized their socialist proposals in various journals, including the New Moral Order. At the height of Owen’s influence during the 1830s and 1840s, Owenism was virtually synonymous with British socialism.

Toward the end of his life, Owen became a spiritualist and published The Future of the Human Race (1853), in which he predicted the coming of a peaceful revolution through the intervention of “departed spirits of good and superior men and women,” including poets Lord Byron and Robert Burns, Thomas Jefferson, and the Duke of Wellington. Owen died on November 17, 1858, near his birthplace in Newtown.

Bibliography:

Harrison, John F. C. Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. New York: Scribner, 1969.
Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Owen, Robert. Life of Robert Owen Written by Himself: With Selections from His Writings and Correspondence. Vol. 1. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967.
The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race; or, The Coming Change from Irrationality to Rationality. Clifton, N.J.: A. M. Kelley, 1973.

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