You probably have heard of Robert Owen. He was a nineteenth-century British political activist (1771-1858) known for his “utopian socialism.“[1] He started communities that eschewed private property, including a colony in New Harmony, Indiana.
In those communities, he said, “the necessaries and comforts of life [will be] enjoyed by all in abundance,” and they “will ever be the abode of abundance, active intelligence, correct conduct, and happiness.”[2]
“Owenite” communities didn’t last for long.
Owen is rightly admired, however. He had a simple philosophy. He believed that all people are the products of both their inherited characteristics and their environment. If the environment is nurturing, they will develop into worthwhile beings, no matter what their economic surroundings. He held this view so strongly that, as a manager, he never punished anyone (except possibly for drunkenness) and was never visibly angry toward people. He knew their circumstances had made them as they were.
Had he stuck with being a businessman, he might have changed the world.
Starting as an apprentice to a draper (seller of fabrics) at the age of ten, Owen worked hard and thought strategically about such things as what products sold best. At age 19 he sought a job as manager of a cotton mill, and he was hired, even though he didn’t know a thing about cotton spinning. He methodically figured out what the various jobs were and became a highly capable manager. When Owen fell in love with the daughter of a mill owner, he persuaded her father both to let him marry her and to sell the factory to him and his partners.
He became a wealthy man—helped by entering the cotton spinning business at a time when prices were rising and markets were growing, but also because he was a wise and hands-on manager. At his factory in New Lanark, Scotland, Owen was known for his humane treatment of workers, even though children still worked for 12 hours a day (he was under pressure from his partners to keep it that way). He set up schools for those children (and their younger siblings) and they seem to have loved him. His factory and school became internationally famous.
Reading his engaging autobiography (written when he was in his mid-80s), you cannot help but like this guy. One of his sons, Robert Dale Owen, wrote about his father as well, reinforcing the favorable image.
But Owen made two mistakes. His most strategic error, given his goals, was to became a free-thinker. He believed in a divine creative force but was disdainful of all religions, including those that most people in England and Scotland espoused. He did not keep that fact quiet; he announced it in a famous speech. Whatever his spiritual doctrine was—deism, agnosticism, or atheism—it damaged his role as an effective messenger of socialism to the workers. (Much of the working population in England embraced Methodism.)
Owen’s second error was to leave his factory to other managers in order to promote his idealistic communities and to become a leader in the burgeoning labor movement. His views were expansive (and unrealistic): “[T]he past ages of the world present the history of human irrationality only, and . . . we are but now advancing towards the dawn of reason, and to the period when the mind of man shall be born again.” [3]
How much better it might have been if he had stayed at New Lanark and continued to set an example of humane treatment and educational uplift of children! And yet, perhaps that is being utopian, too. He was a shining example of generous treatment of children and workers for at least a decade. But that did not substantially reduce what E. P. Thompson called England’s “shameful” experience of the “exploitation of little children.”[4] Only time and political struggle changed that.
Photo of William Henry Brooke’s painting of Robert Owen in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Permission through Creative Commons.
*Spinning, actually.
[1] John Beecher suggests that “romantic socialism” is a more accurate term. See his “Early European Socialism” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy. Edited by George Klosko. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
[2] Robert Owen, Letter to London newspapers, Aug 9, 1817, in The Life of Robert Owen, Vol. 1a (A Supplementary Appendix), 90-92.
[3] Owen, “Address to the Working Classes” in Owen, Vol. 1a, 231.
[4] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon books of Random House, In.c., 1964), 249.