OWEN, ROBERT (1771–1858)

OWEN, ROBERT (1771–1858)

The founder of British socialism, Robert Owen was born to humble parents in Newtown, Wales, on 14 May 1771, and returned there to die on 17 November 1858. An intellectually precocious youth, he read widely, and by the age of 10 experienced a religious crisis, the implications of which would prove crucial for his life’s work and ideas. After being apprenticed to a Stamford cloth-merchant, he moved to London. In the early 1790s he commenced a partnership in Manchester manufacturing ‘mules’ to produce thread by steam-power, and soon became manager of a mill employing 500. Displaying enormous talent as a manager, he moved on 1 January 1800 to assume supervision of a mill constructed by David Dale at New Lanark, on the banks of the Clyde south of Glasgow. At New Lanark Owen’s profits were considerable, but he regarded the mill’s population, prone of drunkenness, pilfering and petty vice, as capable of significant moral improvement. He thus began to apply principles described in his first substantial publication, A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1813–14), which centred on one leading idea, that ‘the character of man is formed for, and not by, him’. This form of philosophical necessitarianism, or environmentalism, was later modified to acknowledge certain evident tendencies or propensities in behaviour, but remained the foundation of Owen’s entire system of thought. He used it to assert that punishment was illogical, since crime was not a function of free will, but resulted from poor upbringing. It remained the optimistic core of Owen’s assumptions about the socialist future, where war, social conflict and crime would be supplanted by peace, harmony and prosperity.

At New Lanark real wages improved, working hours were reduced, education for children was introduced, and moral improvements did indeed result. The key to this programme was undoubtedly education, and Owen in this period was associated with

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reformers like Joseph Lancaster. New Lanark was not, however, a ‘socialist’ experiment; profits were divided amongst the partners according to their investment. But Owen did plan upon extending the public aspects of community reorganization, notably by the construction of a common kitchen and dining facilities.

Dedicated to William Wilberforce, whose evangelical approach to moral renewal was attracting considerable attention, A New View of Society urged the extension of such reforms to the nation at large by reducing gambling, drunkenness and illegitimacy as well as introducing penal and factory reforms, and disestablishing the Church of England. There was nothing particularly socialistic about these proposals, however; indeed Owen denied that the Government should directly employ the poor, suggesting instead that public works schemes on roads, docks and the like be paid less than the average rate of wages, and insisting that the norm should be that the adequately educated poor would seek and find employment for themselves, except in periods of exceptional crisis. Leslie Stephen was thus quite wrong to suggest that Owen’s ‘essential views’ were presented here. A few acute observers, however, notably William Hazlitt, recognized after 1815 a clear affinity between Owen’s ideas and those of WILLIAM GODWIN, whose Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) had been so influential a generation earlier. (In fact Owen had met with Godwin in London some fifty times between 1813–18.)

By 1815 Owen had moved markedly in the direction of a more comprehensive and radical reform scheme. In the Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System (1815) he first focused upon the quest for ‘immediate pecuniary gain’ as the driving spirit behind the existing commercial system, operating according to the principle of ‘buying cheap and selling dear’. The new manufacturing system, he insisted, was creating a new type of character in the labour force, and greed for profit promoted their ever greater degradation by their employers. Machinery was rapidly displacing manual labour in an increasing number of trades, and threatened to produce an increasingly impoverished working class.

Frustrated by his inability to convince fellow-manufacturers to agree to similar measures, Owen in 1816–17, amidst rising post-war economic dislocation, widened his efforts to providing a solution to poverty as such. By the summer of 1817 he had refined ‘the Plan’ to comprise the resettlement of the unemployed poor in ‘Villages of Union’ of some 500 to 1,500 in the countryside, constructed in the form of a large quadrangle, with public buildings at the centre, and heavy industry at the peripheries. Here labour would alternate between agriculture and manufacturing, and, crucially, the results would be shared in common and distributed and organized according to the principle of ‘mutual and combined interest’. Self-sufficiency was the initial goal; later communities could trade with one another upon equitable principles. At a crucial meeting at the City of London Tavern in August, Owen assailed the clergy as the principal opponents of all social change, principally because of the idea of ‘original sin’, which was being given increasing prominence by evangelicals. He now began to speak in terms of the ‘millennium’, and to assume that not only the poor, but also the entire population, would eventually inhabit the new co-operative villages.

His principal goal now became the overcoming of separate, divided, antagonistic social interests, and their replacement by a harmony of interests. In his seminal Report to the County of Lanark

he also proposed abolishing the existing money system and replacing it by a currency based on labour-time, and aimed at superseding both

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competition and the problem of underconsumption, or finding a market to match existing productive capacity. By 1820 Owen called this ‘the social system’, which was designed to promote common aims and co-operative economic benefits, as opposed to ‘the individual system’ of competition and ‘buying cheap and selling dear’, which promoted selfishness, economic waste and the excessively concentrated accumulation of wealth. The principal error of the modern economic system he now identified as the idea:

that man can provide better for himself, and more advantageously for the public, when left to his own individual exertions, opposed to and in competition with his fellows, than when aided by any social arrangement which shall unite his interests individually and generally with society.

From 1815, in Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System, he identified the growth of factories as a chief threat to working-class moral and economic health, though

he did not reject industrialization as such, but rather viewed machinery as capable of lightening the burden of human labour when not introduced to displace it. Practically, the remainder of Owen’s life was devoted to the construction of a successful community, intended to serve as a model of the superiority of ‘socialism’ (the term gained increasing acceptance in the late 1820s to describe Owen’s system) to any system based on competition of interests. About £40,000, or four-fifths of Owen’s fortune, was expended on the acquisition of the New Harmony community in Indiana in the mid-1820s, but owing to lack of supervision, poor choice of members and insufficient unity, this lasted only a few years. (A few smaller communities were also attempted at Orbiston near Motherwell, and elsewhere.) After flirting with trade unionism and the formation of ‘labour exchanges’ where artisans could exchange goods on the basis of cost price, Owen raised funds for a final great communitarian effort, on 533 acres at Queenwood or Harmony, in Hampshire, which commenced in 1839. He created a powerful new organization, the Association of All Classes of All Nations, which at its peak had some fifty branches throughout Britain, concentrated in the industrial Midlands. These helped to raise funds, and to provide a labour force, for the Queen-wood experiment. When this finally failed in 1845, after the expenditure of over £40,000, owing to poor agricultural land, overinvestment in building and insufficient capital, the Owenite movement, which had attracted as many as 50,000 to weekly meetings in the early 1840s, collapsed with it. Though he agitated for reform in Paris during the 1848 revolutions, Owen embraced spiritualism in the early 1850s, thereby undermining the materialism of his earlier philosophy. Owen’s ideas nonetheless remained of some importance after the revival of socialism in the 1880s, through William Morris and others, and through the secularist agitation of George Jacob Holyoake, an Owenite lecturer who had served six months in prison for blasphemy, in particular, and through the Fabian socialists, many of whom, notably Frank Podmore, wrote on him.