Owen and Owenism

Owen and Owenism

Robert Owen (1771–1858) gained fame as a cotton-spinner at New Lanark, near Glasgow, and as a sympathetic employer who endeavoured to improve conditions in his factory. After Waterloo, social dislocation and unemployment convinced him that limited reforms, such as restricting the hours of child labour, were insufficient. Instead, by 1820, Owen became convinced that increasing mechanization would destroy the character of

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the working class, and that a ‘new moral world’ should be created based upon small-scale communities of no more than 2,500 persons, living and working in common, aiming at self-subsistence, and alternating between manufacturing, agricultural and other forms of labour. The ‘social system’ (from whence ‘socialism’ is coined) was to promote a spirit of common enterprise and public spirit, and a harmonization of economic interests. As the movement developed in the 1830s and 1840s, and several communitarian experiments were attempted (notably at New Harmony, Indiana, and Queenwood, Hampshire), an increasingly liberal view of women, marriage and the family was added to Owen’s original agenda. (The most important feminist tract of the first half of the century, William Thompson’s Appeal on Behalf of One Half the Human Race, 1824, emerges from Owenism.) Politically, Owen himself tended towards paternalism, but would eventually, in The Book of the New Moral World, 1836–44, propose the reorganisation of society according to age group, with all passing through the same routine, and thus becoming governors in due course. This would avoid elections in particular, which Owen thought elicited some of the worst passions in human nature.

The Owenite movement produced a number of penetrating works of economic analysis, of which the best known are John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (1826), and The Social System (1831); William Thompson, Inquiry Concerning the Distribution of Wealth (1824), and Labor Rewarded (1827); and John Francis Bray, Labour’s Wrong and Labour’s Remedy (1839). These writings developed themes first explored at length by Owen in his Report to the County of Lanark (1820). Owenites usually argued that the working classes were the principal producers of value, but were deprived of their reward by the capitalist wage system. If society were reorganized on a co-operative basis and far more labour were made productive, idleness abolished, and the invention of machinery turned to useful purposes rather than generating further unemployment, the working day could be reduced, and the working classes would enjoy a far higher standard of living. By the early 1830s, Owenism had a fairly detailed analysis of recurrent economic crises, and insisted that these were endemic to capitalism, and would contribute to the increasing poverty of the working classes.

Two major economic issues divided the early British socialists: whether it was desirable to restrict needs, and live at a more primitive level, in order to reduce working hours, or whether production should expand with needs, but goods be distributed more justly; and whether the scope of organization should be the community, or could be extended to the nation-state. In addition, Owenites disagreed as to whether competition should be abolished completely, or only partially. Owen himself preferred some restraint of needs, and insisted that the communitarian model alone suited socialist aims; John Gray in particular inaugurated the view that a national system of economic planning could be designed and successfully implemented. Owen’s insistence on communitarianism, however, had a crucial moral component: only in community, where individuals lived face to face and knew one another, could substantial moral improvement be achieved, and the abolition of coercive organizations like the police and army be achieved through a regime of mutual moral supervision.

Politically, more of Owen’s followers were democrats, like the Chartists, with whom they often competed from 1836–45. But they disagreed with radical assessments of the origins of poverty, which concentrated on the effects of unjust taxation, and on the continuance of private property under any reformed system. The most frequently used

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example urged here was the USA, which, Owenites argued, had by the 1830s generated a new class of urban poor. And they largely agreed on seeing national politics as epiphenomenal, or a function of class conflicts between the landed and mercantile and manufacturing orders, such that parliamentary politics plays no major role in any Owenite vision of the future.