Owen, Robert, 1771–1858, British social reformer and socialist, pioneer in the cooperative movement. The son of a saddler, he had little formal education but was a zealous reader. At the age of 10 he began working in the textile business and by 1794 had become a successful cotton manufacturer in Manchester.

In 1800, Owen moved to New Lanark, Scotland, where he had bought, with others, the mills of David Dale (whose daughter he married). There he reconstructed the community into a model industrial town with good housing and sanitation, nonprofit stores, schools, and excellent working conditions. Mill profits increased. The New Lanark experiment became famous in England and abroad, and Owen's ideas spread. He instigated the reform that resulted in the passage of the Factory Act of 1819—a watered down version of his proposals, but still a landmark in social reform. He also proposed the formation of self-sufficient cooperative agricultural-industrial communities. One such community, called New Harmony New Harmony, town (1990 pop. 846), Posey co., SW Ind., on the Wabash River; founded 1814 by the Harmony Society under George Rapp. In 1825 the Harmonists sold their holdings to Robert Owen and moved to Economy, Pa., where their sect survived into the early 1900s.
..... Click the link for more information. , was established (1825) in Indiana but failed after numerous disagreements among its members.

Professing a disbelief in religion (1817) and calling for the transformation of society rather than its reform (1820), Owen gradually lost much of his former upper-class support but was embraced by the working classes. After his return (1829) from the United States he became involved in the trade union movement and advocated the merging of unions with cooperative societies. Soon, however, the government took repressive action, and many workers responded by proclaiming the need for class struggle. Believing in the peaceful reordering of society, Owen ended his association with trade unionism and spent the last 25 years of his life writing and lecturing on his beliefs on education, marriage, and religion. Throughout his life Owen based his social programs on the idea that individual character is molded by environment and can be improved in a society based upon cooperation. Chief among his extensive writings are New View of Society; or, Essays on the Formation of Character (3 vol., 1813–14), Report to the County of Lanark (1821), and his autobiography (1857–58, repr. 1970).

Bibliography

See biographies by F. Podmore (1907, repr. 1971), G. D. H. Cole (3d ed. 1966), R. H. Harvey (1949), and M. I. Cole (1953, repr. 1969); studies by A. Morton (1962); J. Butts, ed. (1971), and R. G. Garnett (1973).

Owen, Robert

(born May 14, 1771, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales—died Nov. 17, 1858, Newtown) Welsh manufacturer and philanthropist. At his New Lanark cotton mills (Lanarkshire, Scot.), in partnership with Jeremy Bentham, he set up innovative social and industrial welfare programs, including improved housing and schools for young children. In A New View of Society (1813) he contended that character is wholly formed by one's environment. By 1817 his work had evolved into ideas presaging socialism and the cooperative movement, ideas he would spend much of his life preaching. He sponsored several experimental utopian communities of “Owenites” in Britain and the U.S., including one at New Harmony, Ind. (1825–28)—where Owen lost some 80% of his fortune—all of which proved short-lived. He strongly supported early labour unions, but opposition and repression swiftly dissolved them, and it was two generations before socialism again influenced unionism. He was the father of Robert Dale Owen.

Owen, Robert (Dale) (1801–77) social reformer; born in Glasgow, Scotland. He taught briefly in New Lanark, Scotland, where his family owned the cotton mills, and occasionally he ran the factories in his father's absence. Influenced by Robert Dale (his father), whose theory of social reform was based on cooperation, practical education, and humane working conditions, he emigrated with his father to America (1825) to set up the New Harmony Colony in Indiana. Unfit for manual labor, the son taught school there and edited the New Harmony Gazette. The community failed (1827) and he would later criticize its participants as "lazy theorists" and "unprincipled sharpers." (His father returned to England in 1828.) Known for practicality in the application of social ideals, he nonetheless came under the influence of Frances Wright and the "Free Enquirers," a liberal group that advocated an early form of socialism. Moving to New York to join the group's inner circle (1829), he edited the Free Inquirer and helped form the Association for the Protection of Industry and for the Promotion of National Education. Joining his father in England (1832), he coedited The Crisis with him for six months, then returned to New Harmony where he served three terms in the Indiana legislature (1836–38) and was able to secure large-scale public school funding. He also served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1843–47). Appointed chargé d'affaires at Naples (1853) and then minister (1855–58), he embraced spiritualism in Italy. On his return to the U.S.A. (1858), he became a leading advocate of the emancipation of slaves; commissioned to purchase arms for the state of Indiana (1861–63), he wrote an influential pamphlet, The Policy of Emancipation (1863). As chairman of a national committee to study freed slaves, he wrote The Wrong Slavery (1864). He was also the author of an autobiography and several novels.