Owen, Robert (1771–1858)

Robert Owen was a contemporary of G. W. F. Hegel. Owen's name is well known among academics, but he is not often the subject of research. His work appears in discussions in socialist circles. Further research would show how relevant his work is; it is rich in ideas about how to solve modern social problems and how to overcome environmental crises by reorganizing production and consumption.

Owen was a self-taught and self-made man. He received only a primary education in Newtown (County Powys) in Wales and an apprenticeship in London. But he developed a good grasp of the sophisticated questions of social, moral, and political philosophy and political economy. He was influenced mainly by 18th-century French philosophers, particularly by P. H. T. d'Holbach. But the primary source of his knowledge was the conditions of the working class in Britain. Therefore, all his intellectual and political activities and theoretical and practical knowledge were devoted to improving the conditions of the working class.

Owen wanted to change the world and open up a new epoch in the history of humanity. His main thesis was that throughout history, humanity had been acted upon by circumstance. But it was time now that human beings expressed their own agency and acted upon their circumstances. All his experiments and works contain in their titles the word new. His experiment in New Lanark in Scotland (1800–1825), though in many senses revolutionary, was still an experiment to show how the profit of the owners of the means of production could be improved by improving the conditions of the working class. The only experiment that might be classified as socialist was New Harmony between 1825 and 1829 in Indiana in the United States. In all his experiments he paid particular attention to the education of children, and in his educational experiments he combined theory and practice. After the failure of his experiment in Indiana, he was involved in publishing periodicals. He introduced the term socialist into social and political philosophy.

Ever since Friedrich Engels's distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, Owen has been seen as a utopian socialist. But he was not a utopian in the sense that he was naïve and hoping to change the world by experimenting with small-scale socialist settlements. With his experiments he wanted to stimulate the imagination, to show practically that production can be organized on the principle of meeting people's needs and that a new society can be established throughout the world on the principle of internationalism. He was [Page 1072]aware of the fact that this would require huge effort. If he was a utopian, then, it was in the sense that he thought that this effort could be made by capitalists who were interested merely in improving their profit and by statesmen who were interested primarily in enlarging their powers and empires. But having seized power, even Lenin suggested that one must return now to Owen to learn how to build a socialist society or in Owen's words a New Moral World.