Owen, Robert (1771–1858)

ROBERT OWEN, CONSIDERED the father of the cooperative movement, was born in Newtown, Wales. His father was a saddler and ironmonger. While he was an intelligent boy who did very well at his local school, his father nevertheless sent him to work in a large drapers in Stamford, Lincolnshire. After spending three years in Stamford, Owen moved to drapers in London. This job lasted until 1787, and now aged 16, Owen was employed at a large drapery business in Manchester.

At the age of 19, he became manager of a cotton mill employing 500 people, and in just a few years, thanks to his administrative skill, he became manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company in Manchester. After his marriage to Caroline Dale in September 1799, Owen purchased four textile factories in New Lanark for £60,000 from David Dale, his father-in-law.

When Owen assumed the control of the New Lanark factory, more than 2,000 people were employed, [Page 803]500 of whom were children. Many of them were as young as 5 and were working for 13 hours a day in the textile mills. He immediately stopped employing children under 10 and reduced the labor of those over that age to 10 hours a day.

He greatly improved housing, opened a store where the people could buy quality goods at little more than cost price, and placed the sale of alcohol under the strictest supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. Convinced that education was of the utmost importance in the developmet of a person, he was the first to found infant schools in Great Britain.

A firm believer that a person's character is shaped by the environment, Owen was convinced that by creating the right environment, good and humane individuals can be produced. Like ancient Greek philosophers, he argued that people are deterministically influenced by the way they are raised or treated. Consequently he banned physical punishment in all schools in New Lanark. His views were embodied in his first work, “A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character,” an essay appearing in 1813. While Owen's views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, his originality was to be found in his bold and benevolent application of those views.

In his report to the House of Commons regarding the Poor Laws, Owen asserted that poverty had been primarily caused by the competition between human labor and machinery. His proposal to alleviate poverty was a call for united human action and the subjugation of machinery. The basic recommendation was the formation of 1,200-person communities, each settled on a piece of land ranging from 1,000 to 1,500 acres. People would live in one large building in the form of a square and use a public kitchen. Each family would enjoy its own apartment, and children after the age of 3 would be brought up by the community. Initially Owen's plans for the cure of poverty were well received. The leading newspapers, The Times and the Morning Post, as well as the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria, were impressed by his ideas. However, Owen's personal animosity to “all the received forms of religion” provoked strong opposition to his theories.

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