Robert Owen, (born May 14, 1771, Wales—died November 17, 1858, Newtown), Welsh manufacturer turned reformer, one of the most influential early 19th-century advocates of. His New Lanark mills in Lanarkshire, with their social and industrial welfare programs, became a place of pilgrimage for statesmen and social. He also sponsored or encouraged many experimental “ ”, including one in, U.S. Early lifeOwen was the second youngest of seven children of Robert Owen, the postmaster of Newtown, and Anne Williams.
He attended local schools until the age of 10, when he became an apprentice to a clothier. His employer had a good library, and Owen spent much of his time reading. His reading of books on religious controversies led him to conclude at an early age that there were fundamental flaws in all religions. Excelling in business, by the time he was 19 he had become superintendent of a large mill in, and he soon developed it into one of the foremost establishments of its kind in Great.
Sosialisme muncul sebagai reaksi dari faham liberalism ekonomi dan kapitalisme modern yang muncul akibat revolusi Industri. Beberapa tokoh yang sangat gigih dalam memperjuangkan perkembangan paham sosialisme antara lain Robert Owen, Saint Simon, Charles Fourier, dan Karl Marx. Robert Owen lahir pada 14 Mei 1771 di daerah North Wales, meninggal pada 17 November 1858 (usia 87 Tahun), ia adalah anak yang cepat dewasa dan berasal dari keluarga golongan menengah, ayahnya adalah seorang pengusaha besi dan kepala kantor pos, ia selalu menghargai pendapat maupun pribadi anak-anaknya. Tetapi tetap menjalankan disiplin serta menentang penghukuman badan terhadap anak.
Owen made use of the first American Sea Island cotton (a fine, long-staple fibre) ever imported into Britain and made improvements in the quality of the cotton spun. On becoming manager and a partner in the Manchester firm, Owen induced his partners to purchase the New Lanark mills in Lanarkshire. Success atThere were 2,000 inhabitants of New Lanark, 500 of whom were young children from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children, especially, had been well treated by the former proprietor, but their living conditions were harsh: crime and vice were bred by demoralizing conditions; education and sanitation were neglected; and housing conditions were intolerable. Owen improved the houses and—mainly by his personal influence—encouraged the people in habits of order, cleanliness, and thrift. He opened a store that sold sound-quality goods at little more than cost and strictly supervised the sale of alcoholic beverages. His greatest success was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention.
In 1816 he opened the first in Great Britain at the New Lanark mills and gave it his close personal supervision. The schools, which and other traditional methods, emphasized character development and included dancing and music in the curriculum. Although Owen initially was regarded with suspicion as an outsider, he quickly won the confidence of the people, especially because of his decision during an embargo against the during the to pay wages to the workers while the mills were closed for four months. The mills continued to thrive commercially, but some of Owen’s schemes entailed considerable expense, which displeased his partners.
Frustrated by the restrictions imposed on him by his partners, who emphasized profit and wished to conduct the business along more ordinary lines, Owen organized a new firm in 1813. Its members, content with a 5 percent return on their capital and ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy, bought out the old firm. Stockholders in the new firm included the legal reformer and utilitarian and the Quaker William Allen. Get unlimited ad-free access to all Britannica’s trusted content.Philosophy of social reformIn 1813 Owen published two of the four essays in, in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based.
Having lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion, he developed his own creed that he took to be an entirely new and original discovery. The chief point in Owen’s was that man’s character was formed by circumstances over which he had no control. For this reason, man was not a proper subject of either praise or blame. These led him to the conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man’s character was to place him under the proper influences from his earliest years. The nonresponsibility of man and the effect of early influences were the hallmark of Owen’s entire system of education and social amelioration. For the next few years, Owen’s in New Lanark was to have a national as well as a European significance.
New Lanark became a place of pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal personages, and, according to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, the results achieved by Owen were singularly good. Children brought up on his system were generally felt to be graceful, genial, and unconstrained; health, plenty, and relative contentment prevailed; and the business also was a commercial success.In 1815 Owen a meeting of manufacturers and successfully lobbied them to support the removal of import taxes on cotton. However, his proposal to reduce the number of hours that children could work in the mills was defeated.
His agitation for factory reform met with little effect, and by 1817 his work as a practical reformer had given way to the still vital ideas that were to make him the forerunner of socialism and the movement. Owen argued that the competition of human labour with machinery was a permanent cause of distress and that the only effective remedy lay in the united action of men and the subordination of machinery to man. His proposals for the treatment of pauperism were based on those principles.Owen recommended that villages of “unity and cooperation” be established for the unemployed. Each village would consist of about 1,200 persons on 1,000 to 1,500 acres (400 to 600 hectares), all living in one large structure built in the form of a square, with a public kitchen and messrooms. Each family would have its own private apartment and the entire care of their children until the age of three, after which they would be raised by the. Parents would have access to them at meals and all other proper times. Owen believed that such communities could be established by individuals, by parishes, by counties, or by the state; in each case there would be supervision by duly qualified persons.
Work and the enjoyment of its results would be shared collectively.The size of the projected community had been suggested by that of the village of New Lanark, and Owen soon advocated an extension of the scheme to the reorganization of society in general. His plan would establish largely self-contained, mainly agricultural communities of between 500 and 3,000 people that would be equipped with the most modern machinery. As the communities increased in number, he wrote, “unions of them, federatively united, should be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and thousands,” until they embraced the whole world in a common interest.