Robert Owen - A New View of Society and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

Robert Owen was born in Newtown, Wales, on 14 May 1771, the son of a saddler and ironmonger who was also the local postmaster. As a child, Owen already possessed a determined and forceful personality: later his blithe dismissal of criticism would infuriate even close followers. He loved nature but read literature, history, travel, and biography voraciously, and by the age of seven was assistant to the local schoolmaster. Though religiously inclined, he later recalled, Owen at ten concluded that all existing theologies were erroneous.for his great industriousness, he moved to a similar, better-paid post in London four or five years later, and then another in Manchester. Soon he had learned three things which were to prove crucial to his subsequent career: the art of turning a profit, a sense of the debasing nature of selling and its frequent reliance upon dissimulation, and a feel for cloth.

At the age of seventeen Owen thus found himself in Manchester, which was then just becoming the leading centre of cotton-manufacturing in Britain. Most spinning and weaving still took place at home. But forms of production were quickly being altered by technical developments, notably the invention of Samuel Crompton's mule for producing fine yarn and the introduction of the steam-engine in place of water power at the end of the eighteenth century. Owen soon saw the implications of these changes, and not only in terms of the rapid expansion of production, but equally the increase in urban overcrowding, the rising rate of disease and premature death, and the intensification of work and discipline in the new factories.

Arriving in 1788, Owen remained twelve years in Manchester. The progress of his career was meteoric. By 1790, at the age of nineteen, he had acquired from loans, his savings, and a fortuitous partnership three spinning-machines worked by three labourers. When the position of manager of the first large cotton-spinning mill fell open, however, Owen offered his services. Soon superintending 500 men and women, he was enormously successful, vastly increasing the quality of the cotton spun, and quickly becoming the owner's partner.notoriously liberal views on marriage, little is known of their subsequent relationship, though Owen was very tolerant of his wife's more orthodox religious opinions.)

When Owen arrived at New Lanark he already believed that the new factories provided an ideal venue for behavioural experimentation, and that the vices of the labouring classes, increasingly assailed by evangelicals in particular, could be eliminated through correct training, thorough supervision, and management on principles of justice and kindness. Within a decade, New Lanark was renowned throughout Europe both for its approach to labour and for the quality of its cotton thread, which brought Owen and his partners a highly lucrative trade. The factory workforce itself comprised some 2,000 people, including about 500 pauper children apprenticed from local workhouses. When Owen commenced, he complained that the workers were frequently drunken, prone to theft, and dishonest. Within a dozen years, he later boasted, they were models of industry, sobriety, and orderliness, thanks to his New Views, as they came to be called, of education and management.

How did Owen accomplish this considerable feat? His approach at New Lanark was not socialist. Not only was the word not used until the late 1820s, but Owen had no conception of profit-sharing at the mills, and no dream of eliminating competition, which he would later describe as the chief cause of unemployment and much other social distress. Instead he sought to eradicate vice without punishment and without wielding religious threats, by offering a healthy education and a reasonable working and living environment for his labourers. The latter were not easily convinced of his good intentions. But gradually, through Owen's persistent kindness it was the quality which all who ever met him most frequently recalled and especially after being paid full wages in 1806 when an American embargo on cotton exports halted production, they were won over. Nevertheless, Owen not only enjoyed extremely high profit margins, but still employed children from the age often (he wished to raise this to twelve). Most of his labourers also worked the usual load of fourteen hours daily until 1816, when hours were reduced to twelve. Owen himself sought to reduce these further to ten per day, but was frustrated, as he often was at New Lanark, by his partners' wish solely to buy cheap and sell dear. Exasperated in turn by Owen's experimental whims, the partners tried to force him out. But Owen found new investors and acquired the mills on better terms to himself. Upon his return to New Lanark, the townspeople astounded his new partners by unhitching his horses and joyfully pulling his carriage through the village.