“THE paradox of Robert Owen has continuing fascination. Why has he remained a central figure of the English socialist tradition even though Owenite socialist institutions failed, and his version of socialism was already outmoded before his death? 

How was it that Friedrich Engels could condemn Owen’s socialism as utopian and yet concede that “‘every social movement, every real advance on behalf of workers links itself to the name of Robert Owen’?”

John Harrison contributed this to a collection of essays celebrating the 200th anniversary of Owens birth in 1971. 

He wisely points out that each generation reinterprets great figures from the past, finding a surprising relevance in their insights and a new message and lesson for the times. 

This has been vigorously pursued 50 years on despite Covid in many online forums and meetings. Today put Owen into Google Scholar, over 10,000 entries pop up from town planning to modern management theory, and his “New View of Society” originally published in 1813 is still in print and available as a Penguin Classic. 

Owen is regularly rediscovered. In 1969 the Cambridge University Press published a collection of his writings on education beginning “Robert Owen was one of the most extraordinary Englishmen who ever lived and a great man. 

“In a way his history is the history of the establishment of modern industrial Britain, reflected in the mind and activities of a very intelligent, capable and responsible industrialist, alive to the best social thought of his time. 

“The organisation of industrial labour, factory legislation, education, trade unionism, co-operation, rationalism: he was passionately and ably engaged in all of them. His community at New Lanark was the nearest thing to an industrial heaven in the Britain of dark satanic mills; he tried to found a rational co-operative community in the US. In everything he contemplated, he saw education as a key.” 

Owen was indeed a remarkable man and Newtown, his birthplace, is one of my favourite places to visit. For a small town it has many interesting sights – the Pryce-Jones warehouse when you step off the train, the WH Smith Museum, the Textile Museum, the Oriel Davies Gallery with its rather nice cafe and shop, all these things make a trip to the town worthwhile, but it is most firmly in Wales. 

If the first sentence in this abstract is wrong how much trust can we put in the rest of it? Owen was a prolific writer but something of an unreliable narrator and much that was written about him when he was alive, while not untruthful, is less than accurate. 

George Jacob Holyoake was probably the first “Owenite” to harness Owen’s ideas. In his case for retail co-operation. There is a famous picture of Holyoake at Owen’s graveside after its refurbishment by the co-operative movement in 1902. 

It was during the first series of Co-operative Congresses held between 1829 and 1832 that Owen articulated his ideas. At the last of these Owen introduced his idea of a “rational religion” and its seven articles. The iteration of these was to echo right through until the seven principles of Co-operative identity established by the International Co-operative Alliance in 1995.  

Many of his ideas are common currency today. Owen and the Owenites introduced key concepts of “individualism,” “socialism” and “social science” to Britain. In his early works Owen argues that, since individuals are wholly formed by their environment, education is the crucial factor in transforming them. 

Famously in his four essays on the Formation of Human Character in 1812, he says: “man’s character is formed for him, not by him.”

He later came to adopt some very radical positions, proposing “the emancipation of mankind,” the creation of a “new moral world,” a full-scale reorganisation of British society, major reforms to working practices and the Poor Laws and the establishment of co-operative model colonies.    

After the home of the Robert Owen Memorial Museum in Newtown the next most important place associated with him is New Lanark in Scotland. Nowadays this factory town is a world heritage site. It was rather different in 1799 when Owen and his partner David Dale took control. 

This was the place that Owen put into practice his ideas on education. Holyoake once described Owen as his “machine-loving mentor.” In his New View of Society there is something mechanical in how Owen sees how humans tick. 

As Engels said, “Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man’s character is the product, on the one hand of heredity; on the other, of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development.”

The paradoxes that Owen throws up have been fully explored in a pair of splendid online gatherings promoted by the charismatic David Smith of Co-ops and Mutuals Wales. They took place on Owen’s birthday in May and on International Co-operatives Day in July. 

They had participants from as far away as Japan, Ireland, the US, France and Italy. There was a keynote presentation from Cork by Professor Chris Williams (author of Robert Owen and his Legacy). 

The birthday celebrations included Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford who was quizzed by a group of incredibly articulate Newtown schoolchildren on Owen’s legacy for today.  

These sessions told of a man committed to the best possible working conditions for his workers, who was in an industry underpinned by slavery, a man committed to the most enlightened forms of education but who was no democrat, the patron saint of co-operation but opposed to mere “trading associations,” a promoter of trade unionism who had written to the Home Secretary demanding the release of the Dorchester Martyrs in 1835 but was unable to turn this into a mass movement. 

There are things about Owenism that can still surprise. His view that the family was a key bastion of private property and the guardian of all the things of which he was opposed meant he was almost a proto-feminist and his utopian settlements seem like a precursor to today’s Transition Towns. 

Today however when we can see how destructive of human life and relationships capitalism can be we may better appreciate Owen’s moral critique of the capitalist society he saw being created. The millenarian fever of the Owenites meant they were easily written off as a mere sect, but I think we would be unwise to neglect this moral critique. 

As EP Thompson said, “it would be foolish… to underestimate the long and tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner…It has expressed itself most naturally in the language of moral revolt.”

David Smith has advocated that we move to establish May 14, Owen’s birthday, as Robert Owen Day. I hope he is successful.