Robert Owen
13 Dec 2006
There are several noteworthy early socialists. Some examples are: (1) Henri de Saint-Simon, the founder of French socialism (2) Charles Fourier, a French utopian socialist who coined the word “feminism” (3) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-proclaimed “anarchist” (4) Alexander Herzen, who is known as the “father of Russian socialism,” and (5) Ferdinard Lassalle, a German socialist who founded the General German Worker’s Association, which would later become the Social Democratic Party of Germany. As intriguing as a study of early socialists would be, we’ve elected to limit ourselves to the study of only one.
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welch socialist. He is considered the father of the cooperative movement, which spawned what we know today as co-ops—economic ventures jointly owned and governed by all involved. Owen started out as a successful and benevolent factory owner in Scotland. His operation of a textile factory in Scotland’s New Lanark gained him considerable renown. Along with kindly looking after the welfare of his textile workers, Owen also built an extremely profitable business, a twofold feat unheard of and greatly heralded in his day.
With his business success under his belt, Owen decided to capitalize on the tourists coming to New Lanark to see his social experiment in the textile industry. He convinced himself that the same policies he had enacted in his New Lanark factory could be used to build a utopian community made up of self-contained agricultural settlements. Owen dubbed these settlements “Villages of Cooperation.” With the enlistment of a few thousand tourists and local enthusiasts, Owen launched his utopian scheme at New Lanark. Although he was convinced that his villages would soon take Britain by storm his New Lanark utopia never caught on nor materialized.
Believing Britain to be too blind to see the possibility of his envisioned utopianism, Owen set sail for America in 1824. Here, he hoped to turn his imagined utopia into a reality. Having purchased—lock, stock and barrel—a thriving town in Indiana named New Harmony, Owen recruited settlers by promising to build the world’s first socialist utopia. Once recruited, Owen brazenly announced to New Harmony’s residents, “I am come to this country, to introduce an entire new state of society…To change it from the ignorant, selfish system, to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interest into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.”
Like any good socialist, Robert Owen rejected the idea of original sin and believed in man’s innate goodness. He believed man to be imprisoned by a trinity of evils. In a speech he delivered in New Harmony’s Public Hall on July 4, 1826, Owen bemoaned the fact that “man, up to [that] hour, [had] been, in all parts of the earth, a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race.” What were these “monstrous evils” that encumbered the whole human race and kept it from creating heaven on earth? According to Robert Owen, man was enslaved by the triple chains of: (1) “Private or individual property,” which Owen believed should be eliminated from all societies forever (2) “Absurd and irrational systems of religion,” which Owen believed should be wiped off the face of the earth, and (3) “Traditional social order,” especially traditional marriage and morality.
Once freed from the selfish ambition spawned by personal reward (property), the superstitions of irrational religions, and the suffocating restrictions of traditional customs and morals, man would be free to follow his heart to worldwide utopia. Well, anyway, that’s what Robert Owen believed. In spite of his diehard socialist beliefs, Owen’s faith never became sight in New Harmony. In less than two years Owen’s socialist experiment slid into comic ruin. Rather than proving themselves to be magnanimous, industrious, and decent, the liberated socialists of New Harmony proved themselves to be selfish, shiftless, and decadent.
Dismissing the failure of his socialist experiment in America to the lack of sincerity among New Harmony’s settlers, Owen returned home to England with his socialist ideas intact. Despite being repudiated by the miserable failures of socialist experiments on two continents, Owen still insisted that socialism was humanity’s only path to utopia on earth. The only problem with socialism that Owen was ever willing to concede was that it was an idea before its time; in other words, the world of his day was simply not ready to make the quantum leap to the socialist’s Shangri-La.
Seeing the problem as an unenlightened world, not as a foolhardy and untenable philosophy, Owen decided to dedicate the rest of his life to enlightening men about socialism. What better way to do so than by starting a “church” of socialism? Yes, Owen literally built a church of socialism. He appointed socialist bishops and wrote hymns to socialism. Unlike his failed socialist experiments, however, Owen’s socialist “church” really took off, splintering into multiple groups, as religions are apt to do, and becoming one of the fastest growing “religions” in human history.
Since the days of Robert Owen, socialism has grown phenomenally in our world. More than half of today’s world lives under some kind of socialist regime; this, despite the fact that socialist regimes killed more than 150 million people in the last century alone. Furthermore, socialism is responsible for the impoverishment of billions and for ripping to shreds the social fabric of countries as diverse as Kenya, Russia and China.
When asked on his deathbed if he regretted wasting his life on fruitless projects, Robert Owen, who has been called by some “the kindly Papa of Socialism,” answered: “My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.” Has Robert Owen’s time finally come and will his utopian socialism give rise to the Biblically predicted tyranny of the end times? Time will tell.
Don Walton
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