OWEN, ROBERT. - Socialist, b. at Newtown on 14 May 1771, d. there on 17 Nov. 1858. A theorist of social thought and a maker of reforms, he is among the most suggestive figures of English socialism. The evolution of his thought and of his practical activity runs from what Dolléans defines as employer paternalism (when, in the New Lanark cotton mill, of which he was part-owner, O. implemented complex welfare measures for the workers) to the subsequent stage in which he postulated a sort of agrarian communism "authoritarian and communal," but prepared and encouraged by the government itself.
Many of his attempts as an organizer failed (among them the colony of New Harmony, founded in the United States in 1825), but R. O. remains one of the principal theorists of pre-scientific socialism, in which the vision of a future society, having reshaped from scratch the "character" of man (which depends on the economic situation as well as on education), centers on a specific "automatism" of the good: O. accepts only the concept of a rational religion and accuses the clergy of binding humanity to the chains of an artificial society. Favorable to the policy of high wages, he stands on this side of "industrial" communism: the labor theory of value remains realizable within the circle of free associations or cooperatives. The struggle that O. waged against "profit" (despite the failure of the practical attempts to abolish it, among them the Labour exchange bank, 1832-34), passed to later socialism as its most important legacy.
Bibliography4 works
Massimo Petrocchi