Free English Literature Essays - What was more important in defining Robert Owen's views on society: enlightened ideas or his practical experience as an employer?
The famous human and social rights campaigner, Robert Owen, remains an enigmatic figure in the history of the Industrial Revolution. Owen, the sixth child of a prosperous working class family, began training from the age of ten as a draper. Moving to Manchester after his apprenticeship in 1787, however, brought Owen to the heart of the English Industrial Revolution. Beginning a career in industrial enterprise, Owen quickly achieved success as the owner and manager of the famous New Lanark spinning factory in Scotland. It is clear from Owen’s enthusiastic campaigns for worker rights and education that he was profoundly affected by his direct involvement in industry and which prompted him to begin his campaign to improve working conditions. Owen was more than an idealistic businessman; his ideas were informed by Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment thought, and as a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Manchester he was a vital part of the progressive ideas which defined the group. It is impossible to determine the extent to which Owen’s social theories were born out of his practical experience within industry and direct contact with the working-class, or whether they were the result of his exposure to Enlightenment ideals. Both were equally influential in shaping Owen’s life-long dedication to social activism.
Owen’s A New View of Society, printed in 1816, makes obvious his passion for education as the key to widespread social change. Believing strongly in the effect of environment upon individual well-being, he focuses on issues such as education, sanitation, and worker safety. As John Locke stated in his 1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, “I think I may say that, of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. 'Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind”. Owen, too, believed that education was the key to the advancement of the human race. Clearly a believer in the formative effects of nature rather than nurture, Owen reasoned that improved circumstances would have a positive effect on moral well-being and thus was not simply the means to individual success, but to social advancement as well. His educational theory, therefore, was born out of Enlightenment ideals.
New Lanark, established in 1785 by David Dale, began as a vision of enlightened industry. Dale provided care for the young children of workers, and ensured they were given adequate food and clothing. When Owen jointed New Lanark, he was continuing in a social conscious model provided by Dale; however he spent his first twelve years remodelling and modernizing the factory and raising the quality of life of the workers and their families. New Lanark quickly became the model of a modern workers’ community and writers, politicians and businessmen visited the factory to see the model community in practice. Owen reversed the standard of labour which had come to represent the dark side of the Industrial Revolution. By shortening the working day, modernizing the factory and homes of the workers, providing care and education for children, Owen enacted his own philosophies of social welfare within the practicable context of the mechanised structure of the industrialised world.
Robert Owen believed very strongly that it was the responsibility of the employer for the well-being and care of their employees. Using his own New Lanark mill as an example, he enacted radical changes for his time such as reducing the hours of work for children, outlawing physical punishment, and encouraging his workers to attend school. Although his factory was successful, Owen came to realise that even a conscientious employer would relieve the cycle of social ills rather than solving them. He says, As employer and master manufacturer in Lancashire and Lanarkshire, I had done all I could to lighten the evils of those whom I employed; yet with all I could do under our most irrational system for creating wealth, forming character, and conducting all human affairs, I could only to a limited extent alleviate the wretchedness of their conditions, while I knew that society, even at this period, possessed the most ample means to educate, employ, place, and govern, the whole population of the British Empire, so as to make all into fully-formed, highly intelligent, united, and permanently prosperous and happy men and women, superior in all physical and mental qualities (Owen, 1858).
Education is clearly an important component of the humanism which emerged from the Enlightenment. The educator, in Owen’s model the employer, had an obligation to provide an environment which would nourish both mental and physical development in a child. Championed as the ‘steam engine of his new moral world’, education became a rallying cry for many social activists of the period.
The targeting of education was far from random; Owen based his vision of social reform through education on the idea that a solid system of education would alter the moral fabric of the working class, and filter up into good governance. He challenges his readers to:
[…] enter any one of the schools … and request the master to show the acquirements of the children. These are called out, and he asks them theological questions to which men of the most profound erudition cannot make a rational reply; the children, however, readily answer as they had been previously instructed; for memory, in this mockery of learning, is all that is required. Thus the child whose natural faculty of comparing ideas, or whose rational powers, shall be the soonest destroyed, if at the same time, he possess a memory to retain incongruities without connection, will become what is termed the first scholar in the class; and three-fourths of the time which ought to be devoted to the acquirement of useful instruction will be really occupied in destroying the mental power of the children.
Owen applies philosophy to his observation, implementing education for all child labourers and children of workers too young to work. Education, far from being an tool given to the working class to open opportunities of advancement, was viewed as a tool of moral order. It was only through education that children would be taught moral righteousness; therefore education was an ethical tool. Owen’s dedication to education is admirable, but his reasoning is clouded by his idealism.
Owen was not just a businessman concerned with his workers’ welfare; his vision of social change was much broader. In A New View of Society (1816) Own calls for social change across a spectrum, using his own business of New Lanark as example. Although New Lanark proved a socially conscious enterprise could be financially successful, Owen’s philosophies were more socialist than capitalist. In 1824 Owen ventured beyond business to found New Harmony, Indiana, which was what he called a Community of Equality. His communitarian principles were ultimately unsustainable, but his model for modern industry remains an inspiration for modern activists and businessmen alike.
Convinced that his utopian visions were not only workable but necessary, Owen credited his background in business at New Lanark for the practicality of his models. He describes how his ideals are inspired by observation:
[I]t must be evident to those who have been in the practice of observing children with attention, that much of good or evil is taught to or acquired by a child at a very early period of its life; that much of temper or disposition is correctly or incorrectly formed before he attains his second year; and that many durable impressions are made at the termination of the first 12 or even 6 months of his existence.
Critics have noted, however, that the financial records at New Lanark reveal Owen to a typical entrepreneur, more hard-headed businessman than righteous philanthropist. Although he claims that his philosophies are derived from direct experience in the mills, Owen’s socialist vision of equal societies do not coincide with his capitalist actions. After the failure of his communes in America, Owen returned to Britain to continue to campaign for social welfare reform through similar avenues such as trade unions and cooperatives. Owen’s philosophies become increasingly idealistic, referring to his pet cause of education as the ‘New Moral World’. Although Owen protested that his interest in education was born out of his direct experience in business, he clearly shapes his campaign as a moral revolution.
Robert Owen was a man undeniably dedicated to campaigning for social welfare reform during the Industrial Revolution. It is impossible, however, to determine whether it was his personal experience in the industry which ultimately shaped his philosophies, or whether it was his inspiration from Enlightenment theorists. What is clear is that Owens became deeply affected by his involvement with New Lanark in particular, and his direct experience in the business and every day experience of factory work tempered his idealism.
Works Cited
Owen, R. A new view of society, or essays on the principle of the human character and the application of the principle of practice. London: Cadell & Davies, 1813.
--- The life of Robert Owen: written by himself. vol. 1. London, Effingham Wilson, 1858.
Stewart, W.A.C.; McCann, W.P. 1967. The educational innovators. vol. 1. 1750–1880. London, Macmillan
