This volume consists of twelve essays from leading scholars and younger researchers on various aspects of the life, work and legacy of Robert Owen (1771-1858). A radical thinker and humanitarian ...employer Owen made a major contribution to nineteenth-century social movements including co-operatives, trade unions and workers’ education. He was a pioneer of enlightened approaches to the education of children and an advocate of birth control. He established utopian communities in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America, and is often thought of as a leading early British socialist.
This paper argues that the present‐day disagreements over the right course for sociology and its public role are reflected and paralleled in contemporary historiography of Robert Owen, British social ...reformer and a self‐described social scientist. Historical accounts, written from the perspectives of public sociology, “pure science” sociology, and anti‐Marxism, interpret Owen's historical role in mutually antithetical and self‐serving ways. Contrasting the three presentist accounts, I engage in an analysis of “techniques of presentism”—history‐structuring concepts, such as “disciplinary founder” and “disciplinary prehistory,” that allow presentist authors to get their effects. Along the way, I elaborate Peter Baehr's classification of sociology's founders.
Jeremy Bentham invested an important amount of money in New Lanark's cotton mills, which at that time were run by Robert Owen. However, apparently Bentham never took a serious interest in the ...organisation of such a successful entrepreneurship and new model society, although it seemed to fit in with Bentham's ideas of the entrepreneur ('projector') and also with Bentham's ideas on social reform, seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This article explains how Bentham's share in New Lanark came about. It tries to ascertain whether the New Lanark experiment and Owen's ideas fit Bentham's managerial theory and ideas on social reform so as to understand why Bentham did not pay more attention to Robert Owen's practice.
The efforts toward the colonization of Texas 1820s attracted a motley collection of adventurers and speculators, each with his own plan to found a successful colony. Most of these efforts would fail, ...and the results of the Texas Revolution would open an entirely new chapter in the history of the region. Regardless, no proposal towards colonization in Texas was quite like the one offered by arguably the most visionary applicant in the period: Robert Owen. Owen, a successful Welsh industrialist, was renowned in literate circles as a social and educational reformer. A prolific writer, Owen had written extensively on the reformation of society based on principles that rejected the supernatural (i.e. organized religions) and promoted new enlightened principles of human relations that broke from past models of human organization. Here, Herrera discusses Owen's view of utopian society.
The aims of education, and the appropriate means of realising them, are a recurring preoccupation of utopian authors. The utopian socialists Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) ...both place human nature at the core of their educational views, and both see education as central to their wider objective of social and political transformation. The greatest philosophical difference between them concerns human nature: whereas Owen saw character as plastic and open to creation, Fourier saw it as God-given and liable to discovery. The most striking practical difference concerns their institutional recommendations: whereas Owen saw schooling as taking place in largely conventional spaces, Fourier sought to integrate education into the community-his ideal society contains no schools and no teachers. Both authors had some (limited and often indirect) practical influence on educational practice, despite the failure of their wider ambitions for social reform.
Robert Owen's "Declaration of Mental Independence," declaimed on the Fourth of July, 1826, was one of the most ill-received speeches in the early Republic. The attendant controversy provides an ...opportunity to theorize invective's role in democratic culture. Invective was useful in the early Republic, and continues to be useful today, because it is both constitutive of national identity and a curative rhetoric for managing cultural anxiety. However, there are limits to what invective can achieve, and invective's place in democracy is consequently ambivalent. Rather than curing democratic anxiety, invective tends to perpetuate it, disrupting democracy's emphasis on controlled conflict and pushing it ever closer to violence.
This article argues for utopianism, an activity which has all too often been denigrated by socialists. Its starting point is Donnachie and Mooney's article for issue 35(2) of Critique on the ...connection between Robert Owen and Tony Blair, in which their shared utopianism is viewed as a key element in their class collaborations and flight from the reality of capitalism's voracities. Whilst I do not argue against most of the criticisms made of Owen and Blair, I take issue with the implied anti-utopianism of Donnachie and Mooney's critique, a position they draw on from Marx and Engels. In contrasdistinction I argue that Marx and Engels (in spite of themselves) were great utopians, that utopianism needs to be seen as a broad method of social investigation (being counter-revolutionary as well as revolutionary but ground worth fighting for-not just a flight of fancy), and that socialism is and always has been impoverished by attempts at discursive closure or, as the dystopian Zamyatin would put it, Fantasiectomy (the surgical removal of the imagination). Whereas the utopian imagination has come to be associated with the monographic fantasy of a powerful or charismatic individual, our solution should lie in the democratization of the political imagination, of the imagining of the 'best of all possible worlds', rather than in its abandonment. The latter approach merely leaves fallow ground to be occupied by those already with a voice, such as Owenites and Blairites, rather than encouraging the historically silent to speak for the first time, freed from the anti-utopian restraint of 'well, you can only speak this way, because this is the way it has always been done'.
Historians have recognized Alexander Campbell as the leading figure in an important American Christian reform movement, an advocate of Christian unity, and an educator, but his role as an apologist ...has been forgotten. This book focuses on Campbell's career as a defender of the faith, arguing that he was "the most significant Christian apologist of America's antebellum period." He contended with some of the most notable skeptics of his era, most famous among them Robert Owen, founder of New Harmony. Martin E. Marty says regarding Campbell, "No clergyman of his time exerted himself more vigorously in combat of the infidels of the period." This groundbreaking book supports this claim with in-depth treatment of these debates.
