'''Robert Owen''' (Newtown, Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of Spiritualism towards the end of his life <ref>(O'Hara, 2006, p.75)</ref>. His third pillar said that he disliked the factory system, and supported the cottage system.  

==Biography==
thumb|left|250px|A portrait of Robert Owen

===Early life===

Owen was born in Newtown, Powys, then a small market town in Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales. He was the 6th child, out of 7. Here his father had a small business as a saddler and ironmonger. Owen's mother came from one of the prosperous farming families; here, young Owen received almost all his school education, which terminated at the age of ten. After serving in a draper's shop for some years, he settled in Manchester.

===Commercial Success in Manchester (1790)===

He very rapidly gained success. When only nineteen years of age he became a worker of a cotton mill employing one hundred people, and by his administrative intelligence and energy soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory, Owen used the first bags of American sea-island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first sea-island cotton from the Northern States. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun; and indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade. In 1794 or 1795 he became manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester.

===Philanthropy in New Lanark (1800)===
During a visit to Glasgow he fell in love with Caroline Dale, the daughter of the New Lanark mill's proprietor David Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark, and after his marriage with Caroline in September 1799, he set up home there. He was manager and part owner of the mills (January 1810). Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton mills in Manchester, he hoped to conduct New Lanark on higher principles and focus less on commercial principles.

The mill of New Lanark had been started in Dale and Clyde made it a great attraction. About two thousand people had associations with the mills. Five hundred of them were children who were brought at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of the workers were in the lowest levels of the population;  theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were neglected; and most families lived in only one room. The respectable country people refused to submit to the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the mills.

Many employers operated the truck system, whereby payment to the workers was made in part or totally by tokens. These tokens had no value outside the mill owner's "truck shop." The owners were able to supply shoddy goods to the truck shop and still charge top prices. A series of "Truck Acts" (1831-1887) stopped this abuse. The Acts made it an offence not to pay employees in common currency. Owen opened a store where the people could buy goods of sound quality at little more than cost, and he placed the sale of alcohol under strict supervision. He sold quality goods and passed on the savings from the bulk purchase of goods to the workers. These principles became the basis for the Co-operative shops in Britain that continue to trade today. 

His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. He was the founder of infant schools in Great Britain, especially in Scotland. Though his reform ideas resemble European reform ideas of the time, he was likely not influenced by the overseas views; his ideas of the ideal education were his own. 

Though at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. The mills continued to have great commercial success, but some of Owen's schemes involved considerable expense, which displeased his partners. Tired at last of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wished to conduct the William Allen, were content to accept just 5% return on their capital, allowing Owen a freer scope for his philanthropy. In the same year, Owen first authored several essays in which he expounded on the principles which underlay his education philosophy.

Owen had originally been a follower of the classical liberal and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. However, as time passed Owen became more and more socialist, whereas Bentham thought that free markets (in particular, the rights for workers to move and choose their employers) would free the workers from the excess power of the capitalists. 

From an early age, he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considered an entirely new and original discovery. The chief points in this philosophy were that man's character is made not by him but for him; that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame. These principles lead up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man's character is to place him under the proper influences - physical, moral and social - from his earliest years. These principles - of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences - form the key to Owen's whole system of education and social amelioration. They are embodied in his first work, ''A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character,'' the first of these essays (there are four in all) appearing in 1813. Owen's new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them.

thumb|275px|Robert Owen's house in [[New Lanark.]]
For the next few years Owen's work at New Lanark continued to have a national and even a European significance. His schemes for the education of his work-people attained to something like completion on the opening of the institution at New Lanark in 1816. He was a zealous supporter of the factory legislation resulting in the Lord Liverpool, and with many of the rulers and leading statesmen of Europe. 

New principles were also adopted by Robert Owen in raising the standard of goods produced. Above each machinist's workplace, a cube with different coloured faces was installed. Depending on the quality of the work and the amount produced, a different colour was used. The worker then had some indication to others of his work's quality. The employee had an interest in working to his best. Though not in itself a great incentive, the conditions at New Lanark for the workers and their families were idyllic for the time.

New Lanark itself became a much frequented place of pilgrimage for social reformers, statesmen, and royal personages, including Nicholas, later emperor of Russia. According to the unanimous testimony of all who visited it, New Lanark appeared singularly good. The manners of the children, brought up under his system, were beautifully graceful, genial and unconstrained; health, plenty, and contentment prevailed; drunkenness was almost unknown, and illegitimacy was extremely rare. The relationship between Owen and his workers remained excellent, and all the operations of the mill proceeded with the utmost smoothness and regularity. The business was a great commercial success.

===Plans for alleviating poverty through Socialism (1817)===
thumbnail|left|250px|Robert Owen is commemorated with this statue in [[Manchester.]]
Hitherto Owen's work had been that of a philanthropist. His first departure in House of Commons on the Poor Law.

The general misery and stagnation of trade consequent on the termination of the Napoleonic Wars was engrossing the attention of the country. After tracing the special causes connected with the wars which had led to such a deplorable state of things, Owen pointed out that the permanent cause of distress was to be found in the competition of human labor with machinery, and that the only effective remedy was the united action of men, and the subordination of machinery.

His proposals for the treatment of poverty were based on these principles. Communities of about twelve hundred persons each should be settled on quantities of land from 1000 to 1500 acres (4 to 6 km²), all living in one large building in the form of a square, with public kitchen and mess-rooms. Each family should have its own private apartments, and the entire care of the children till the age of three, after which they should be brought up by the community, their parents having access to them at meals and all other proper times. 

These communities might be established by individuals, by counties, or by the state; in every case there should be effective supervision by duly qualified persons. Work, and the enjoyment of its results, should be in common. The size of his community was no doubt partly suggested by his village of New Lanark; and he soon proceeded to advocate such a scheme as the best form for the re-organization of society in general. 

In its fully developed form - and it cannot be said to have changed much during Owen's lifetime - it was as follows. He considered an association of from 500 to 3000 as the fit number for a good working community. While mainly agricultural, it should possess all the best machinery, should offer every variety of employment, and should, as far as possible, be self-contained. "As these townships" (as he also called them) "should increase in number, unions of them federatively united shall be formed in circles of tens, hundreds and thousands", till they should embrace the whole world in a common interest.

In ''Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race'', Owen asserts and reasserts that character is formed by a combination of Nature or God and the circumstances of the individual's experience. Owen provides little real evaluation of the subject but agrees with socrates' general overview.

===Community Experiment in America (1825)===
thumb|400px|[[New Moral World, Owen's envisioned successor of New Harmony. Owenites fired bricks to build it, but construction never took place.]]
At last, in 1825, such an experiment was attempted under the direction of his disciple, Abram Combe, at Orbiston near Glasgow; and in the next year Owen himself commenced another at New Harmony, Indiana, U.S.A. After a trial of about two years both failed completely. Neither of them was a pauper experiment; but it must be said that the members were of the most motley description, many worthy people of the highest aims being mixed with vagrants, adventurers, and crotchety, wrongheaded enthusiasts, or in the words of Owen's son "a heterogeneous collection of radicals... honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in."

Josiah Warren, who was one of the participants in the New Harmony Society, asserted that community was doomed to failure due to a lack of individual sovereignty and private property. He says of the community: "We had a world in miniature &mdash; we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. ...It appeared that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ...our "united interests" were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation..." (''Periodical Letter II'' 1856) Warren's observations on the reasons for the community's failure led to the development of American individualist anarchism, of which he was its original theorist.

200px|thumb|ロバート・オウエン 
'''ロバート・オウエン'''（'''Robert Owen''',1771年5月14日 - 1858年11月17日）は、イギリスの社会改革家。

==人物==
人間は環境によって変えられる、とする環境決定論を主張した。ニュー・ラナークで繊維工場を経営する事業家だったが、低所得の労働者階層の実情を目の当たりにし、幼少の子どもの工場労働を止めさせ、性格改良のための幼児の学校を工場に併設。性格形成学院と名づけた。幼児教育の最初の試みで、幼稚園の生みの親といわれるフリードリヒ・フレーベルよりも先んじて、就学前の子どものための学校を実践。教室での掛け軸の利用など、教育方法にも工夫を凝らした。

また協同組合などの事業も手がける。後、アメリカに渡って私財を投じてインディアナ州において共産主義的な生活と労働の共同体（ニューハーモニー村）の実現を目指すが成功しなかった。エンゲルスらから、サン＝シモン、フーリエなどと共に空想的社会主義者と評されつつも、挙げた実績に関しては高い評価を受けた。

著書に、『ロバート・オウエン自伝』、『新社会観』がある。
日本国内に、ロバート・オウエン協会がある。

== 関連項目 ==
* ロッチデール先駆者協同組合
* 産業組合
* 信用金庫