Robert Owen was a manufacturer. We find him at the age of twenty years already the manager of a great cotton-mill. Soon after he established a mill at Lanark. Here he learned practical life by personal experience. We distinguish two periods in his life. In the first he is what we may call an educationalist, a man who interests himself especially in the education of youth and expects through it an essential reformation of human society. The chief work of this epoch is the book _A New View of Society_. In the second period he is a socialist; and his most important work is _A Book of the New Moral World_. Owen really interests us in this second period, as a socialist. What does he thus teach? And what is the essence of this first form of utopian socialism?
Robert Owen takes as the starting-point for his theorising the investigations which he made in his immediate surroundings. He pictures to us the state of affairs in connection with his own manufactories; how the workers, especially the women and children, degenerated, physically, intellectually and morally. He begins also with a recognition of the evils which distinguish the modern capitalistic system; his starting-point is proletarian. Upon these investigations of his own he now builds a social-philosophic system which is not unknown to one who has studied the social philosophy of the eighteenth century. Owen's social philosophy is essentially characterised by this, that he believes in man as good by nature, and in an order of communal life which would in like manner be naturally good if only these men were brought into proper relations with each other--faith in the so-called _ordre naturel_, in a natural order of things which has possibly existed somewhere, but which in any case would exist, were it not that artificial hindrances stand in the way, evils which make it impossible for man to live in this natural way with others. These evils, these forces, which stand in the way of the accomplishment of a natural communal life, Robert Owen sees of two kinds: one in the faulty education of men, the other in the defective environment in which modern man lives--the evils of a rich _milieu_. He infers logically, if we would again realise that natural and beautiful condition of harmonious communal life, that _ordre naturel_, both these evils must be driven out of the world. He demands, therefore, better education on the one side, a better environment upon the other. In these two postulates we find side by side the two periods of his development as we have heretofore seen them. In the first he lays stress rather upon education; in the second, rather upon change of environment. He recognises, further--and this is perhaps the particular service rendered by Owen to socialistic theory--that these evil conditions, on the overcoming of which all depends, have not been provided by nature, but have grown out of a definite system of social order, which he believes to be the capitalistic. In the capitalistic economy he sees nothing of that natural law which the representatives of the classical economies assert; but an order of society created by man. Even his opponents believed in the _ordre naturel_, only they thought that it was realised; Owen did not. Much more, Owen was compelled to demand the overthrow of this economic system in order that his goal might be reached, that man might be able to enjoy a better development and a better environment. For this reason he demanded that the artificial economic system should undergo essential changes, especially in two points, the main pillars upon which the economic system is built. Owen repudiated the competition of the individual and the profit-making of the master.