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( Robert Owen)
Robert Owen (14 May 1771, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of socialism and the cooperative movement. Owen's philosophy, which Karl Marx would later name utopian socialism, was derived from three fundamental pillars of his thought. First, he believed that no one was "responsible for his will and his own actions" because "his whole character is formed independently of himself." Owen firmly believed that people were the product of their environment, which fueled his support for education and labour reform. His views made Owen a pioneer in the promotion of investment in human capital. Owen's second pillar was his opposition to religion. Owen felt that all religions were "based on the same absurd imagination" which he said made mankind "a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite." However, he did embrace Spiritualism towards the end of his life [1]. His third pillar said that he disliked the factory system, and supported the cottage system. Owen was born in Newtown, a small market town in Montgomeryshire, 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. 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. 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.
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