Yeni Toplum Görüşü ve Lanark Raporu

by Robert Owen, Lâle Akalın (Translator)

Book by Owen, Robert

Genres: Utopia

216 pages, Paperback

Published September 28, 2006

About the author

In 1771, reformer and philanthropist Robert Owen was born in Wales. He became known as "a capitalist who became the first Socialist." Owen started work as a clerk at age nine. With help from a sympathetic cloth merchant to whom he was apprenticed, Owen educated himself. Owen was an unbeliever by 14, influenced by Seneca, and his acquaintance with chemist John Dalton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By 18, Owen established a small spinning mill in Manchester. He married the daughter of a Glasgow cotton manufacturer, purchasing his father-in-law's New Lanark mills in Scotland. Owen set out to put his humanitarian creed into practice, and turned New Lanark into a model community attracting the attention of reformers around the world.

Owen set up the first infant-school in Britain, and a three-grade school for children under ten. He appealed to the government and other manufacturers to follow his lead, but was rebuffed by clergy-led opposition when his views on religion became widely known. At a public meeting calling for "villages of unity and cooperation," living wages and education of the poor at the City of London Tavern (Aug. 21, 1817), Owen called "all religions" false. He sought to limit hours for child labor in mills in 1815, and saw passage of a watered-down Factory Act in 1819. Owen's Essays on the Principle of the Formation of Human Character (1816) were his major treatises, in which he advised: "Relieve the human mind from useless and superstitious restraints."

He founded New Harmony, a model settlement in Indiana, in 1825-28--a failed venture which he signed over to his sons Robert Dale and William Owen. Owen wrote Debate on the Evidences of Christianity (1829). Owen founded the Economist in 1821 to promote his progressive views, and The New Moral World in 1834, along with an ethical movement called "Rational Religion." His "Halls of Science" attracted thousands of nonreligious followers ("Owenites") and the trade unions. Owen founded several other publications. His autobiography was published in 1857-58. Joseph McCabe called him "the father of British reformers, and one of the highest-minded men Britain ever produced." (Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists, 1920). D. 1858.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Polyani listed 'the three facts of the consciousness of Western man: knowledge of death, knowledge of freedom, knowledge of society.' he attributed the first two points to the Old Testament and Jesus, respectively. For the third he gives Robert Owen as having come closest to being a single name that can be attached to teasing-out knowledge of society. The Old Testament, Jesus, … Robert Owen? I'd never even heard of him, let alone in a line up like that.

Clearly he is by no means an unknown – his writing is still in print – but the lack of reviews of his main work here gives some indication of how little he is read in comparison to his contemporaries. There are some clear reasons for this. One of them, as the editor to this edition puts it, is that Owen's 'style was only occasionally lucid […] His books were repetitive and ill-planned' and that's just on page 1! This lack of coherence shows in Report To The County Of Lanark, where a reader could easily conclude that Owen's main goal was that everyone should wear kilts while replacing all ploughs with spades (for the good of society, of course). New View, on the other hand, is very readable: the sectioning generally makes sense and the sparingly used italicised lines emphasise the key points. It's not perfect by any means, but he was hugely influential, or at least notorious, at the time (even if little ultimately came of this influence) and his position of being an industrialist himself gives his writing a distinctive context.

[Connor Dunne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read by a man who was undoubtedly ahead of his time on a number of areas, be it on education, workers rights, removing the youngest children from the workforce, treating crime as a symptom of a poorly constructed society rather than the act of the individual, just to name a few.

Viewing his work from a modern lens I may disagree with his utopian quest of reform, he is clearly a necessary figure. It is directly due to his works that we have so many social programs today. He is truely a once in a generation person.