The Social Father

As a leader of the early campaign to limit child labor, Robert Owen urged factory owners to practice the benevolence that the Third Earl of Shaftes­bury had vaguely praised. Jeremy Bentham urged Owen on, investing in one of his humanitarian textile mills.

Members of the Parliamentary Committee considering restrictions on child labor expressed the fear that children under ten would be lazy and spoiled if not required to work. Owen insisted that his own experience at New Lanark showed that time spent in school made older children better workers. He also argued, with great prescience, that children could benefit enormously from education beginning at the age of three.⁴

Owen's followers sometimes referred to him as ‘‘The Social Father”, and virtually everything he wrote was infused with parental solicitude. If the title evoked traditional reverence for the heavenly Father, it also called attention to Owen’s disinterest in all forms of religion, which he considered little more than superstition.⁵ Owen combined a humble sense of obligation toward the dispossessed with almost insolent disregard of cultural and religious precedent. Today he would probably be termed a secular humanist. The term secular paternalist would be more apt.

Owen's criticisms of the Church, like his advocacy of rights to divorce, invited derision from most supporters of the status quo. He was sometimes labeled an infidel. Yet his unwearying idealism neutralized at least some of the acid poured upon his reputation. He condemned all forms of violence. He denounced slavery. He campaigned tirelessly on behalf of reduced working hours for children and public education. Having made a fortune in manufacturing, he proceeded to invest his profits in efforts to develop a more egalitarian society. A good husband and committed father, he was by most accounts unfailingly courteous and kind.

He may have controlled his anger by channeling it into condescension. Owen viewed adults, like children, as innocent, unformed, blameless creatures. Conceding that men and women often behaved in selfish ways, he explained that they had been trained to do so. A social system based on cooperation would, he believed, foster greater concern for others. This argument was not far-fetched. Psychologists today (though not economists) treat the development of social affection and moral values as a stage of maturation.⁶ Families and schools shape children's emotional, as well as cognitive intelligence.⁷

Owen's insistence that young children are malleable challenged the aristo­cratic conceit that heredity—or good breeding—determined character. But he carried his argument to metaphysical extremes reminiscent of theological doctrines that denied free will. On a more practical level, he aroused concerns regarding the extent to which men and women could be retrained—and by whom. Even his close supporters balked at the suggestion that men should not be held accountable for their own actions.⁸ One of the subjects advertised for public discussion at a meeting of the London Co-operative and Economical Society in 1824 was the following question: ‘‘Is the position of Mr. Owen correct, that man is not properly the subject of praise or blame, reward or punish- ment?''⁹ Given the framing, it is difficult to imagine anyone shouting ‘‘yes.''

Like Che Guevara, who would issue an even more urgent call for a ‘‘new socialist man'' in the twentieth century, Owen seemed to think the possibilities for heroic reconfiguration were within reach, but failed to explain exactly how it would take place.

He was initially uninterested in expansion of the franchise, writing his manifestos for a political elite whose cultivated intelligence he always praised and whose motives he seldom questioned. It seemed self-evident to him that employers, even slave owners, would benefit from treating workers well.11 He addressed his first public tract, A New View of Society, to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, explaining the necessity not merely of educating, but of reforming the character of the poor and working classes. '2The Book of the New Moral World, prefaced by a letter to His Majesty William IV, reiterated the vision of a rising generation that could be educated to superior social conduct.¹³ In 1833, he published ‘‘An Appeal to the Rich”, and in ‘‘Revolution by Reason” he proclaimed that ‘‘This great change... must and will be accomplished by the rich and powerful.” On his final trip to America, Owen appealed ‘‘To the Capitalists.”¹⁴

This strategy often won him attention, if seldom agreement, from those in power. Not surprisingly, it also infuriated his natural constituency within the working class. ‘‘Why re-moralize the poor and not the rich?” asked Thomas Wooler in the radical magazine Black Dwarf, adding his own prescription: ‘‘Reduce the herd of locusts that prey upon the honey of the hive and think they do the bees an essential service!”¹⁵