Owen@250

Abstract

This essay takes the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Robert Owen’s birth in 1771 to review some scholarship in the field since the last major commemoration of the event in 1971. It then contends that were Owen alive today he would apply his leading ideas on the relationship between wants, needs, and social progress to the climate catastrophe looming over us now. As is evident in Owen’s works and in various communal experiments associated with the Owenite movement, a clear sense of exchanging unnecessary consumption with free time and creative activity emerged as early as the 1820s. Owen himself was particularly hostile to changes in fashion, insisting on a more stoic and Spartan approach to clothing in general. In the Owenite movement, however, a trend developed which was less puritanical in its approach to consumption, and argued instead that developments in production might well furnish the means to permit luxuries of various kinds to flourish in the new social system.