(born May 14, 1771, Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales—died Nov. 17, 1858, Newtown) Welsh manufacturer and philanthropist. At his New Lanark cotton mills (Lanarkshire, Scot.), in partnership with Jeremy Bentham, he set up innovative social and industrial welfare programs, including improved housing and schools for young children. In A New View of Society (1813) he contended that character is wholly formed by one's environment.
By 1817 his work had evolved into ideas presaging socialism and the cooperative movement, ideas he would spend much of his life preaching. He sponsored several experimental utopian communities of “Owenites” in Britain and the U.S., including one at New Harmony, Ind. (1825–28)—where Owen lost some 80% of his fortune—all of which proved short-lived. He strongly supported early labour unions, but opposition and repression swiftly dissolved them, and it was two generations before socialism again influenced unionism. He was the father of Robert Dale Owen.
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