ABSTRACT
The men who lived through the period of decisive economic change that links the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together had no doubts about its revolutionary character. Robert Owen had much in common with the apostles of the new economic order. He became himself a great industrialist, and he was never for a moment in doubt about the triumph of the machine and of large-scale production based upon the new sources and instruments of power. Owen was like some other great employers of the time, in that he set out to create, not so much a factory, as an industrial community—a whole social system based on a productive unit. From 1824 to 1829 Owen spent most of his time in America, paying only brief visits to Great Britain in order to look after his factory at New Lanark. Against dominant doctrine of blessings of capitalist competition, Owen preached gospel of social co-operation and of society organised as Co-operative Commonwealth of producers.
