ABSTRACT

The Report to the County of Lanark is by far the best and most comprehensive exposition of Robert Owen’s social doctrines. In it, he is for the first time fully speaking his mind, and expounding his Plan, not as a mere expedient for the relief of unemployment, but as the basis of an alternative social order. Clearly, Owen urges, this deficiency of employment arises from some defect in the mode of distributing the “extraordinary addition of new capital” which the Industrial Revolution has produced. In the new villages Owen aims at destroying the evils of the division of labour. Owen begins with the currency question, then a theme of violent controversy in connection with the younger Sir Robert Peel’s Act of 1819, under which cash payments, suspended since a short while after the outbreak of the wars following the French Revolution, were to be gradually restored.