ABSTRACT
In England, where the industrial revolution was furthest advanced, Robert Owen's basic psychological assumptions were Benthamite; this was true even though Marx called him a "utopian socialist". Owen did proceed from the hedonistic criterion of the greatest happiness. In Owen's view Bentham mistook a transient and relative motive for the permanent culture. Locke and liberal environmentalism was an obvious part of Owen's heritage. Owen did propose that people are subject to the processes of persuasion. Owen's criticism of egotism was an aspect of his approach to communal personality. Owen's blasts at individualism were not really a criticism of too much freedom, but an attack on the oppression which this principle had given rise to socially. Owen gives up the problem of politics by fusing it with society, reasoning the problem of freedom out of existence. Owen's socialist thought contained elements of continuity with nineteenth-century liberalism, although he wanted to eliminate its achievements in connection with the problem of politics itself.
