ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a religious discourse within Owenism, the movement which emerged around Robert Owen in the early nineteenth century and which had a significant influence upon trades unionism, cooperativism, and socialism in Britain. Such a religious discourse has been largely neglected in scholarship on Owenite socialism. This chapter identifies two functions which this religious discourse performs within the Owenite political imagination; first, in venturing social critique of existing relations of property and of moral norms; second, in asserting the possibility of, and capacity for, the achievement of change.
