Robert Owen, born 250 years ago, tried to use his wealth to perfect humanity in a radically equal society

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Richard Gunderman, Indiana University (THE CONVERSATION) Do you have a work schedule that leaves you with enough time off the clock to rest up and handle your other responsibilities? If so, you might owe something to Robert Owen, a wealthy industrialist who was born in Wales on May 14, 1771. Owen is widely credited with being the first person to advocate for a universal ‘œeight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’� approach to work-life balance. He experimented with this concept at his own factories and urged employers everywhere to adopt this management ethos as part of the socialist ideology he embraced decades before Karl Marx. In the early 19th century, many U.S. and European factory workers worked up to 18 hours a day, six days a week. Once a year, I travel with 15 fellows enrolled in a leadership program to New Harmony. It’s the site of Owen’s greatest experiment, a ‘œcooperative community’� he founded in southern Indiana on the banks of the Wabash River. Far more radical than limiting labor to eight-hour workdays, the utopia Owen envisioned ran up against human nature. Early success and a socialist vision Owen, born into a working-class family, had virtually no formal education. By the age of 21, he was managing a textile mill, and at 28 he married the daughter of a Scottish mill owner, whose business he soon purchased. Owen rejected long hours and took steps to make child labor less exploitative. Although he paid higher wages than his competitors, the mill’s profits made him a wealthy man. Owen believed in lifelong education, establishing an Institute for the Formation of Character and School for Children that focused less on job skills than on becoming a better person. This innovation attracted considerable attention, and many dignitaries ‘” including the future czar of Russia ‘” visited to see it for themselves. But Owen’s ambitions went far beyond the well-being of his workforce. He conceived of socialist communities of people who would live together, as well as collectively prepare and eat their meals. Children would remain with their families until age 3, at which point the community would take over raising and educating them. Men and women would have equal rights. At the core of Owen’s philosophy was an earnest question: Why shouldn’t people who work together enjoy the fruits of their labor communally, promoting ‘œthe well-being and happiness of every man, woman, and child, without regard to class, sect, party, country, or colour?’� There’s a long-running debate over whether nature or nurture is the biggest factor shaping human character. Owen firmly sided with nurture. He believed in a concept then called ‘œhuman perfectibility.’� In his view, all that was necessary to create better human beings was to raise, educate and employ them in better circumstances. Creating New Harmony Owen sought to demonstrate the viability of his ideals by establishing a new community in the United States that would adhere to them. His aspirations belonged to a broader utopian movement that included the Fruitlands agrarian commune in Massachusetts and the Oneida community in New York state. Other Europeans had attempted their own real-life experiments. In fact, a German religious sect that emphasized a communal way of life was selling its southern Indiana town of Harmony, and its residents were relocating to Pennsylvania.