Question

Who was the leading English manufacturer who sought to build a cooperative community called ‘New Harmony' in Indiana (USA)?
1. Louis Blanc
2. Daniel Johnson
3. Friedrich Engels
4. Robert Owen 

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 4 : Robert Owen 

• By the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, socialism was a well-known body of ideas that attracted widespread attention.
• Socialists were against private property, and saw it as the root of all social ills of the time.
• Because they think that individuals owned the property that gave employment but the propertied were concerned only with personal gain and not with the welfare of those who made the property productive.
• So if society as a whole rather than single individuals controlled property, more attention would be paid to collective social interests. Socialists wanted this change and campaigned for it.
• Socialists had different visions of the future. Some believed in the idea of cooperatives.
• Robert Owen (1771-1858), a leading English manufacturer, sought to build a cooperative community called New Harmony in Indiana (USA).
• Other socialists felt that cooperatives could not be built on a wide scale only through individual initiative: they demanded that governments encourage cooperatives.
• In France, for instance, Louis Blanc (1813-1882) wanted the government to encourage cooperatives and replace capitalist enterprises. These cooperatives were to be associations of people who produced goods together and divided the profits according to the work done by members.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) added other ideas to this body of arguments.
• Marx argued that industrial society was ‘capitalist’. Capitalists owned the capital invested in factories, and the profit of capitalists was produced by workers. The conditions of workers could not improve as long as this profit was accumulated by private capitalists.