Robert Owen was a Utopian Socialist, He was also the founder and administrator of New Lanark, a model community in Scotland. Owen's career began in a textile mill in Manchester, England when he was twenty. Several years later, he bought the establishment at New Lanark, in Scotland. Modeling it on his beliefs in Utopian Socialism, within ten year the community was world famous. He later formed the New Harmony utopian cooperative in Indiana and it failed. Returning to England, he became active in the Labor movement, forming the Grand National union that promoted social change as well as his Villages of Cooperation. The union lasted for two years. Owen died in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven.
The Worldly Philosophers