| Summary: | This chapter takes a closer look at the emergence of utopian socialism. The earliest written use of the term socialist has been traced to a letter in the 1820s from Edward Cowper, an inventor and engineer, to Robert Owen. The latter was a successful industrialist who became renowned for reforms he introduced at the factory he ran at New Lanark in Scotland, as a campaigner for Factory Acts, which would improve the conditions of workers, and as the advocate of planned communities modelled on New Lanark, which would serve as sanctuary islands of socialism in an ocean of capitalism. Owen's proposals were rooted in a very different understanding of human nature — he accepted John Locke's account of the human mind as a blank slate that was shaped by what was empirically perceived through the five senses and agreed with Jean Jacques Rousseau that human relations could and should be remade in accordance with enlightened reason. Owen's proposals for social engineering inspired some social experiments and a wider sense that an alternative future to laissez faire capitalism was possible.
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