Robert Owen And

HE Co-operative Movement was in its early days described by William Hazlitt as “a slip of Owenism grafted upon a stock of common sense”. This metaphor is not merely more apt, but also more accurate, than to call Owen the “father” of Co-operation. For one thing, there were co-operatives in Britain before Owen enunciated his plan of a new society, and even before he was born. Voluntary associations, some of them with philanthropic participation or encouragement, for self-supply of flour, bread or other victuals or for carrying on a trade in a common workshop, were known from the middle of the 18th century onwards. They represented, as P. A. Kropotkin pointed out, a very natural recourse to mutual aid as a means of getting the best living possible out of barely adequate money wages, or perhaps of increasing those wages. They also represented Hazlitt’s “stock of common sense”, and since no nation possesses a monopoly of common sense they had their counterparts in other European countries already under the shadow of the impending industrial revolution. T