In 1800, a young Welsh factory manager did something no one had ever tried before: he treated his workers like human beings. He raised their wages, shortened their hours, built schools for their children, and - to the astonishment of absolutely everyone - made more money than ever.
His name was Robert Owen, and he was just getting started.
Twenty-five years later, Owen bought a town in Indiana and invited the world to come live in it - without money, without private property, without competition. The experiment lasted two years. Most historians call it a failure. This book respectfully disagrees. Two years of people fed, sheltered, and given the freedom to figure out who they were is not a failure. By that standard, every life that ever ended would be one.
A New Harmony traces Owen's extraordinary journey from the cotton mills of Scotland to the prairies of America, and then forward - to our own age of artificial intelligence, automation, and the looming question that Owen asked two centuries before anyone was ready to hear it: What happens when people no longer need to work to survive? Will they flourish, or fall apart?
Along the way, the book takes cheerful detours through the comfortable hypocrisy of Friedrich Engels, the untested confidence of Karl Marx, the birth of the cooperative movement, the strange modern world of corporate wellness programs, and a small house in the Canadian woods where, for nine years, a very different kind of social experiment quietly proved that Owen may have been right all along - just two hundred years too early.
Warm, witty, and deeply humane, A New Harmony is not a book about how to fix the world. It is a book about a man who tried - and about why trying is the whole point.
Keywords: Robert Owen, utopian socialism, New Lanark, New Harmony, basic income, automation, cooperative movement
