Social reformer who emphasized education and cooperation
In A New View of Society (1816) Owen argued that “any general character may be given to any community by the application of proper means,” a principle he later tested at New Lanark and New Harmony.
A Welsh-born British manufacturer and social reformer, Owen sought to improve working, living and educational conditions at New Lanark. In A New View of Society he argued that environment and education form human character. He later pursued cooperative and communal experiments. Marx and Engels’ classification of Owen as a utopian socialist is a later, polemical interpretation. His early reform proposals should be distinguished from the International Working Men’s Association’s emphasis on workers’ self-emancipation.
Career timeline
- 1792Became manager of the Piccadilly Mill in Manchester.
- 1800Bought the New Lanark mills with partners in 1799 and managed them from January 1800.
- 1824–1827Led the New Harmony community experiment in Indiana, which was dissolved in 1827.
- 1828Settled in London, championing cooperatives, the trade union movement and child labour legislation.
- 1832Opened the National Equitable Labour Exchange, based on labour notes.
- 1834Briefly led the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union before its collapse in 1834.
- 1835Formed the Association of all Classes of all Nations and served as its first leader.
Former miner who founded the British Labour Party and opposed the First World War to the end, urging an anti-war general strike
Elected to Parliament in 1892 after organising miners, Hardie helped lead the Independent Labour Party and the new Labour movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, he campaigned against the conflict.
Born into poverty in Scotland and working in the pits from about the age of ten, he rose as a miners’ organiser to become in 1892 the first working-class member of parliament. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and became Labour’s first parliamentary leader in 1906, supporting women’s suffrage and Indian self-rule. At Copenhagen in 1910 he proposed a general strike in the arms industries to prevent war. He attended the Brussels Bureau meeting of July 1914 and opposed the war until his death in 1915.
Career timeline
- 1881Led the first strike of Lanarkshire miners.
- 1892Elected for West Ham as an Independent Labour candidate and entered Parliament.
- 1893Helped form the Independent Labour Party and was elected its first chairman and leader.
- 1906Elected Labour leader in the House of Commons; resigned in 1908.
- 1914–1915Campaigned as a pacifist against the First World War.
He raised the workers' flag and the republic's on a single staff
Too wounded to stand, he was shot tied to a chair — Kilmainham Gaol, 12 May 1916
A socialist revolutionary who fused Marxism with Irish national liberation. He founded the Irish Citizen Army, commanded the Dublin Brigade in the 1916 Easter Rising, and was executed by the British after its suppression.
Career timeline
- 1896Founds the Irish Socialist Republican Party
- 1903–1910IWW organizer in America
- 1910–1914Leads the ITGWU through the 1913 Dublin Lockout
- 1910Published Labour in Irish History
- 1913Founds the Irish Citizen Army
- 1915Published The Re-Conquest of Ireland
- 1916.04Easter Rising — Dublin commandant, signatory of the Proclamation
- 1916.05Shot at Kilmainham Gaol
