(Preview) The Socialist Who Bought a Town

Robert Owen was a factory owner, a social reformer, the father of British socialism… and possibly the nicest company-town tyrant in history.

Long before Karl Marx called for revolution, Owen tried to build a kinder version of capitalism: humane factories, universal education, shorter work days, and workers treated like human beings instead of expendable machinery.

His model industrial town at New Lanark became world famous, attracting kings, intellectuals, and even the Tsar of Russia.

But success convinced Owen he could go further. So he sold everything and moved to Indiana to build a socialist utopia from scratch. What followed was a chaotic experiment involving communal child rearing, endless committee meetings, militant intellectuals, religious clashes, labor shortages, and eventually… the ghost of Thomas Jefferson.

In this episode, Heaton travels to Scotland to explore the strange rise and catastrophic collapse of Robert Owen's alternate-universe socialism—and asks whether history might have looked very different if Owenism, rather than Marxism, had become the dominant socialist tradition.