In A New View of Society, Owen argues that, since individuals are wholly formed by their environment, education is the crucial factor in transforming them. Later he came to adopt far more radical positions, proposing nothing less than 'the emancipation of mankind' and the creation of a 'new moral world', a full-scale reorganization of British society, major reforms of working practices and the Poor Laws and the establishment of co-operative model.

Robert Owen (14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. In 1824, Owen came to America to invest the bulk of his fortune in an experimental 1,000-member colony on the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, called New Harmony. New Harmony was to be a utopian, or ideal/perfect, society.