Conference "Robert Owen and Europe"

Monday 4 June, 2.00pm-5.00pm, Worcester College
Tuesday 5 June, 9.00am-5.00pm, Maison Française

Convenors: Michael Drolet, Worcester College, Ludovic Frobert, CNRS/ENS, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, CNRS/MFO

Robert Owen’s (1771-1858) and his followers’ ideas and experiments in community found, since the early nineteenth century, numerous resonances in Continental Europe and throughout the wider world. Despite what J.F.C. Harrison revealed some forty years ago in his pathbreaking studies on the impact Owen’s ideas and those of his followers had in the United States, significant gaps remain in our appreciation of the influence of Owen’s and his followers’ work: not least in determining the extent to which their ideas were received in Continental Europe. This workshop has been conceived with this goal in mind, and its objective is to fill many of these gaps with contributions on the early reception of Owen’s ideas in Italy, Spain, Poland and France in the first half of the 19th century.

PROGRAMME:

MONDAY 4 JUNE. 2-5pm, Hinton Room, Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre, Worcester College.

Gareth Stedman-Jones (Queen Mary, Univ. of London): “Millennium and Enlightenment: Robert Owen and the Second Coming of the Truth‘”

Thomas Bouchet (Univ. de Bourgogne): “Les fouriéristes et Robert Owen”

Michel Bellet (Univ. de St-Etienne): “La réception d’Owen par les saint-simoniens”

Michael Drolet (Worcester College, Oxford) et Ludovic Frobert (CNRS/ENS-Lyon): “Education et pédagogie dans l’owenisme de Joseph Rey”

TUESDAY 5 JUNE. 9am-12pm, Maison française d’Oxford 

Tom Hopkins (Christ’s College, Cambridge): “Liberal economists and Owenism: Blanqui and Reybaud”.

Quentin Schwanck (ENS-Lyon): “Robert Owen’s influence on French Republicanism in the first half of the 19th century: the role of former Saint-Simonians and their networks (Pierre Leroux Jean Reynaud George Sand)”.

Nicolas Eyguesier (Univ. de St-Etienne): “Robert Owen et les genevois: sa réception par Sismondi et Marc-Auguste Pictet”.

Fabrice Bensimon (Univ. College London): “Robert Owen, Etienne Cabet and London continental exiles (1830s and 1840s)”.

TUESDAY 5 JUNE. 2-5pm, Maison française d’Oxford

Ophélie Siméon (Univ. Paris 3), “‘Goddess of Reason’: Anna Doyle Wheeler, Owenism and the Rights of Women”.

José-Luis Menudo (Univ. Pablo de Olavide), Fernando Lopez Castellano (Univ. Granada): “Robert Owen’s quest for the ‘new moral world’ in a non-industrialized country”.

Riccardo Soliani (Univ. Genova) et Vitantonio Gioia (Univ. Salento): “Some notes on Owen’s reception in Italy”.

Piotr Kuligowski (Univ. Poznan): “From rejection to historicization: the reception of Robert Owen’s ideas in the Polish context in the 19th century”.