A legacy of ‘propagandist action’: Robert Owen, the paradox of working-class pedagogy, and the making of Britain’s co-operative movement

Abstract

What’s the secret of British co-operation’s success? This essay argues that one answer to that question is: adult education. Drawing from cultural hegemony theory and historical literature, it shows that Robert Owen’s revolutionary philosophy of education fired many campaigns and institutional innovations: to dispel “false beliefs”; propagate a “rational social system”; and advance collective aspirations for “self-improvement”. Both an educational visionary and social reformer, Owen’s passion for “propagandist action” thus laid unique discursive foundations for Owenist-socialism’s enduring legacy of popular education. It also drove British co-operation’s emergent counter-hegemony to the investor-owned firm through three overlapping waves: early Owenism’s founding-prophetic tradition, which subordinated co-operative shops to “villages of co-operation”; the local-democratic pedagogy that subsequently emerged around those shops; and the movement-spanning professionalism that defines Britain’s contemporary educational institutions. Accounting for this sustained tradition of educational activism thus helps explain British co-operation’s durability. For example, its robust and wide-ranging present-day educational innovations such as the Co-operative College, Co-operative News, or the Co-operative Party are artefacts of this distinctive legacy. Lessons from the British experience thus illustrate the potential to build on adult education’s evolving promise, with significant conceptual and strategic implications beyond British shores.