Utopianism

UTOPIANISM. An age-old longing for a society based on harmony and happiness, often merging with the modern ideals of material growth and personal fulfillment, utopianism has played a fundamental role in the development of modern American society and culture. It has also profoundly influenced oppositional or alternative theory and practice during eras of prospective change. In turn, waves of utopianism have often been followed by institutional submergence or ideological displacement into personal salvation, consumerism, and/or nationalist rituals such as war and imperial adventures.

Before 1870, utopianism tended to be defined by the perfectionist thought of the premodern world. “West” on the compass of the Radical Reformation was the direction of human salvation, and many European religious perfectionists established outposts in the New World. Secularization and the beginnings of industrialism added new components. The three modes of utopianism—political, communal, and literary/popular culture—resonated with the millennial passions of Protestant America in the early nineteenth century. Broad reform tendencies such as abolitionism and woman’s rights raised ideological challenges containing a religious-Utopian premise of sin and salvation. Utopian communes, even in the secular form of Fourierism and Owenism, attempted to escape from corrupt society. An element in the ideological ascension of laissez-faire, utopianism represented a desire to find alternative ways of reconstituting a moral universe in which one could be true to one’s own nature. Despite the advocacy of such leading intellectuals as Frances Wright and Horace Greeley, such personal perfectionism did not seriously threaten rising capitalism.

Toward the end of the century, however, the material hardships and moral corruption imposed by monopoly capitalism returned utopianism to public concern. Literary Utopias flourished, with hundreds of authors assaying the possibilities of future, better societies, sometimes displaced to undiscovered lands, or even to distant planets. Among them, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was not only by far the bestselling, but also the most emblematic. While criticizing the profound inequalities of contemporary life, most Utopian authors were, like Bellamy, unwilling or unable to conceptualize the future without some form of political or intellectual elite. Their own commitment to an ideology of Christian socialism or populism could not overcome their fears about the conflicts that emerged in the contest between capital and labor. Such middle-class utopianism looked to the state as an active instrument in balancing class forces and in facilitating progress and prosperity.

Meanwhile, a number of working class-based socialist movements of the 1880s–1890s viewed Utopian communalism as an opportunity to challenge state power through example. Eugene V. Debs’s followers, many from the defunct American Railway Union, thus saw in the short-lived Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth a vehicle to translate utopianism into a vanguard movement for workers’ independence and self-development somewhere in the West. Like most other such experiments of the time—the single-tax colony at Fair Hope, the socialist Ruskin cooperative in Tennessee, and the anarchist communities at Home and Equality on Puget Sound in Washington, and a number of contemporary immigrant socialist experiments—the Brotherhood faded to the political margins. These nevertheless provided important experiences in social change and helped create a leadership for the mass-based Socialist Party to follow, in which the Utopian journalism of a J. A. Wayland and the act of creating colonies gave way to creating socialist propaganda, waging strikes, and seeking political power.

What little utopianism existed in the era of Debsian Socialism usually served the purpose of groups seeking to escape particular environments (such as the Stelton, New Jersey, Colony of mostly removed New York anarchists) or to deal with the collapse of the Socialist movement (such as the Llano Colony). Utopianism resumed during the 1930s in a different and much less radical guise, chiefly under the auspices of the New Deal. Drawing in part from the back-to-the-land sentiments of communalists such as Ralph Borsodi, the Jersey Homesteads, for instance, sought to create a cooperative environment for displaced urban workers. Other New Deal communal projects extended the role of the state in the pursuit of deurbanization and welfare capitalism. Even non–New Deal Utopian communities of the 1930s, like the anarchist Sunrise Colony in Michigan (composed of a number of veterans from Stelton), became ensnared in various New Deal agencies. In several other instances, however, Utopian longings reflected nostalgic yearnings for the closed communities advocated by such right-wing political and religious fundamentalists as Dr. Francis E. Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin.

The Utopian content of working-class and Black struggles tended to be translated into unions and Left parties, as outlined ideologically in the “proletarian literature” movement with its icons of class. Dystopian fears in such works as Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), and more subtly in the hard-boiled detective and film noir genres, suggested utopianism turned on its head, into the ideologies of the total society against the individual, a condition obvious in fascism, Stalinism, and the mass culture of welfare capitalism.

The 1960s returned utopianism to central concern and gave it the new tasks of challenging the legitimacy not only of the state, but also of materialism and “progress.” This was, to a considerable extent, a “children’s crusade.” Countercultural activities of the young received the theoretical blessing of social critics such as Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, in the search for liberation from the repressiveness of subtly repressive institutions and of bourgeois daily life. The political call for participatory democracy appealed to many of the same Utopian desires as the search for new cultural lifestyles, the musical taste for Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, or the literary taste for Samuel R. Delany, Marge Piercy, and Ursula Le Guin.

For a brief moment in history, communal experiments flourished once more. Reflecting a split between political activism and cultural retreat, burned-out radicals tried to “get back to the Garden” (as a song lyric from the Woodstock Festival put it) with self-conscious social experiments in the rural areas of Vermont, New Mexico, California, and Oregon. The more widespread “hippie communes,” scattered mostly across the western states, offered a generally vague sense of escape from industrialism. In the cities, many young people established more-or-less collective living styles, replicating in some ways the vanishing extended families of their ancestors. Few communes of any kind survived the tests of time and change.

The quest for utopia did not perish, despite these failures. By the early twenty-first century, the Foundation for Intentional Community, which began in 1937, listed more than 1,200 active communities comprising at least 100,000 people and spread across the continent and beyond. Disappointment or disgust with social, political, and environmental crises encouraged a new generation to experiment with alternative living arrangements, although few cast these efforts within the framework of the Left. It was more the sense, as one scholar concluded, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and these innovators hoped to salvage a bit of their heritage for posterity. Some of these communities took the form of co-housing, with few utopian aspirations. Others, some very small in size, harkened back to the principles of nineteenth-century communalism. For example, small The Mothership of Portland, Oregon, described itself as a “queer-friendly, child-centric community home” that shared equally all resources and responsibilities, including child-care.

In the realm of literature and film, speculative or science fiction continued to straddle the desire for utopian and dystopian narratives, including the extraordinarily popular The Hunger Games (2012-2015), a commercially-successful depiction of a power elite versus and the oppressed that culminates in a revolution lacking reference to the historic Left.

Jennings, Chris. Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopias. New York: Random House, 2016.

Klaw, Spencer. Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Le Warne, Charles Pierce. Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885–1915. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975.

Roemer, Kenneth M. America as Utopia. New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1981.

Shor, Francis. “The Utopian Project in a Communal Experiment of the 1930s: The Sunrise Colony in Historical and Comparative Perspective.” Communal Studies 7 (1987).

Reece, Erik. Utopias Drive: A Road Trip Through America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Stargisson. L. Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.