The utopian spirit as we have been discussing it, is revealed through the written words of men who were critical of the world they lived in and dreamers of a better world. What we cannot forget is that there have been many instances of groups of people who believed strongly enough in the possibility of improving their lot to attempt the founding of new communities planned according to their ideal principles. Invariably such an undertaking has required a move from the “old country” that they found intolerable to a new, open territory. For this reason, America of the nineteenth century furnished admirable opportunities, and there were scores of such group settlements throughout the United States and Canada, large and small, successful and abortive. Some of these communities have endured through a good many generations, particularly those with a pronounced strain of pietism: the Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkards.
Fourierism exerted a wide influence in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. The author of the doctrines was Charles Fourier, who wrote Traite’ de I’ Association Domestique Agricole (1822) and Le Nouveau Monde Industriel (1829). The leader of the movement in America was Albert Brisbane. An influential convert was Horace Greeley. Of the numerous communities, or phalanxes, the most famous was Brook Farm, which attracted the attention of Hawthorne, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and members of the Alcott family. An interesting plan for such a community was discussed quite seriously by Coleridge and Robert Southey to be called “Pantisocracy,” but it did not materialize. A more practical group established a settlement at New Harmony, Indiana, under the leadership of a Scottish industrialist named Robert Owen. A second French utopist, Etienne Cabet, after writing a utopian novel entitled Le Voyage en Icarie (1840), established his own community, first in Texas, then later in Nauvoo, Illinois. Other successful communities deserving special mention are the Oneida (N.Y.) Community; the Shakers, with villages in eight states about 1840; the Amana Community, still thriving in Iowa; and the Hutterites, with communities from the Dakotas through western Canada. In modern Israel the communal settlements called Kibbutzes operate on principles and under regulations closely resembling those described in More’s Utopia.
No two communities were identical in purpose and operation, but certain aspects of the utopian norm appear frequently. Many of them followed the plan of community of property, equality in sharing labor, community rearing of children, simplicity and uniformity of dress, avoidance of luxury, rigid codes of behavior, pacifism, and a government by selected elders. All of this is obviously reminiscent of More’s island commonwealth.
For students wishing to understand fully the extent of interest in the creation of imaginary commonwealths and fascination over accounts by mariners of remote regions, certain other works of fiction not precisely utopian ought to be examined. Examples are: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire’s Candide (especially the Eldorado episode), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and Herman Melville’s Typee.
Still further afield from sailors’ tales of island kingdoms but nevertheless enlightening in the broad study of man’s aspirations toward a better world, one may consider some of the more sober expository documents such as: Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and his Social Contract, De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Carlyle’s Past and Present, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, and Engel’s “On Authority” from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
