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Utopia in Action
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
Holland GossRoland Schaer |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Utopian dreams have been a part of human experience since the beginning of recorded history. In the West, utopian ideals have manifested themselves more and more frequently through real attempts at social and political change since the late eighteenth century. In an exhibition at The New York Public Library from October 14, 2000, to January 27, 2001, entitled "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," organized in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, curators from both libraries look at some of these attempted utopias and highlight their successes, failures and influences. |
 lthough ideal societies have been an integral part of human imagination for thousands of years in the Western world, it was not until the late eighteenth century that people began to act seriously on utopian impulses. Early ideal societies existed in another time and another place, and they were often inhabited by a specialized population: a selected group of the virtuous, the just and the chosen. The American and French Revolutions lifted the idea of utopia from the realm of literary fiction and the imagination and introduced the possibility that utopia could represent the ultimate goal of human progress. In these first large-scale efforts to reinvent society, the American and French revolutionaries attempted to bring the abstract utopian principles of liberty, equality and justice to the concrete reality of every citizen's life. |
Later, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempts to bring utopian ideals into reality took many forms. Europeans and Americans created new communities on the margins of society to act as examples to the rest of the world, and they attempted change on a larger scale by reinventing city design, social organization and political systems. |
Social utopias of the Romantic age
Born at the beginning of the industrial era, after the great upheavals of the revolutions, the numerous social utopias of the Romantic age represent varied attempts to reconstruct the moral and social universe. A growing number of social utopians based their theories on the idea of a natural evolution of society that would bring happiness to everyone as long as people were given the proper guidance. The question was not whether a utopian society could be achieved but, rather, by what means. |
Did utopia depend on allowing people to pursue their passions and work at what they liked best (Charles Fourier's notion of transforming society into self-sufficient, independent and voluntary associations)? Would a better society result from promoting scientists and artists to a new priesthood (Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon's belief that the ideal world was an industrialized state in the hands of scientists and engineers who would strive to produce things useful to life)? Or was it a matter of improving the "character" of future generations through education and psychology (Robert Owen's vision of self-contained communities where people's characters would be formed properly by placing them under the correct influences from their earliest years)? |
Gradually, on both sides of the Atlantic, these nineteenth-century utopians, whose precarious resources made them true adventurers, established communities whose example, they hoped, would inspire the creation of a rationally organized world society. |
American religious communities
The great religious revival of the mid-nineteenth century caused a surge in the popularity of Christian groups in the United States. The members of these groups, regardless of their specific affiliation, were often followers of a charismatic leader who offered a new interpretation of Christianity. |
The Shakers and the Mormons--both still in existence today--are millenarian groups, who believe it their duty to construct an ideal world here on earth. The Shakers, who believe that their founder, Mother Ann Lee, was the second incarnation of Christ, built communities based on simplicity, celibacy and worship as a way of living out the Kingdom of God. For the Mormons, constructing an earthly version of the Heavenly Jerusalem will hasten the inevitable Second Coming and assure their salvation. |
The Oneida community, which was founded in Putney, Vermont, in 1841 and moved to Oneida, New York, in 1848, believed, like the Shakers, that the Second Coming had already happened and that they were obligated to live out the just and peaceful life that followed it. To perfect their community, they practiced complete equality, selective breeding and mutual criticism--a practice whereby one member's faults were discussed by the group in order to encourage correction of his or her faults. |
The worker's dream
In Europe, until the revolutions of 1848, utopian aspirations were mostly marked by idealistic optimism, highlighting the themes of a universal republic and the fraternity among all peoples. But in the second half of the nineteenth century a distinct shift occurred. On the heels of the universal vision offered by utopias of the Romantic period, there emerged a social movement based on a vision of history dominated by class relations and the resulting bitter conflicts. Fueled by the theories of Karl Marx, socialist doctrines gave priority to the emancipation of the proletariat, or working class, through violent means when necessary, as a precondition of a future freedom. |
This view of utopia took many forms. Those who followed Marx believed in seizing the political power of the state. Anti-authoritarian anarchists felt that the organized state should immediately cede its place to loosely associated groups of individuals. In the late nineteenth century, these theories were all tested by reality, in particular during the Paris Commune, in 1871, where utopian aspirations turned to tragedy. |
The utopian machine
The twentieth century has witnessed periods of great faith in the ability of technology to improve society. Advances in technology promised a future in which the burdens of manual and household labor could be eased by electricity, robots, more efficient machines for industry and travel, and streamlined transportation designs allowing for faster speeds. The avant-garde artistic movement called Futurism took the glorification of new technology to an extreme. The movement's founding manifesto, written by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, professed a hatred of the past and promoted a frenetic exaltation of the machine and of speed. |
At the same time, the dangers of a mechanical utopia were ever present. Two world wars revealed the horrifying power of industry mobilized for global violence. Also of great and long-lasting concern was the increasing search for a mechanized alternative to human beings, in the form of robots or automatons. |
The making of a "New Man"
To many in the twentieth century, the Soviet Union represented the creation of a political utopia at the national level, on a larger scale than had ever been attempted before. By the end of the 1920s, when Joseph Stalin launched the collectivization of the land and forced industrialization, exalting model workers and the victories of "planning," the Soviet Union appeared to be a society capable of accomplishing miracles. Moreover, the universal aspect of Communism promised the future emancipation of all people in a world cleansed of exploitation and oppression. Soviet propaganda pictured a radiant future, constructing itself one day at a time. |
The reality behind the Communist societies of Eastern Europe--all of which failed before the end of the twentieth century--presented an entirely different picture: that of a dystopia, or a utopia that had turned on itself. Behind the mass mobilization demanded in the name of a bright future, there was political violence, forced labor and secret killings. The literature of the time--from the novel We, written in 1920 by Evgenii Zamiatin, to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953--describes this inversion of utopia into dystopia, where in the name of happiness a totalitarian state attempts to take over or destroy society through purges, terror and brainwashing. |
Utopia of the body
The National Socialist German Workers' Party, more commonly known as the Nazi Party, ruled Germany under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. Rather than propose a political utopia, National Socialism emphasized latent tendencies long present in Western utopian thinking, most notably the idea of eugenics, or selective breeding. As early as Plato, utopian thinkers had promoted the notion of creating "better" people, but the Nazis took the desire for racial purity to the extreme and advocated a true "utopia of the body." Nazi propaganda reveals the obsession with the creation of a perfect "Aryan" race of non-Jewish Germans, mixed with the desire for the complete subordination of the individual to the state. |
Nazi attempts to realize racial perfection had, of course, horrific consequences for those deemed imperfect or impure. The notion of exclusion, while often a component in utopian schemes, had never been taken to the level of systematic genocide practiced by the Nazis. |
The metropolis of the future
What form should the ideal city take? At the turn of the century, faced with the development of sprawling cities and urban misery, Ebenezer Howard invented the garden city, and his concern for restoring the balance between city and country in an industrial world has remained an influence on city planning to this day. In contrast to the garden city ideal, many architects and urban planners have proposed reinventing the modern industrial city. The Soviet dreams of the 1920s and the proliferation of skyscrapers in the United States in the 1920s and '30s presented new cities that expanded and broke away from the ground to conquer sky and space. Architects proposed vast projects of "contemporary industrial cities" that were rational, geometric and standardized, reflecting the industrial civilization of the masses. |
In the second half of the century, city planning was influenced by new factors. Postwar suburbs, oriented around the automobile, were intended to provide inexpensive housing for a growing population. At the end of the century, the new urbanist movement tried to correct the defects of what had turned out to be suburban sprawl. There has been increasing attention to ecological concerns, and many people have explored outer space, the ocean floor and underground areas as locations for the ideal city. |
Rejecting the past, re-creating the present
In the West, the 1960s and '70s saw a powerful resurgence in social and political movements, most of which (particularly the feminist movement) had long histories. This upsurge of radical critique left few social and political institutions untouched as people re-examined authority, the state, the family, education and personal relationships. |
The anticipated eradication of perceived evils in the world inspired utopian dreams: the Vietnam War fueled visions of peace; racial and gender injustices spurred hopes for a more egalitarian and tolerant society; awareness of environmental destruction fostered dreams of a renewed and healthy planet. Many sought an inner utopia through mind-altering drugs, spiritual enlightenment, increased self-awareness, meditation or the power of music and chanting, believing that to improve the individual would also improve society at large. |
Twentieth-century intentional communities
Intentional communities may be defined as groups of people who share the same philosophies, values and goals and who have chosen to live together. The monastic communities of the fourth century are often considered the first intentional communities in Western history. Since then, religious and secular communities have been both proposed and established for numerous reasons. |
The twentieth century brought a renewed and conscientious effort to create intentional communities with a wide range of goals. The kibbutzim--cooperative, usually agricultural, Jewish communities established in present-day Israel--got their start in 1909, and by 2000 included more than 200 communities. In the 1960s, thousands of people joined communal living situations as an act of social rebellion and in an attempt to redefine the institutions of marriage, family and the competitive economy. While most of those communities disbanded quickly, many lasted and inspired new efforts. Most of the more than 700 communities in Europe and the United States today--whether urban or rural, religious or secular, new or old--emphasize economic and social cooperation. Some communities separate themselves from the rest of society, choosing to pursue their goals in private, while others hope to serve as an example of a better lifestyle to the rest of the world. |
This story was derived from the exhibition "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," a collaboration between The New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and on view at The New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, from October 14, 2000-January 27, 2001, displaying materials from the collections of both libraries and selected other institutions. Copyright 2000 The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. All rights reserved. |
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