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Short-lived, much loved

review of Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. By Chris Jennings.

The Economist, 20 February 2016

Shaker Round Barn

Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. By Chris Jennings. Random House; 488 pages; $28.

UTOPIANISM in politics gets a bad press. The case against the grand-scale, state-directed kind is well known and overwhelming. Utopia, the perfect society, is unattainable, for there is no such thing. Remaking society in pursuit of an illusion not only fails, it leads swiftly to mass murder and moral ruin. So recent history grimly attests.

Although true, that is just half the story. Not all modern Utopians aim to seize the state in order to cudgel the rest of the world back to paradise. Plenty of gentler ones want no more than to withdraw from the mainstream and create their own micro-paradise with a few like-minded idealists. Small experiments in collective living swept America, for example, early in the 19th century and again late in the 20th.

Most failed or fell short. None lasted. All were laughed at. Yet in this intelligent, sympathetic history, Chris Jennings makes a good case for remembering them well. Politics stultifies, he thinks, when people stop dreaming up alternative ways of life and putting them to small-scale test.

Though with occasional glances forward, Mr Jennings focuses largely on the 19th century. At least 100 experimental communes sprang up across the young American republic in the mid-1800s. Mr Jennings writes about five exemplary communities: the devout Shakers, Robert Owen�s New Harmony, the Fourierist collective at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, the Icarians at Nauvoo, Illinois, inspired by a French proto-communist, Etienne Cabet, and the Oneida Community in New York state practising �Bible communism� and �complex marriage�.

The Shakers� founder was a Manchester Quaker, Ann Lee, a devout mother worn out by bearing dead or dying children. In 1774 she left for the New World, determined to forswear sex and create a following to share her belief. An optimistic faith in human betterment, hard work and a reputation for honest trading helped the Shakers thrive. At their peak in the early 19th century, they had perhaps 5,000 members scattered in some 20 villages across eight states. They counselled celibacy, to spare women the dangers of child-bearing, made spare, slim furniture, now treasured in museums, and practised a wild, shaking dance that was taken as a sign of benign possession by the Holy Spirit.

Robert Owen, a British mill-owner and reformer, treated private property, along with organised religion and marriage, as a social scourge. In 1825 he bought land for a farm-and-factory commune in Indiana. It attracted farmers, artisans and intellectuals. Tools, food and housing were free. The commune had mixed-sex schools and a library. It sponsored scientific research. Without a shared faith or purpose, however, the members split into competing groups. By 1827, Owen�s secular community had disbanded. The difficulty of pursuing micro-communism in a capitalist society also dogged Cabet�s American followers. His New World Icarians split into several rival groupings. Shakers, Owenites and Icarians focused, each in their own way, on duties. They sought to tame human selfishness. Gloomy as he looked in portraits, the Frenchman Charles Fourier concentrated on fun. His writings inspired the Brook Farm commune near Boston and, less directly, Oneida. Fourier wanted to free people�s instincts so that everyone, especially women, might lead a life of varied enjoyments and sensual delight. Stripped of emphasis on sex, Fourier�s message that a good life was a cultivated life, not one of striving and work, appealed to New England intellectuals who formed Brook Farm�s core.

�Paradise Now� is more than a record of failed hopes. Some ideas spread to the mainstream. Fourier�s feminism is a good example. Fourierist communes foundered across the New World and Old; his ideas about gender equality lived on. No society could improve, Fourier believed, until women�s lot improved. �The best countries�, he wrote, �have always been those which allowed women the most freedom.� That is a common thought today. It was radical when Fourier wrote it in 1808.

Women more generally are at the centre of the Utopian story. Some communes he writes about were democratic, some authoritarian. None was patriarchal. Mr Jennings�s book is rich in fond hopes and improbable ventures. Rather than nudging readers to mock, which is easy, the author reminds them instead to remember that the maddest-sounding ideas sometimes become motherhood.