Literature Review

The American utopian communities have captured the interest of writers of all stripes ever since the movement’s inception, but the reasons for this interest have evolved significantly over the course of the last century. A common thread throughout the evolution of the subject has been an increasing focus on the founders of the communities rather than the communities as a whole. In this essay, I will examine several published works which have been important to my research on the utopian movement, from contemporary writers up to the present day. I will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s approach. Where applicable I will highlight the “founders focus” pattern, and demonstrate the varied reasons why different authors have been drawn towards this emphasis on the founding figures. 

Within the field of American utopian research, there is arguably no name more widely recognized than Charles Nordhoff. Nordhoff was an American journalist writing in the mid-1870s, just after the utopian communal movement peaked within the United States. He was concerned with the plight of the working class within the booming factories of post-Industrial America. Nordhoff believed that the employer/hireling dynamics of America’s rising capitalist economy were detrimental to the flourishing of working-class laborers. He was convinced that the labor unions which were gaining traction throughout America were ultimately detrimental to the workers they sought to protect. In his words, “Any organization which teaches its adherents to accept as inevitable for themselves and for the mass of the nation the condition of hirelings, and to conduct their lives on that premise, is not only wrong, but an injury to the community.”(1) This conviction led Nordhoff to seek alternative economic models which could empower the working class. 

Nordhoff was intrigued with the idea of communist communities but could find little data on those existing within the United States at the time. To remedy this void, Nordhoff set out on a mission to visit each communal society within the United States, documenting his experience as he traveled. The book he published chronicling his findings, The Communistic Societies of the United States, has since become one of the most important primary sources on American utopian communes. The breadth and depth of Nordhoff’s research is unmatched, over the course of 5 years, he visited not just every major utopian group, but nearly every single individual commune existing within those groups at the time (over 70 in total). Nordhoff’s background as a journalist prepared him well for this project, his research is exhaustive. Each chapter of his book covers a different group. Within each chapter, he opens with an overview of the group’s history up to that point. Nordhoff then recounts his first-hand experience visiting the community, followed by a detailed rundown of the various economic efforts the communities were involved in. The latter portion of each chapter is dedicated to the doctrinal peculiarities of the group in question, making full use of interviews and theological texts if they were available. 

The Communistic Societies of the United States has become one of the most cited sources on the American utopians. Nordhoff’s outsider perspective and objective curiosity provide an invaluable window into the secluded utopian societies. Guided by a focus on the working class and a background in journalism, his work gives us an unparalleled, boots-on-the-ground, overview of what life was like in these societies.

More recently, Chris Jennings’ Paradise Now has emerged as a popular book on the American utopian movement. Jennings contends that the utopian movement emerged in the United States out of the confluence of Christian millennialism and Enlightenment Progressivism. In Paradise Now, he demonstrates how these ideas came together within the fledgling democracy to create a unique intellectual atmosphere in which the imminent arrival of a worldwide utopian social revolution “seemed reasonable to reasonable people.” (1)

Choosing to frame the utopian movement in this manner has some interesting implications, beginning with the groups Jennings chooses to cover. Jennings narrates the rise and fall of 5 different societies in Paradise Now. Two of these groups, the Shakers and Oneida commune, are fairly self-explanatory to readers familiar with the movement, the others are a more surprising addition. Jennings chooses the Icarians, Fourierists, and Owenites as his other subjects. These three groups rarely take center stage in popular writing covering the utopian movement. The Icarians are usually overshadowed by other major utopian groups due to the greater success of those movements both in growth and longevity. The Fourierists and Owenites are both small, early groups, and also two of the very few non-religious groups within American utopianism.

Moving beyond his choice of communities, another important observation is that in his narrative, Jennings chooses to focus primarily on founders. He begins the chapter of each group with the life story of its founder, and as he narrates the group’s history, his historical lens remains firmly centered on that key figure. Jennings’ emphasis in this regard serves his thesis well. These individuals were unquestionably influential in developing the idea of an impending societal revolution and popularizing it throughout the United States and Europe. The Owenites were disciples (in a secular sense) of the incredibly persuasive orator and social reformist Robert Owen. Owen, an Englishman, had an impressive network of connections within the circles of the European and American elite.(3) He personally met three US Presidents and gave two addresses to Congress detailing his vision to build a proof-of-concept utopian city in the US. Jennings correctly assesses that he was one of the single most important figures in legitimizing popular expectation of a utopian revolution. In a similar fashion, the ideas of French philosopher Francois Fourier were pivotal in popularizing the concept within the American intellectual scene, most notably when the American Transcendentalists discovered his utopian philosophy. It would eventually become the bedrock of the Brooks Farm community, which several major figures within the Transcendentalist movement were involved with. Icaria was a commune formed by another Frenchman, Etienne Cabet, who was influential in popularizing the utopian vision in Europe. Cabet amassed a following of over a hundred thousand communists in France before setting off to build Icaria, the instantiation of his vision, in the wilds of Texas. 

The remaining two groups covered in Paradise Now were more explicitly religious than the ones covered so far. Stacked against the three discussed above, the Oneidan’s and Shaker’s founders share much more modest origins, neither were household names when they began their movement. What they lacked in background, however, they more than made up for with ambition. Both Oneida’s John Noyes and the Shaker’s Anne Lee claimed to be direct mouthpieces of God’s will. Anne Lee went so far as to claim that she was the female counterpart to Jesus, hence the Shaker’s formal name: United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. 

Jennings’ modernist, reason-focused rendition of the utopian movement is an excellent resource for understanding the beginnings of the movement and how it came to have such an incredible impact on Western thought in its heyday. However, Jennings does downplay the changes to the movement past the 1850s when “reasonable people” lost interest. The members of these late 19th century communities were animated by a conviction that God was moving in their midst. This conviction was the primary force driving their decision to live communally, beyond any sense that communal societies were a reasonable means of social reform. 

Jennings' dismissal of the later stage of the movement is evident in his conclusion, where he points to the end of the Civil War as the final nail in the coffin for the movement. While there is no doubt that the utopian movement was on the decline by this point, it feels jarring to simply end there. Oneida maintained a strong community up to 1880, and although the Shakers had already begun to decline in numbers, they remained the largest group up to the turn of the century, when they still had over a thousand members. The group that unseated them however, best demonstrates Jennings’ dismissal of the utopian’s late religious phase. 

The Amana Inspirationists in central Iowa numbered around 1800 members in 1900. This group of German immigrants didn’t form their communal society until 1840. Because of this late start and their general lack of world-changing ideals, Jennings does not mention them at all in his presentation of the utopian movement, although numerically they were clearly one of the most significant groups. The decision makes sense, however, if one understands that the Inspirationists don’t really fit into Jennings’ model. The Amana colonies could not be mistaken for a social reform movement. Their communism was completely embedded in religious conviction, and they never believed that communism was sustainable outside their religious context.

Ultimately, Jennings’ focus on presenting the utopian communities as a movement based on reason and mass social reform brings him to odds with what the utopian movement really became. While Jennings demonstrates that the movement did create a great deal of sensation within the American public, the communities which ultimately gained significant numerical growth and longevity were all religious groups whose primary mission was to separate from, not change, the surrounding society. This is true of two of the communities whom he covers, Oneida and the Shakers, as well as many that he does not, including the aforementioned Amana Society. 

This discrepancy is especially evident when comparing Paradise Now to Nordhoff’s work. The overall impression of these societies is considerably different between the two. Where Jennings emphasizes the sensation these communities (or rather, their founders) caused in the broader American and European society during the early 19th century, Nordhoff, writing in 1874, primarily emphasizes the religious convictions of the communities he visits and how it informs their members’ simple, secluded, lifestyles. 

Ironically, one of the authors Jennings extensively cites emphasized the different phases of the utopian movement and the dynamic that religion played in its evolution over half a century before Paradise Now was published. Arthur Bestor was an American historian who during the 1940s and 50s became recognized as the leading expert on the American utopian movement. Jennings calls Bestor the single “most influential historian of the utopian movement.”(4) Bestor’s book on the subject, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663-1829, won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best English-language book on American history. 

One of the most striking features of Backwoods Utopias is the timing of its publication. 1950 saw McCarthyism at the peak of its influence in American society. To publish an extensive book on American communist societies in this environment was an incredibly bold undertaking. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we find the word communism used only 13 times in the book’s 250-some pages. Bestor establishes the ideology of the utopians as “communalistic” rather than “communistic”. The principle difference for Bestor is that in seeking to reform society, communalism is “resolutely opposed to revolution” but is still not content with gradualism.(5) This seemingly contradictory dynamic of mass social change which is sudden but not forceful is evident in the 19th-century utopians’ absolute confidence that a single successful model community would trigger a societal landslide toward communal life.

Bestor identifies the origins of communitarianism as rooted in the religious movements of post-Reformation Europe. As is evident in his title, he identifies the early utopian movement as the sectarian phase due to the many groups which espoused their own unique variations of this ideology. He particularly emphasizes Marx and Engels’ rejection of communitarianist thought in favor of their own revolutionary philosophy because the communitarians sought universal societal transformation rather than a class struggle.(6) Bestor observes that it is a migration experience which most often sparked the transition from a religious sect to an overtly communitarian one.(7)

Bestor demonstrates that it was the religious communitarians who arrived in the United States during the 18th century that ultimately served as the kindling for the 19th century Europeans such as Owens and Fourier to start their movements. Had the Shakers and other religious communitarians not established longstanding communities by the 1800s, there would not have been such a widespread sense of feasibility for communal social reform within American society.

The meat of Backwoods Utopias documents Robert Owens’ incredible legacy in popularizing communitarian utopianism in the minds of the American public. In this sense, it can be seen as an early instantiation of the “founder focus” which has become so prevalent in utopian studies. This is certainly not inherently a bad thing, there is arguably no single individual within American utopianism who more deserves a book dedicated to his legacy than Robert Owen. And this is a pretty remarkable statement to make for a movement so packed with extraordinary personalities. As described earlier, Owens was the single figure who unquestionably did the most to secure communitarianism a spot as a common dinner-table topic in 19th-century America. Bestor’s account is both written in an engaging narrative and exhaustively sourced. He details the rise and fall of Owenism in the United States and the incredible legacy it had on the development of the American West.

It is again ironic that in the closing paragraphs of Backwoods Utopias, Bestor identifies the 1840s as the beginning of the final phase of the utopian movement, a passing of the torch back to the sectarian religious communities. While Bestor doesn’t cover this phase himself, he acknowledges that the religious communities, emphasizing separation from the surrounding culture, were largely unaffected by the communal stir which Owenism made in broader American society. It was ultimately the post-Civil War economy that brought this final phase of utopianism to a close, ending a fascinating arc of American history. It’s interesting that Jennings chose to make such a clear break from Bestor’s position without any serious engagement or attempt at refutation. Perhaps Jennings was simply presenting a more reductionist view due to the less academic nature of his book, which was marketed toward a popular audience. 

In recent decades, there has been an emerging body of research focusing on the sociopolitical character of the utopian communes. The researchers behind this movement are especially interested in studying the social dynamics of the utopians through the lens of Max Weber’s theories on charismatic authority. It will come as no surprise to the reader that a research movement emphasizing charismatic authority leans heavily towards a founder-focused view of the movement, and this is very much the case.

Max Weber was a German sociologist working around the turn of the 21st century, whose work has been profoundly influential in the development of modern social theory. His theory on charismatic authority posits that it is a revolutionary form of authority that becomes attractive to people who are frustrated with the status quo of the two traditional forms of authority, legal and traditional. Weber describes charismatic authority as inherently unstable, with a constant tendency to either fall out of favor, or morph into one of the two traditional forms, a process that Weber refers to as routinization.(8)

In the 1970s, Robert House, an American management professor, published a theory on charismatic leadership heavily influenced by Weber. House’s work, coupled with the prominence of charismatic figures throughout the 80s and 90s such as Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, and Sam Walton, sparked a wave of research into the topic. In the wake of this trend, there has been a revival of academic interest in the American utopian movement, as many sociologists have identified the prevalence of charismatic authority figures within the utopian communities as an anomaly worth investigating.

The most comprehensive of these essays which I have discovered is Christoph Brumann’s “The Dominance of One and Its Perils.” Brumann examines 41 different communal movements, mainly from the United States. While the scope of his research expands beyond the utopian movement, including some communities up into the 1960s, the utopians remain his primary focus and represent the majority of his subjects. Brumann’s interest is in the longevity of communal groups. He focuses on two factors that he identifies as key to a community’s longevity, the presence of a charismatic authority figure, and the branch structure of the communal group. While the first is relatively self-explanatory, the branch structure warrants some further explanation. 

Most growing communal groups encounter a situation where their population swells beyond the point that one single communal location can sustain. Brumann demonstrates that the methodology the community develops to facilitate the creation of such “branch” communities is one of the single most influential factors in determining the ultimate longevity of that particular communal movement. Specifically, he examines the extent to which any given branching model keeps its daughter communities reliant on the mother group (either spiritually or economically). Brumann demonstrates that there is a significant correlation between the self-sufficiency of branch communities and the longevity of the overall group.

The other key factor is the aforementioned presence of charismatic leadership. “The strong dominance of one,” Brumann says, “does not mesh well with the survival of property-sharing utopian communes, neither in the form of an overwhelmingly charismatic leader among ordinary members nor in that of a highly dominant central settlement among other, peripheral branches.”(9) Through his research, Brumann's thesis is that there is a direct correlation between the influence of a dominant charismatic figure within a community and the speed at which the community ultimately fails. 

Brumann’s argument is convincing, and there is a slew of additional research available which seems to support his findings. The 1980s seem to have been an especially hot point for this research. In September 1980, Spencer C. Olin published “The Oneida Community and the Instability of Charismatic Authority.” This essay works from the Weberian model of charismatic authority to demonstrate how the downfall of Oneida’s founder and spiritual leader, John Humphrey Noyes, ultimately resulted in the demise of the community within only a few months. Both Olin and Brumann emphasize that “time is the enemy of charisma.”(10) The earlier communities can overcome their reliance on charismatic leadership through routinization, the more promising their prospects for longevity.

Much more recently, Jonathan Andelson explores similar dynamics in the Amana Society in his 2016 essay “Routinization of Behavior in a Charismatic Leader”. Andelson employs statistical analysis of the nature of prophetic revelation between two different charismatic leaders within the Amana Society. He demonstrates that there was a distinct pattern of increasing systematizing present in prophetic revelation as the influence of charismatic authority began to wane within the community.(11) Andelson posits that this can be understood as a unique form of routinization not previously considered within the Weberian model.(12) One where, rather than the community shifting away from reliance on charismatic authority, the charismatic individual alters their own behavior to reduce their influence within the society. This form of routinization is particularly noteworthy because the Amana Society represents one of the few utopian groups which were able to transition their community beyond the lifespan of their charismatic founders or leaders. This could potentially indicate that a successful transition lies more in the hands of the leaders than in the larger community, a finding which would seemingly give credence to maintaining a stronger emphasis on these figures when studying the movement.

The emphasis on founders within utopian research has left significant gaps of opportunity to expand our understanding of the movement. Many questions about the nature of the people drawn to these societies remain unexplored. What drew the common person to follow these charismatic men into so radical a life change? How did the founder’s fall from grace and eventual dissolution of these communities affect their members? Did the majority abandon the communal vision, or continue on to other communal societies? 

The most significant omission within the literature that I have encountered is theological critique. Throughout their history, the utopianists held communal living and common ownership of property as a core theological conviction. Having grown up within a communal society myself, I would love to see more engagement from the broader Christian community on this topic. I do wonder however if the prevalence of founder focus doesn’t help keep this movement in obscurity. After all, it’s much easier to dismiss a few eccentric visionaries than the thousands of people who followed them with conviction. Delving into the unexplored aspects of members’ motivations and aspirations would surely give us a more holistic understanding of this complex historical phenomenon. Shedding light on both the allure and challenges of communal societies and paving the way for broader discussions within the Christian community and beyond.

(1) Nordhoff, Charles. The Communistic Societies of the United States. (New York, Hillary House Publishers, 1962). 16

(2) Jennings, Chris, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. New York, Random House, 2016. 3

(3) Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by the Owen’s utopian vision. Engels was reporter for one of Owen’s newspapers for several years.

 (4) Bestor, Arthur. Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. 135

(5) Ibid. 2

(6) Ibid. 6

(7) Ibid. 16

(8)  Weber, Max, 1864-1920 and Guenther Roth, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. 1111-1125

(9) Brumann, Christoph. “The Dominance of One and Its Perils: Charismatic Leadership and Branch Structures in Utopian Communes.” Journal of Anthropological Research 56, no. 4 (2000): 445. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630926.

(10)  Spencer C. Olin, Jr. “The Oneida Community and the Instability of Charismatic Authority.” The Journal of American History 67, no. 2 (1980): 300. https://doi.org/10.2307/1890409.

(11) Andelson, Jonathan G. “Routinization of Behavior in a Charismatic Leader.” American Ethnologist 7, no. 4 (1980): 724-726. http://www.jstor.org/stable/643478. 

(12)  Ibid. 716