The Seeds of Their Own Destruction: Lessons from Utopian Experiments in Nineteenth-Century America - Part 1: The Other American Dream
47 Pages Posted: 25 May 2021 Last revised: 14 Jun 2023
Date Written: May 24, 2021
Abstract
Nineteenth-century America provided fertile ground for novel ways to organize society. The young republic’s unmatched economic and religious freedom and its vast frontier enabled hundreds of experiments in social engineering. All of them failed. But their common visions, doctrines, and trajectories enable us to glean enduring lessons from their failures.
This essay spotlights several of the most extraordinary efforts to achieve utopia. We trace these efforts from their founders’ visions and participants’ initial zeal to problems threatening their viability to their responses to those problems and the complications that resulted, in a cycle that eventually undid their aspirations.
We view this cycle through established sociological and economic frameworks, followed up with how the social order that surrounded these unique communities achieved their progress, including how the lack of ideology enabled their success where the utopians had failed.
The essay is developed in three parts:
Part 1: The Other American Dream
Part 2: Body and Soul
Part 3: Utopia versus Progress
The present submission, Part 1, describes the rise of Hopedale, Oneida, and Amana as socialistic communities and their eventual demise despite having highly successful core businesses that were able to grow only by substantially abandoning their societies’ founding visions. We describe the fundamental challenges to viability that they all faced, including the incentive problem, the public choice problem, and the knowledge problem.
A compendium of the 258 utopian societies that we analyzed is included.
Keywords: utopia, socialism, communalism, collectives, incentives, public choice
JEL Classification: A13, B14, B15, H42, N31, P27
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation