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Simutopia Other notable communities included the socialist utopias founded by followers of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Owen, a wealthy English textile manufacturer, hoped to form communities where all would share equally in the production process and all would own the machines together. He proposed to "cut the world up into villages of three hundred to two thousand souls; allot each person an area of land varying from one-half an acre to one and a half acres; place the dwellings of each village in the form of a parallelogram with common kitchens, eating apartments, schools and places of worship in the center; require every person to forswear individualism and work for the common benefit." =Owen's son, who later served in Congress, called collective communities "the invention which will at once multiply the physical and mental powers of the whole society to an incalculable extent." Owen tried to realize his dreams by buying the town of New Harmony, Indiana and reorganizing it as a socialist collective. a drawing of the plan for New Harmony appears above. Owen's "harmonists" dislaced an earlier generation of utopians, the Rappites, who had founded Harmony Indiana as a religious utopia. A history of New Harmony appears here. Frenchman Charles Fourier similarly argued that utopain
collectives could revolutionize human life, Albert Brisbane, the leading
Fourierist in America, argued that planned, collectivist communities would
do for the household "what the mariners compass has done for navigators,
the telescope for astronomy, and steam for machinery." Fourierist's
organized themselves into "phalanxes," in which property would
be commonly owned and all work shared in turn. Fourierist ideas also served
as the basis for the famous "Brook Farm" collective intellectual
experiment, which included such major literary figures as Hawthorne, Melville,
Emerson, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. Below is a plan for the "phalanstery"
to house community members at Red Bank, New Jersey. A more modest building
was eventually constructed. On the next page, you can try your hand at planning a utopian community of your own. |
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Although
all Fourierist communities failed, they were surprisingly popular. Phalanxes
were established at communities as diverse as Red Bank, New Jersey, Ripon,
Wisconsin, and Dallas, Texas.