reason that each one of us by himself has his own home and wife and
children. From this self-love springs. For when we raise a son to
riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become
either ready to grasp at the property of the state, if in any case
fear should be removed from the power which belongs to riches and
rank; or avaricious, crafty, and hypocritical, if any is of slender
purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken away
self-love, there remains only love for the state.”
How shall the common Utopia keep from being neglected through each
one’s concern for his little private utopia?
This is the critical problem that our utopians have all to face;
and Campanella loyally follows Plato in his solution. It is perhaps
inevitable that each utopian’s personal experience of life should
enter into his solution, and overwhelmingly give it color; and here
the limitations of our utopians are plain. More and Andreæ are married
men, and they stand for the individual family. Plato and Campanella
were bachelors, and they proposed that men should live like monks or
soldiers. Perhaps these two camps are not so far away as they would
seem. If we follow the exposition of that excellent anthropologist,
Professor Edward Westermarck, we shall be fairly well convinced, I
believe, that marriage is a biological institution, and thorough
promiscuity is, to say the least, an unusual form of mating. Plato
perhaps recognized this when he left us in doubt as to whether a
community of wives would be practiced by his artisans and husbandmen.
So he perhaps paves the way for a solution by which the normal life
for the great majority of men would be marriage, with its individual
concerns and loyalties, whilst for the active, creative elements in
the community a less secluded form of mating would be practiced. The
painter, Van Gogh, has given us a kernel to chew on when he says that
the sexual life of the artist must be either that of the monk or the
soldier, for otherwise he is distracted from his creative work.
We may leave this question in the air, as long as we realize that all
our utopias rest upon our ability to discover some sort of a solution.
2
Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a utopia in the sense that I
have explained our principle of selection in the preface to the
bibliography. It is only a fragment, and not very good as fragments go;
and it would drop out altogether from our survey were it not for the
hugely over-rated reputation that Bacon has as a philosopher of natural
science--indeed, as _the_ philosopher after Aristotle.
The greater part of Bacon’s ideas are anticipated and more amply
expressed by Andreæ. When we have deleted Bacon’s multitudinous prayers
and exhortations, when we have disposed of his copious descriptions
of jewels and velvets and satins and ceremonial regalia, we find that
the core of his commonwealth is Salomon’s House, sometimes known as
the College of the Six Days’ Works; which he describes as the noblest
foundation that ever was upon earth, and the lantern of the kingdom.
The purpose of this foundation is the “knowledge of the causes and
secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human
empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The material
resources of this foundation are manifold. It has laboratories dug into
the sides of hills, and observatories with towers half a mile high;
it has great lakes of salt and fresh water which seem to anticipate
the marine laboratories we know today; and it has engines for setting
things in motion. Besides this, there are spacious houses where
physical demonstrations are made, and sanatoria where various novel
cures are attempted; there are experimental agricultural stations,
too, where grafts and crosses are tried. Add to this pharmaceutical
laboratories, industrial laboratories, and numerous houses devoted
to such things as experiments with sounds, lights, perfumes, and
tastes--which Bacon presents in a wild farrago without any regard to
the essential sciences to which the work he describes is related--and
one has a tally of the “riches of Salomon’s House.”
Twelve fellows of the college travel into foreign lands to bring
back books and abstracts, and reports on experiments and inventions.
Three make a digest of experiments. Three collect the experiments of
all the mechanical arts, and also of practices which are not brought
into the arts. Three try new experiments. Three devote themselves to
classifications; and another three, known as dowry men or benefactors,
look into the experiments of their fellows and cast about for means
of applying them to human life and knowledge. Three fellows consult
with the whole body of scientific workers and plan new channels of
investigation; and three, who are called interpreters of nature,
attempt to raise the results of particular investigations into general
observations and axioms.
In telling all this, as in the rest of his New Atlantis, Bacon is
incredibly childish and incoherent: he gives such a description of
Salomon’s House as a six-year-old schoolboy might give of a visit to
the Rockefeller Foundation. Beneath these maladroit interpretations,
however, we see that Bacon had a grasp on some of the fundamentals of
scientific research, and of the part that science might play in the
“relief of man’s estate.” It is nothing more than a hint, this New
Atlantis; but a word to the wise is enough; and as we look about the
modern world we see that, in its material affairs at any rate, the
great scientific institutes and foundations--the United States Bureau
of Standards, for one--play a part not a little like that of the
College of the Six Days’ Works.
Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which
he had been anticipated by Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of
scientific institutes--with these two utopians we stand at the entrance
to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that
materially contributes to the good life has been perfected. The earlier
utopias were concerned to establish the things which men should aim
for in life. The utopias of the later Renascence took these aims for
granted and discussed how man’s scope of action might be broadened. In
this the utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not
attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means,
we in the Western World live in an inventor’s paradise. Scientific
knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more
power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But
today we face again the riddle that Plato, More, and Andreæ sought to
answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power?
As we skip here and there through the Utopias of the next three
centuries, this question gets more deeply impregnated in our minds.
CHAPTER SIX
How something happened in the eighteenth century which made men
“furiously to think,” and how a whole group of utopias sprang
out of the upturned soil of industrialism.
CHAPTER SIX
1
There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century
and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into
no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of
Denis Vairasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this
in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than the
Republic.
One finds the clue to this lapse in Tiphaigne de la Roche’s Giphantia,
a sketch of what was and what is and what will be, and in particular,
an inquiry into the “Babylonian” mode of life. The author of Giphantia
tells a parable about Sophia, the incarnation of Wisdom, who rejects
the offers of the spendthrift, the merchant, the soldier, and the
student, and accepts the suit of a diffident fellow who had retired in
solitude to the country, to spend his days like a cultivated gentleman.
One remembers the way in which Montaigne spent his declining years;
one remembers Voltaire; and one sees how deeply the ideal of Robinson
Crusoe--a cultivated Robinson Crusoe, surrounded with books and beyond
the reach of any king and court--colored the deepest aspirations of
this period. Rousseau, writing about the corrupting influence of the
arts and sciences, and Chateaubriand, seeking the noble savage in the
American wilderness and finding him in his own bosom--these men struck
the dominating note of the eighteenth century. In a society that was
already painfully artificial and “arranged” the institutes of Lycurgus
and Utopus must have seemed as repressive as those of Louis XIV. So
almost two centuries pass before we find any fresh regions to explore
in Utopia.
2
The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the
Renascence, arose, as I have pointed out, from the contrast between the
possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal conditions
that attended the breakdown of the town economy of the Middle Age.
Like Plato’s Republic, it attempted to face the difficult problem of
transition.
In the course of the next three centuries the adventure of exploring
and ransacking strange countries loses its hold upon men’s imagination;
and a new type of activity becomes the center of interest. The conquest
of alien countries and the lure of gold do not indeed die out with
this new interest; but they are subordinated to another type of
conquest--that which man seeks to effect over nature. Here and there,
particularly in Great Britain, untrained men “with a practical turn”
begin to busy themselves with improving the mechanical apparatus by
which the day’s labor is done. A retired barber, named Arkwright,
invents a spinning frame, a Scotchman named MacAdam discovers a new
method of laying roads; and out of a hundred such inventions during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new world comes
into existence--a world in which energy derived from coal and running
water takes the place of human energy; in which goods manipulated by
machinery take the place of goods woven or sawed or hammered by hand.
Within a hundred years the actual world and the idola were transformed.
In this new world of falling water, burning coal, and whirring
machinery, utopia was born again. It is easy to see why this should
have happened, and why about two-thirds of our utopias should have been
written in the nineteenth century. The world was being visibly made
over; and it was possible to conceive of a different order of things
without escaping to the other side of the earth. There were political
changes, and the monarchic state was tempered by republicanism; there
were industrial changes, and two hungry mouths were born where one
could feed before; and there were social changes--the strata of society
shifted and “faulted,” and men who in an earlier period would have been
doomed to a dull and ignominious round, perhaps, took a place alongside
those whom inheritance had given all the privileges of riches and
breeding.
In contrast to all these fresh possibilities were the dismal realities
which were easily enough perceived by people who stood outside this
new order, or who by temperament revolted against the indignities
and repressions and vilenesses that accompanied it. It is not my
particular business here to deal with the facts of history; but unless
one understands the facts of history, the utopias which I am about
to present lose a good part of their meaning. Those machines whose
output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of
agriculture and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so
big that all men might be fed--the very instruments that were to give
the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for
the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to
be nothing short of instruments of torture.
I do not speak too harshly of the early industrial age; it is
impossible to speak too harshly. Take the trouble to read Robert Owen’s
“Essay on the Formation of Character” (Manchester: 1837) and learn what
conditions were like in a model factory run by an enlightened employer:
it is a picture of unmitigated brutality. One must go back to the
blackest periods of ancient slavery for a parallel, if indeed one would
find it, for the Pyramids that were built under the lash have a certain
grandeur and permanence which justify their existence, whilst the goods
which were produced in Yorkshire through the maimed bodies of pauper
children proved to be as impermanent as the lives that were sacrificed
in making them.
Those who were inside this new order--the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys
whom Dickens pictures in “Hard Times”--sought to realize their utopia
of the Iron Age on earth. When we are through with the genuine utopians
we shall examine the idola by which all the “practical” men of the
nineteenth century, Marx as well as Macaulay, patterned their behavior.
Those who stood out against this new order were not so much opposed to
the new methods as to the purposes for which they were being used: they
felt that an orderly conquest of Nature had turned into a wild scramble
for loot, and that all the goods industrialism promised were being
lost, for the benefit of a few aggressive and unsocialized individuals.
With the host of critics and interpreters and reformers that arose
in the nineteenth century we shall have a little reckoning to make
presently: those who concern us here however belong to the stock of
Plato, More, and Andreæ, in that they attempted to see society as a
whole, and to protect a new order which would be basically sound as
well as superficially improved. Yet with the exception of the utopias
which revolted against industrialism these nineteenth century essays
are partial and one-sided; for they tend to magnify the importance of
the industrial order as much as Gradgrind and Bounderby did, and in
doing this they lose sight of the whole life of man. These industrial
utopias are no longer concerned with values but with means; they are
all instrumentalist. I doubt whether an intelligent peasant in India or
China would get out of the whole batch of these utopias a single idea
which would have any bearing on the life that he has experienced--so
little of human significance remains when the problems of mechanical
and political organization have been disposed of!
One symptom of this lack of individuality, this lack of what, in the
old-fashioned sense used to be called a philosophy, is the fact that
we can treat all these industrial utopias in groups. The first of
these group-utopias I shall call, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the
Associationists.
3
Among the Associationists, the most influential utopian is Charles
François Marie Fourier. He was a prolific and incoherent writer, and
his Utopia, if the truth be told, exists as disjecta membra rather than
as a single work; but in his case I make an exception to the criterion
of selection; because in every other respect he has a claim upon our
attention. This Fourier was a dry little French commercial traveller,
whose personal fortune was lost in the French revolution and whose
hopes for founding a real eutopia were blasted by the July revolution
of 1830. Again and again he transferred himself from one line of goods
to another in order to increase the area of the territory he covered
and learn more of the workings of society; and so in his writings a
wealth of concrete detail goes hand in hand with personal crotchets
and the opinionativeness which arises almost inevitably out of an
undisciplined solitude. What follows is a distillation of Fourier’s
thought, with the lees and orts left in the bottom of the flask.
Fourier differs largely from the early utopians in that he is concerned
first of all not with modifying human nature but with finding out what
it actually is. His utopia is to be based upon an understanding of
man’s actual physical and mental makeup, and its institutions are to
be such as will permit man’s original nature to function freely. The
motive which draws his community together is attraction; the power
which sets his institutions going is “the passions.” Under the head of
passions--the original biological equipment--Fourier gives a list of
tendencies which corresponds roughly with the modern psychologist’s
list of instincts.
Fourier takes these passions as “given”; his utopia is not designed to
“effect any change in our passions ... their direction will be changed
without changing their nature.” As Brisbane says in his Introduction to
Fourier’s philosophy, social institutions are to these passional forces
what machinery is to material forces. A good community, according to
Fourier, is one which will bring all these passions into play, in their
complex actions and interactions.
As in the Republic, the ideal behind Fourier’s utopia is harmony;
for man has a threefold destiny; namely, “an industrial destiny, to
harmonize the material world; a social destiny, to harmonize the
passional or moral world; and an intellectual destiny, to discover
the laws of universal order and harmony.” What was at fault with
modern civilized societies was that they were incomplete, and in
their functioning they created a social dissonance. To overcome this,
says Fourier, men must unite into harmonious associations which will
give play to all their activities, and which, by erecting common
institutions, will do away with the waste arising in the individual’s
attempts to do for himself all the things which would be done by a
complete community.
For this perfect association Fourier provides minute plans and tables;
but the general plan can be outlined with brevity.
First of all, Fourier, too, goes back to the valley section. The
initial nucleus of his utopia is to consist of a company of 1,500
or 1,600 persons, owning a good stretch of land comprising at least
a square league. Since this experimental phalanx, as Fourier called
it, would have to stand alone, and without the support of neighboring
phalanxes, there will in consequence of this isolation be many gaps
in “attraction,” and “many passional calms to dread in its workings.”
To overcome this, Fourier insists that it is necessary to locate the
phalanx on soil fit for a variety of functions. “A flat country, such
as Antwerp, Leipsic, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable ... owing
to the uniformity of land surface. It will therefore be necessary to
select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or at
the very least, a fine valley, provided with a stream of water and a
forest, like the valley of Brussel or of Halle.”
This domain would be laid out in fields, orchards, vineyards, and so
forth, according to the nature of the soil and industrial requirements.
By devotion to horticulture and arboriculture, Fourier figures, an
intensive development would supply abundantly the needs of the colony.
The main economic occupation of the phalanx would be agricultural--this
is perhaps the great distinction between Fourier and later
Utopians--but all the arts would be practiced within the phalanstery,
since otherwise the association would be incomplete.
The principle of the association is concretely embodied in a vast
edifice in the center of the domain: “a palace complete in all its
appointments serving as the residence of the associates. In this palace
there are three wings, corresponding to the Material, the Social, and
the Intellectual domains. In one wing are the workshops and halls of
industry. In another are the library, the scientific collections,
museums, artists’ studios, and the like. In the center, devoted to
the social element, are banquet halls, a hall of reception, and grand
salons. At one end of the palace is a Temple of the Material Harmonies,
devoted to singing, music, poetry, dancing, gymnastics, painting, and
so forth. At the other end is the Temple of Unityism, to celebrate with
appropriate rites man’s unity with the universe. On the summit there is
an observatory with telegraph and signal tower, for communication with
other phalanxes.
The phalanx men are associationists; but it follows from Fourier’s
theory of the passions that they have private interests as well as
public ones; and these private interests are permitted to flourish
as long as they do not interfere with social solidarity. Thus they
avoid the waste inherent in private housekeeping by having public
kitchens, where, incidentally, the children are trained from an early
age at cooking, as they are today in one or two experimental schools:
nevertheless it is possible to dine in solitude as well as in company.
By the same token, every member of the phalanx is guaranteed a minimum
of food, clothing, lodging, and even amusements without respect to
work; at the same time, private property is sanctioned, and each
member extracts from the common store a dividend in proportion to the
amount of stock he holds in the association. This dividend, it must be
qualified, is considerably reduced by the fact that a system of profit
sharing replaces the pure wage system. There is thus a sort of balance
between private self-seeking and the maintenance of the public good.
In order to manufacture goods economically, large scale production
is introduced wherever possible, and the division of labor is forced
to its ultimate limits. Fourier takes account of the resulting
monotony, however, and suggests that the monotony be corrected by
having recourse to changing tasks and occupations from time to time.
In commercial exchange, the phalanx acts as a unit; it constitutes a
great self-governing body which traffics in surplus goods with similar
associations, without any middleman, in something of the manner,
perhaps, that the Co-operative Wholesale Societies do today.
By abolishing the individual household, the phalanx gives a new
freedom to women; and Fourier does not see how it is possible to
maintain the system of monogamic proprietorship once women have a free
choice of mates. So the women of the phalanx are not intellectual
nonentities; and since they no longer preside over the individual home,
they help run the whole community. Is it necessary to add the common
nurseries, the common schools, the informal education of the children,
and the number of other things which follow from this emancipation?
Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of this utopia is
its utilization of a moral equivalent for war, long before Professor
William James invented the phrase. One of the great functions of the
phalanx is the assemblage of productive armies even as “civilization”
assembles destructive ones. There is a fine passage in which Fourier
pictures an industrial army of golden youths and maidens, “instead of
devastating thirty provinces in a campaign, these armies will have
spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-wooded thirty barren mountains,
dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes.” It is
for lack of such industrial armies, says Fourier, that civilization is
unable to produce anything great.
4
What strikes us when we put together the fragments of Fourier’s
utopia--as one might put together a jigsaw puzzle--is the fact that he
faces the variety and inequality of human nature. Instead of erecting
a standard for men to live up to, and rejecting mankind as unfit for
utopia because the standard is far beyond its height, the standard
itself is founded upon the utmost capacity which a community might be
able to exhibit. Fourier meets human nature half-way: he endeavors to
project a society which will give regular channels to all its divergent
impulses, and prevent them from spilling unsocially all over the
landscape. In his statement of this aim there are plenty of weaknesses
and absurdities; and I confess that it is hard to take this pathetic
little man seriously; but when one has grappled with Fourier’s thought
one discovers that there is something to take.