When exactly did utopia become less interesting than dystopia? The vision of a grim and gray future is just as much a fantasy as that of a perfectly ordered society, but somehow it is the grim one that now captures our attention. The descriptions of a glistening City of the Sun or a New Atlantis have given way to the warnings of 1984 and Brave New World. If those title phrases have passed into general usage, as the word utopia once did, it is because they stand for things that we urgently want to talk about.

All this is to be expected, according to Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’s brilliant study of American utopian societies. After the cruel experience of “the Thousand-Year Reich, Soviet gulags, the Khmer killing fields,” the very idea of utopia now seems suspect. Its vision of the future is “absolutist,” which inexorably culminates in tyranny, as modern history confirms. This might explain why the five-hundredth anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), one of the most consequential books ever published, passed last year virtually unnoticed.

As a small compensation, however, we have five engaging books that deal with various utopian communities in the United States. They are not explicitly about Thomas More (who mostly goes unmentioned), but they pay indirect tribute by showing how ardently and imaginatively his ideas were embraced by nineteenth-century America. Some of these utopian projects were short-lived, such as Robert Owen’s secular community at New Harmony, Indiana, which flared out within a few years in the mid-1820s, or Brook Farm, an equally short-lived experiment of the 1840s, the most famous community of the Fourierist Associationists. But some were staggeringly vital, such as the Shakers, the celibate communal society that began in the early 1770s, established twenty-four settlements, and still lingers, after a fashion, in Maine. Or the notorious Oneida Community, which began by abolishing traditional marriage, only to become America’s leading manufacturer of plated silver—the most traditional of all wedding gifts.

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