USH - Utopian Communities - Church

Utopian Communities (also known as “intentional communities”) are “planned residential communities designed to promote a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities.” These utopian communities were attempting to create an ideal society.

Although utopian communities date to the earliest days of American history, they had become institutionalized in American thought by the 1840s. Many groups challenged the traditional standards and social conventions of the time, their desire for a perfect world often in sharp contradiction to the actual world they lived in, one in which such concepts as capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, immigration, and tension between the individual and the community, ideals that contradicted older forms of living.

The first of the American Utopias was evident in Robert Owen’s creation of the New Harmony Community in western Indiana in 1825. There, the residents established a socialist community in which everyone shared equally in labor and profit. The peace and contentment, however, would not last. Just months after the creation of a constitution in January 1826, the residents (numbered just over a thousand) divided into sub-communities. This division then disintegrated into chaos.

Another community started at this time was a community started by Francis Wright at Nashoba in Tennessee. Wright hoped to show that free labor was more economical than slavery, but the community did not attract settlers and it closed down within a year.

Transcendentalists [see Ralph Waldo Emerson, page 6] believed that an understanding of truth and eternity could only result when humankind abandoned the concrete world of the senses in favor of a more spiritual characterization of nature. They thus, in order to escape the modern world, created many utopian communities in the 1840s. The most important of these was Brook Farm, established in West Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841. Residents hoped to free themselves from the competition of the capitalist world so as to work as little as possible, all the while enjoying the fruits of high culture.

Although none of these communities would remain a long-lasting settlement, they reflected the personal, social, and religious views of some of the American people at the time, a desire for an equal world free from competition and injustice rampant in the modern world.