SOURCE: “Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality” in Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought, MIT Press, 1974, pp. 113-44.

[In the essay that follows, Hansot places Bellamy's fiction in the larger context of utopian thought from Plato to H. G. Wells, and argues that Bellamy imagines a fundamentally conservative ideal.]

Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward: 2000-1887 in 1884 and Equality in 1897. The latter was Bellamy's last book, part of which was written during illness.¹Equality is a much longer and more detailed account of the utopia presented in Looking Backward, but, apart from the later volume's increased attention to religion and its place in society, the argument of the two books is similar.

Reared in the Calvinist faith by his father, a mildly evangelical Baptist minister, Bellamy later rejected orthodox religion and traditional Emersonian self-reliance in favor of his own “religion of solidarity.” The new religion was to result from the psychic development of new levels of consciousness; during this development men would slough off the constraints of a self-enclosed personality for the freedom of an impersonal cosmic awareness.

Comte's solidaristic concept of living for others in the past and in the future was important in Bellamy's development, as was the Civil War, which, in the author's image of a cohesive array of marching men, stood for the surrender and submergence of the personality to an ideal of freedom greater than itself.²

In the year 2000 Bellamy imagines that all countries of any importance will have adopted the economic reforms pioneered by the United States. Nations will have become autonomous within a federal system. With scarcity no longer an incentive for aggression, international relations will have become harmonious, and the eventual unification of the world into one nation can be expected in the near future.³

Bellamy's spokesman in this paradise is a physician, Dr. Leete, who is also the host of Julian West, the inadvertent visitor from the nineteenth century. West is transported to utopia very simply: the well-to-do Bostonian has trouble sleeping and summons a mesmerist. When he awakens, 113 years have elapsed, and, finding himself in a Boston he no longer recognizes, West relies on Dr. Leete for guidance and for explanation. A tedious romance between the visitor and Dr. Leete's daughter serves, in Bellamy's words, “to alleviate the instructive quality of the book. … ”⁴ It has been suggested that Julian West is meant to be an example of the greater psychic development toward altrusim that Bellamy wanted to portray as normal in utopia.⁵ While it is true that West does develop a new sense of values, this change is obligatory for any visitor to utopia. West is primarily a device for explaining utopia to the reader, and in utopia he reserves his greatest admiration, not for any increase in spiritual awareness, but for the new economic arrangements. In contrast to Howells, who tried to portray a spontaneous, direct, and active altruism in his utopia, Bellamy's utopians express their “altruism” through their economic arrangements, which, by eliminating poverty and class distinctions, have fostered the growth of equality.

In its emphasis on economic arrangements as both the source of present injustices and the means of remedying them, Bellamy's utopia is typical of much of nineteenth-century utopian thought. He shares with other utopian visionaries, such as Etienne Cabet and Theodor Hertzka, both the belief that utopia should and can be brought about and the encouragement of active efforts to hasten its arrival. Hertzka, in his eagerness to distinguish himself from such an “unpractical enthusiast” as Sir Thomas More, speaks for many activist reformers of Bellamy's bent.

For this book is not the idle creation of an uncontrolled imagination, but the outcome … of profound scientific investigation. … Thoughtlessness and inaction are, in truth, at present the only props of the existing economic and social order. What was formerly necessary, and therefore inevitable, has become injurious and superfluous; there is no longer anything to compel us to endure the misery of an obsolete system. … ⁶

The major concern of this study is with the ways in which Bellamy's portrayal of the utopian ideal and its relation to the present differ from those of his classical predecessors. In its static character and its ability to serve as a thought experiment, the modern utopia still resembles its classical counterpart. But even these commonalities do not remain stable because the implications of an immobile society change during the process of bringing utopia into existence, and the result of a thought experiment is not quite the same when the differences in men's natures become more important than what they have in common.

THE IDEAL OF LOOKING BACKWARD AND EQUALITY

The single ideal of Bellamy's utopia, the prerequisite for a rightly ordered society, is economic equality. In the introduction to Equality, Bellamy reminisces:

… it was in the fall or winter of 1886 that I sat down to my desk with the definite purpose of trying to reason out a method of economic organization by which the republic might guarantee the livelihood and material welfare of its citizens on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality.⁷

The equal division of wealth among all members of society recommends itself to Bellamy on both economic and moral grounds. It is the most efficient way to run an economy because it creates a vastly increased consumer demand, which in turn is a continual stimulus to the economy to increase its productive capacity. The fair distribution of wealth also follows the golden rule of Christ, for it embodies the ethical ideal of equal treatment for all.

Nothing can be in the long run or on a large scale sound economics which is not sound ethics. It is not, therefore, a mere coincidence, but a logical necessity, that the supreme word of both ethics and economics should be one and the same equality.⁸

Bellamy's utopia is based on the ideal of economic equality, which has the advantage of being, at the same time, morally right and the most efficient way to organize society. The work that Bellamy's citizens perform can be explained in terms of the utopian social organization, and, from the point of view of an inhabitant of utopia, there seems to be no other basis upon which it can be explained. In contrast to the ideal activity of classical utopias, which is based on a reality that transcends utopian society, the explanation for modern utopian activity is found in the organization of utopia and, for those acquainted with the past, in its contrast to a ruder age. Bellamy's claim that economic equality is both efficient and moral is one example of this justification in terms of the past, for the measure of both efficiency and morality is the waste and inhumanity of nineteenth-century society.

Economic activity in the year 2000 takes the form of an industrial army, which Bellamy claims is the most rational and efficient way of organizing work. The industrial army is a concept that repays exploration, for how its members are selected, their motives for joining, how different types of work are classified, and the reasons for such classifications are all indicators of the degree to which activity and organization are really inseparable in utopia.

All young citizens in Bellamy's future society are evaluated on the basis of their school and early work habits, and their rank among those ready to enter the labor market is determined according to the intelligence, efficiency, and devotion to duty that they have shown. Those with the highest rating obtain first choice of job and locality. The administration equalizes the labor conditions, as much as possible, by providing shorter hours for more arduous labor; the control of working hours permits, at the same time, the regulation of supply and demand.

The beginning worker serves for three years in a general unclassified grade of common laborers, then as an apprentice. After these preliminary stages, he becomes a regular laborer, classed in one of three grades according to his ability and industry. Regradings, which occur regularly, allow a worker to rise or descend in the rank list. Both permission to specialize and ability to choose the area of specialization depend on getting and keeping a certain grade. Bellamy, not afraid of explicit categorizations, remarks that those who remain at the lowest grade are “likely to be as deficient in sensibility to their position as in ability to better it.”⁹

Although technically no greater honor is assigned to one job than to another, and although emulation is dismissed as an incentive for inferior natures, it is difficult to see what other motive serves to keep the economic system functioning.¹⁰ Bellamy's own preference is clearly for the nobler type of worker who measures his duties by his endowments. But this preference begs the question, as endowments have already been graded and classed (presumably with accuracy) by the industrial army and, in addition, any worker inclined to shirk his duties is punished by a regime of bread and water. Moreover, promotion from one rank to another is considered a public distinction marked by the wearing of an iron, silver, or gilt badge—a custom that blurs even more the initial differentiation attempted between those inferior natures motivated by emulation and the superior ones motivated by their duty to fulfill their natural abilities.¹¹

His distaste for emulation leads Bellamy to maintain that in utopia the coarse motive of gain, typical of nineteenth-century individualism, has been replaced by patriotism, service to the nation, and a passion for humanity. Yet these abstractions are given no content that would allow one to picture their functioning as actual motives. Consequently, emulation and natural endowments come to seem indistinguishable, since the only method that Bellamy offers to determine natural endowment is the rank and badge system, which must also serve as the goal for those motivated by emulation.

It is not surprising to find that Bellamy has portrayed economic activity as almost entirely the result of the way in which the industrial army is organized. The fact that economic activity in utopia is pictured in terms of a rather rigid social organization is indicative of Bellamy's desire to subdue the potential anarchy it is capable of generating; the alternative, “each man for himself,” or what theorists have called the state of nature, is condemned as being demonstrably destructive of human dignity and equality. But at the same time, at the level of individual motivation, nothing other than emulation is available to explain the functioning of the industrial army. Emulation appears to express either the desire of inferior types to advance in the industrial army or the desire of superior persons for honor. In both cases the reason for emulation is to be found in the already existing economic organization and therefore cannot serve as a basis for calling economic activity more than social.

Further evidence for the social character of Bellamy's ideal is found in his treatment of education. In classical utopias, education strengthened those preexisting traits in human nature that the author judged desirable, and inhibited those he thought harmful. In the modern utopia, in which a better environment is much more instrumental in determining the way in which men act, one might expect the formative powers of education to be stressed even more. But in Bellamy's treatment, education is merged with the economic system, rather than being given a broadly formative influence apart from it. In the year 2000 the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave. For those who enter the industrial army the line between education and nurture-maintenance is a thin one because school performance is merged with the first three years of unclassified labor in order to determine the rank of candidates for the industrial army.

The role of education is more clearly delineated for those who choose professions after finishing their term of general labor (brain workers as opposed to hand workers) and therefore must continue their studies in schools of technology, medicine, art, and higher liberal learning. The professions are organized as a counterpart to the industrial army, and a definite choice of occupation must be made before the age of thirty, six years after entering the industrial army; otherwise there would remain too brief a period in which the state could profit from the professional talent it has educated.

Apart from determining the citizens' natural aptitude for future occupations that allow them to serve the nation, what do the schools do? Manual training, Bellamy states, is not allowed to encroach upon general culture, but beyond that brief comment he tells us next to nothing about what general culture might be. A theoretical knowledge of industry and tools, reinforced by frequent visits to the workshop, is explicitly mentioned as a part of education, as is further training in postgraduate schools; both take place during the working as well as the retirement years (retirement occurs after twenty-four years of industrial service). But despite the author's emphasis upon the freedom of mind that comes with economic security (he calls it a “moral atmosphere of serenity”), Bellamy gives no intimation why his citizens would continue their studies other than to suggest that the intellect matures late in life.¹² “Late blooming” is hardly a sufficient motive for education unless one ascribes to the intellect an active thirst for knowledge, which in any case Bellamy does not do.

A long and detailed critique of nineteenth-century education is phrased entirely in economic terms and provides a partial explanation of the continued close relation between the two in Bellamy's utopia.

The basis of education is economic, requiring as it does the maintenance of the pupil without economic return during the educational period. If the education is to amount to anything, that period must cover the years of childhood and adolescence to the age of at least twenty. That involves a very large expenditure, which not one parent in a thousand was able to support in your day. The state might have assumed it, of course, but that would have amounted to the rich supporting the children of the poor, and naturally they would not hear to that, at least beyond the primary grades of education.¹³

Aside from exposing and reforming nineteenth-century malpractices, the treatment of education if astonishingly scant when one considers what a fertile field malleable human nature offers an enterprising utopian author. In Bellamy's case the most probable explanation for this omission is his belief that human nature has not changed in utopia; only the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action. It should be remarked that Bellamy's claim that human nature has not changed in utopia is quite different from the classical utopian view that human nature is fundamentally the same. The classical view assumed that the basic requirements of men's natures are identical and that therefore one value or good is capable of satisfying their nature. The modern claim that human nature has not changed considers diversity a fundamental characteristic of men's nature. The similar nature of preutopian and utopian men refers to a temporal rather than an essential similarity.

Bellamy's view that human nature has not changed in utopia, put in temporal perspective, means that once the deleterious motive of competitive economic gain is removed, human nature is freed—is no longer impeded, so to speak—in the event that it wishes an education. But Bellamy suggests no specific, concrete motives for desiring knowledge, such as curiosity about the nature of the universe or a desire to explore the past or predict the future. He seems to rest his case for education firmly upon economics when he says that “the greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it.”¹⁴

Both economic and educational activity, to the extent that the two are distinguishable, can thus be described as social activity, which can be justified only in the already existing utopian social organization. In addition to being social, the modern utopian ideal has been described as “pervasive,” to indicate that one ideal determines the nature of all other activities in utopia. The pervasive principle is reductionist in its operation: in Bellamy's society all utopian activities in which independent motives or purposes might operate are reduced to the social ideal of economic equality. One example of the pervasive character of the ideal has already been provided in the virtual identity that Bellamy establishes between education and economics. Two other apparently independent activities, the arts and criminality, upon examination appear derivative from economic equality and thus offer additional evidence of the pervasiveness of the social ideal.

Bellamy is typical of his century in regarding the arts as an autonomous area of activity:

I would call attention to the fact that sentimental love of the beautiful and sublime in nature, the charm which mountains, sea, and landscape so potently exercise upon the modern mind through a subtle sense of sympathy, is a comparatively modern and recent growth of the human mind. … If culture can add such a province as this to human nature within a century, it is surely not visionary to count on a still more complete future development of the same group of subtle psychical faculties.¹⁵

But within utopia the autonomy of the arts is not maintained. Intellectual sympathy, now available to a vastly increased proportion of individuals, is the faculty that permits the appreciation of the arts, among which Bellamy includes cleanliness. This appreciation is said to make the conditions of life pleasanter by eliminating the inconvenience (odor is cited as an example) that often resulted, in preutopian times, from association with the uncouth.

Although Bellamy is frequently vague about the difference, he does distinguish the pleasant environment created by the arts from universal education, which is necessary for the citizen's full enjoyment of aesthetic matters. (And, of course, the level of hygiene was much more closely related to the level of education in Bellamy's day than it is now.) Education is claimed to have produced an era of unparalleled intellectual splendor, of which the preutopian renaissance offered only a faint suggestion. An aspiring author, in this second renaissance, can exempt himself from service to the industrial army—if he is able to secure sufficient public popularity and remuneration. Every author has an equal chance to try to obtain recognition from the public, whose verdict is deemed conclusive.

Bellamy's treatment of the arts, then, assumes that quality is identified by an almost unanimous public opinion. He bases this unanimity on universal education of a high level. But education, as Bellamy treats it, is almost identical to the desire for economic equality, the social ideal. The unanimity that supports the arts would thus appear to be merely another facet of the social ideal.

The same problem recurs when Bellamy tries to show why the artist should want to obtain such honors. The only explanation offered is that such honors are fair: all participants start from the same basis. But the sense and significance of fairness is never given, and the reader is left to suspect that it is again economic equality expressed in another form. Similarly, when Bellamy describes a feeling of pleasure that the reader may experience over a book, the feeling is not shown as part of a distinctive mode of activity or way of perceiving. Public opinion, fairness, the feeling of pleasure—all seem to lack referents other than the all-pervasive one of economic equality.

In an article written in 1889, William Morris criticizes Bellamy's utopia for offering inadequate scope to the artistic impulse:

[Bellamy's] temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilization, if only the injustice, misery, and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half change seems possible to him. The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industrious professional middle class man of today, purified from their crime of complicity with the monopolist class, and become independent instead of being, as they are now, parasitical. … ¹⁶

Morris suggests, in contrast to Bellamy, that art is not a mere adjunct to equality of condition but the necessary and indispensable instrument of both variety in life and human happiness. His criticism of Looking Backward is, finally, that it offers only one ideal—economic equality.¹⁷

In view of Bellamy's assertion that human nature has not changed by living in utopia, his treatment of crime may offer grounds for modifying Morris's criticism. In apparent contradiction to his claim for the continuity of human nature, Bellamy observes that nineteenth-century crime was due almost entirely to inequality of possession. When the nation became the sole trustee of wealth, he says, “We cut this root, and the passion tree that overshadowed your society withered, like Jonah's gourd, in a day.”¹⁸ Crimes of violence, attributed to ignorance and bestiality, have almost disappeared in Bellamy's utopia. What crime remains is treated as an outcropping of ancestral traits (atavism), and the criminal is sent to the hospital, not to jail. This procedure has a certain logic, for if all motives for crime have been abolished and crime continues to exist, what explanation other than atavism or hereditary disorder is possible?

In Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, Butler, with satiric intent, pushes assumptions about criminality such as those Bellamy was prone to make to their logical and ludicrous extreme. Butler describes a society in which illness is a crime and crime is an illness to be cured by hospitalization or a “straightener.” The point is well taken, for if crime can be explained entirely in terms of attendant circumstances or events, one is no more responsible for crime than for a disease or accident. (Indeed, one could argue that contagion is a much more serious risk than corruption for an onlooker.) If immorality is not dealt with on its own terms, almost any other terms such as societal conditions or aesthetic displeasure can be shown to have some relevance.¹⁹

Bellamy's difficulty, seen in his treatment of education and the arts as well as crime, comes in separating indicators (badges, ranks, public acclaim) from causes. He is reluctant to attribute preutopian evil to constant characteristics in human nature, but unless he can supply other plausible justifications for the various activities within utopia, the reader may fill in the lack himself by mistaking the indicators for the causes of such activity.

In other words, it seems that Bellamy is able to maintain that human nature has remained the same by reducing human motives to the desire for economic equality or variants thereof, such as fairness in artistic competition. In this process he has separated motive from its basis in human nature and is then free to assimilate motive into varying forms of economic organization. But if Bellamy is to be taken seriously when he asserts that human nature has not changed in utopia (although economic organization has), then what is left as a permanent part of human nature are only those traits that were thwarted in the old capitalistic system but are fully expressed in the new economic organization. Those characteristics are, of course, various forms of the desire for equality, which are indistinguishable from Bellamy's economic organization because they find unique expression through and as a result of that economic organization. Bellamy's ideal is therefore pervasive, eliminating or reducing all motives to the social one of economic equality.

The different motives accounting for activities in preutopian and utopian society vary according to the different forms of economic organization in the two societies. Bellamy's economic arrangements were previously called social because of the lack of any other motives that would have suggested the presence of nonsocial forms of behavior. But it is now possible to call these economic arrangements, as well as the activity that takes place through them, social in a much stronger sense. Such social activities are the unique and adequate receptacle of a constant trait in human nature—the desire for equality. Social activity is thus the sole and adequate expression of man's nature in Bellamy's utopia. When the new era was inaugurated, Bellamy says:

There was, of course, a large residuum too hopelessly perverted, too congenitally deformed, to have the power of leading a good life, however assisted. Toward these the new society, strong in the perfect justice of its attitude, proceeded with merciful firmness … the new order, guaranteeing an equality of plenty to all, left no plea for the thief and robber, no excuse for the beggar, no provocation for the violent. … With a good conscience, therefore, the new society proceeded to deal with all vicious and criminal persons as morally insane, and to segregate them … wholly secluded from the world—and absolutely prevented from continuing their kind. By this means the race, in the first generation after the Revolution, was able to leave behind itself forever a load of inherited depravity and base congenital instincts, and so ever since it has gone on from generation to generation, purging itself of its uncleanness.²⁰

There is, in short, no excuse for an old human nature in a new social order. Atavism does not, any more than the rubric “morally insane,” answer the problem of continued criminality. It merely poses the question at one remove: why do people continue to act in a manner that reflects circumstances and causes no longer in existence? Bellamy might have used as an explanation something approximating Bagehot's “cake of custom,” or he might have suggested a lag in human nature's ability to respond to changed social conditions. But in so doing Bellamy would also have had to allow for the possibility that outmoded habits or basic, slow-changing human appetites would affect the functioning of the economic system. Such retarding elements, in any case, are incompatible with the utopian citizen's awareness of the near-perfect rationality of his economic system in comparison with nineteenth-century private capitalism. Once the root is cut, the gourd should, according to Bellamy's logic, wither. If reason is at fault, those in whom reason is defective—those who are no longer capable of being considered fully human—must be isolated and eliminated.

For Bellamy, then, whatever has not changed in human nature finds sole and adequate expression in social activity. But he does not describe the constant factor in human nature—the desire for equality—as capable of supporting any other value or ideal than the economic. Equality in the economic realm does not serve as the basis for the occurrence of other and different activities. It is this lack that makes it tempting to describe Bellamy's equality in terms of similarity: like human natures produce like actions.

By distinguishing a level of activity not used in this analysis (biological necessity), Herbert Marcuse suggests how the pervasive character of the utopian ideal derives from its social nature. Marcuse distinguishes two levels within the historical structure: a phylogenetic-biological level (scarcity), at which animal man develops in a struggle with nature, and a sociological level (hierarchical distribution of scarcity), at which socialized individuals and groups struggle among themselves and with their environment.²¹ Marcuse notes that the two levels are in constant interaction, but social phenomena generated at the second level (the division of labor, law, government) are exogenous to the first. These phenomena are more malleable and are capable of faster change without altering the first, more fundamental instinctual level.

In Bellamy's utopia the two levels appear to have become entirely separated. The sociological level—society organized to ensure economic equality—appears able to alter entirely, or even make superfluous, the phylogenetic-biological level. In utopia the basic appetites, such as sex and hunger, which are expressed at the phylogenetic-biological level, no longer appear in any form as motives for activity at the sociological level. This is perhaps the most striking instance of the capacity of the social ideal to imprint its nature on motives that are not in themselves social.

Morris comments on Bellamy's difficulty in handling the delicate problem of motivation in terms that parallel Marcuse's analysis. He criticizes Bellamy for assuming, within utopia, the same drive to provide for such needs as hunger as characterized nineteenth-century Boston, needs that utopia was supposed to eliminate.

The underlying vice in it [Bellamy's utopia] is that the author cannot conceive … anything else than the machinery of society, and that, doubtless naturally, he reads into the future of society, which he tells us is unwastefully conducted, that terror of starvation which is the necessary accompaniment of a society in which two-thirds or more of its labour-power is wasted. …²²

Either Bellamy assumed such drives and could not explain them in terms of his utopia, or he eliminated them. In Morris's explanation the motive for activity within utopia is preutopian fear of starvation. In the terms of this study it is the existence of a social organization designed to produce economic equality. And in both cases utopian activity appears equally incomprehensible.

THE STATIC CHARACTER OF LOOKING BACKWARD AND EQUALITY

The modern utopian author who intends that his ideal society be brought into being may be held to account for the way that society would function if it existed. The classical utopias discussed earlier in this study were perfect societies that deliberately excluded change as incompatible with perfection. Immobility was one of the characteristics that made them effective standards of judgment—points of stability by which to measure the flux of existing reality.

Most modern utopian authors deny that their societies should contain any such static perfection. For utopia to be a fit place in which men can live and develop their capacities, the modern utopian author must design a system that accommodates, even encourages, change. Bellamy and Wells are emphatic in their insistence that utopia must have a future as well as a past. That the past is capable of important development is established, for it has resulted in utopia. But such development is seen as a mere foretaste of what will occur in the utopian future. Bellamy's statement, referred to earlier, that Boston in the year 2000 is enjoying a renaissance of such brilliance as to make the sixteenth-century Renaissance pale into insignificance is typical of the claims made for modern utopias. In the Preface to Looking Backward, the author declares his confidence in utopia's future:

The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this bimillennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years, than by “Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred.²³

Bellamy suggests that a “solid ground” for future development was laid in the progress of the last century. Of what does this “solid ground” consist? The changes in nineteenth-century capitalist society were accomplished through peaceful industrial evolution. Capital became concentrated in large monopolies and trusts that absorbed or eliminated all but a few small business firms. Although initially a hardship to individuals, the consolidation resulted in a vast increase in productive efficiency and wealth, and after a period of time the public, which had resisted consolidation, came to see that it was the source of the material well-being and progress they enjoyed. Still later the remaining monopolies merged into a single syndicate, and the people themselves assumed control of their economic affairs, just as a century before they had taken over the conduct of their political affairs.

Bellamy maintains that the development of monopoly capitalism into state or national capitalism was inevitable.

The solution came as the result of a process of industrial development which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize and cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable.²⁴

Yet if progress in the past was inevitable and a necessary development of the logic inherent in economic forces, these forces afford little scope for change in the future. The logical last step, the unification of nations separate only in name into a world state, is already anticipated, and Bellamy does not foresee any further political-economic development beyond it. To be sure, the economy will continue to produce an ever-increasing abundance of goods and products, but Bellamy to the contrary, such productivity is not really progress, only more of what already exists.

In Equality, Bellamy seems to acknowledge implicitly that ever-increasing abundance is too weak a vehicle of change, for he devotes greater attention to the change of opinion that, he claims, accompanies economic evolution. Within this new emphasis, he attributes the inevitability of the revolution to the increase of intelligence among the masses since the sixteenth century. In this more voluntaristic version of events, all the evils of the capitalist system were necessary in order for men to gain a clear conception of what was at stake (the irresponsible power of private capitalism) and to establish a “wholly new economic system … based upon public control. … ”²⁵

But increased intelligence provides no better solution to the problem of future change than economic productivity. The increase of intelligence came about because of a specific set of conditions: men were able to contrast the rationality of a consolidated economic enterprise with the remaining irrationality of uncoordinated management and to draw the appropriate lesson. But once the lesson has been learned, economic enterprise within utopia is fully rational. To the extent that the increase of intelligence depends upon the contrast between rational and irrational social arrangements, utopia offers limited possibilities for continued progress in that realm as well.

As has been noted, Bellamy maintains that within utopia human nature has not changed; only human motives have changed with the new environment. He does not say what human nature is apart from its motives, but it seems apparent that the new environment has eliminated one important motive for change, that which depends on the contrast of reason and unreason. In describing a sermon (piped into the home) Bellamy indicates that he is aware of the problem. He has the minister say that “it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinity within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even … the struggle for existence … could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the earth.”²⁶ Bellamy gives very few such indications of unease; in Wells's and Howells's utopias the signs of discomfort are much more explicit.

When Bellamy is not propounding economic developments as a motive for future change in utopia, he favors the notion that progress will be based on the continual development of men's spiritual capability. He says that “the first full and clear revelation of the natural and inherent varieties in human endowments” dates from the introduction of economic equality.²⁷ In Bellamy's reading of future history, once men were no longer crippled by an inadequate material environment, they were able to concentrate their energies on spiritual evolution. The twentieth century, accordingly, has seen the most progress in the science of the soul and its relation to the Eternal and the Infinite. Men have eaten, in Bellamy's language, the fruit of the tree of love and the mutuality that resulted has permitted them to develop an entirely new phase of civilization the motto of which is: Ye Shall Be As Gods.²⁸

Among Bellamy's unpublished papers there is a description of the new epoch:

These intense emotions, whether of pain or of pleasure, these ravishments, we do not want them. … We look for a placid race that shall not alternate between honey and vinegar, but live on mild ambrosia ever. To love unwisely is to dread direfully. We will have no dread.²⁹

But when love's object is men as spiritual and as like-minded as oneself, it amounts to little more than self-congratulation. As a basis for progress in utopia love based on homogeneity is not convincing, and in their mild enjoyment this “placid race” does not appear capable of being agents of the progress Bellamy wishes to see in utopia.

Bellamy's utopia cannot accommodate change as novelty, if novelty is understood to mean the development of men or institutions into something different from what they are when they attain utopia. A minimum condition of novelty—the need or the will to devise something better than what exists at present—is lacking in utopia. But if the utopian environment cannot support developmental change, then change of a weaker sort may still occur as a response to accidents or factors beyond men's control. There are, however, difficulties even in imagining this lesser type of change. Utopia is, to all intents and purposes, a world state, precluding change in reaction to threats from hostile neighbors. The economy is too rationalized to allow any unanticipated side effects such as depletion of resources or overabundance of production. The natural environment presents no threat, as men have made themselves largely independent of it by machines.³⁰

Indeed, the only source of change that seems plausible in Bellamy's utopia is the one his citizens are busy eliminating—atavism. It may not be accidental that the standard determining atavism is the present level of development of utopian citizens, for atavism, so defined, permits “change” to take place without the need to innovate. If one looks at its origin, atavism is the final irrational threat to Bellamy's utopians. It is change whose source is “outside” the utopian system, an accident with no explanation at all. “Progress,” then, might be said to consist in eliminating this last source of unwelcome change.³¹

Change as novelty or as a reaction to change initiated from outside the utopian environment is not provided for in Bellamy's ideal society. The type of change that remains possible to utopia is change in its weakest form—the elaboration and consolidation of the status quo. New goods will continue to be produced by new machines, which will, at the same time, improve the environment. In their activities the utopians appear to be busy maintaining the status quo; when atavism has been eliminated, the status quo will, presumably, maintain itself.

Politics, the method by which the arrangements of society are deliberately maintained or changed, has almost disappeared from Bellamy's utopia. The author notes that “most of the purposes for which government formerly existed no longer remain to be subserved.”³² Law became obsolete when the relations between men were simplified. Lying has gone out of fashion, as Julian West remarks, leaving very little work for judges in either civil or criminal cases. The remaining governmental functions have been merged with the economic plant. Bellamy concedes that “a government in the sense of a coordinating directory of … associated industries we shall always need, but that is practically all the government we have now.”³³

The past is no guarantor of the future, and despite Bellamy's claim, his utopians do not appear capable of having a history more splendid than any known to the past. Moreover, their own past, as well as the tradition of change it represents, no longer makes sense to the inhabitants of utopia. Dr. Leete's daughter tells Julian West that she knows nothing about nineteenth-century conditions and the revolution that emerged from them.

You have no idea how hard I have been trying to post myself on the subject so as to be able to talk intelligently with you, but I fear it is of no use. … Since you have been telling me how the old world appeared to you in that dream, your talk has brought those days so terribly near that I can almost see them, and yet I cannot say that they seem a bit more intelligible than before.³⁴

Dr. Leete's daughter is not unique. Bellamy says that after the revolution such were the joy and contentment of the populace that they would willingly have forgotten about the past. However, a historian, “moved by a certain crabbed sense of justice,” decided to make a record of past events, which he called Kenloe's Book of the Blind.³⁵ The contents of the book are a recapitulation of Bellamy's two utopias, describing the miseries of capitalism and contrasting them to the superior rationality achieved in utopia.³⁶ The Book of the Blind has become irrelevant to the utopians not only because they have sight but also because they have diagnosed the few remaining cases of blindness among themselves and know that their cause is atavism. To remain interested in a disease that is fast disappearing and in any case cannot be cured is to indulge a degree of morbid curiosity of which Bellamy's utopians are quite innocent.

Atavism is all the more irrational if, as Bellamy seems at times to believe, history as well as the personality that tries to base itself in history is discontinuous. In a novel written in 1884 the protagonist says: “In their eyes the past was good or bad for itself, and an evil past could no more shadow a virtuous present than a virtuous present could retroact to brighten or redeem an ugly past.”³⁷ And in Doctor Heidenhoff's Process one of the characters remarks that the ancients had a beautiful fable about the waters of Lethe. He goes on to conjecture: “Just think how blessed a thing for men it would be … if their memories could be cleansed and disinfected. … Then the most disgraced and ashamed might live good and happy lives again.”³⁸ Bellamy forgets that Plato's souls drank the waters of Lethe only after they had chosen their lots for the next life.

Even Julian West, with direct experience of utopia's past, professes amazement that a nation of rational human beings could have ever consented to live under capitalist conditions. His astonishment is, no doubt, genuine, for it is the function of the visitor to utopia to become convinced of its superiority. But inasmuch as the visitor is merely the means of explaining utopian organization, he quickly falls victim to the utopian citizens' inability to comprehend any reality other than their own.

It is not surprising that utopians cannot understand preutopian society. In Bellamy's twenty-first-century Boston, almost all the activities described are explained in terms of economic equality, the desire for which Bellamy considered a fundamental characteristic of all men. However, because the static character of utopian reality prevents serious change from being described, it tends to make such a character trait appear absolute, even if the author had intended it to be understood as a condition for, or relative to, other traits that the utopians would develop in the future. And when an occurrence cannot be directly related to this economic justification, such as the feeling of pleasure Bellamy's utopians experience when reading a book, the unrelated description appears both inadequate and irrelevant. It accords with no known mode of activity within utopia and appears as an unexplained quirk or as a fetish held over from a prior time without any meaning. Similarly, any activity whose description is omitted in utopia (such as liberal education in all but name) must appear to the reader to be banished from utopia. Because utopia is an artificial construct that claims to be complete, it cannot admit to having overlooked some activities. The author can leave no corner of utopia uncoordinated by omission—only by deliberate design.

What seems to have occurred is that the organization of utopian activities and Bellamy's ideal of economic equality are so dovetailed that to question any given activity becomes tantamount to questioning utopia in its entirety. To ask how pleasure justifies the existence of artistic activity, for instance, would be to introduce into utopia another possible principle of determining reality, and to do so would require the entire reorganization of utopia. Utopian society and its ideal appear to be perfectly congruent, so that to ask why a liberal arts education is not described in Bellamy's Boston is to question the adequacy of the author's view of men's nature and the organization of society through which their natures are to find expression.

It might be argued that, were another ideal introduced into utopia, some reorganization might be required, but that the entire utopian reality would hardly be jeopardized. This would be the case if the author were able to show the method or explain the reasons for specifying his ideal in one particular set of institutions and not another. Were then the ideal to be altered or another ideal introduced, the method could be used to make changes in utopian institutions. However, the author does not and cannot show why his ideal results in just this type of organization and no other. The reason is extrinsic to utopia and therefore to any explanation that can be offered within utopia: the author's experience of his own social reality and the extent of his imaginative ingenuity in reconstructing it.

Without a necessary connection of ideal and institution, though the principle and its concrete exemplification appear adequate to each other, within utopia there can be no convincing explanation of the nature of this necessity. If the method by which the ideal is specified into institutions were available within utopia, although ideal and institution would continue to dovetail neatly, it would be possible to suggest alternative ways of specifying the ideal, and change (but not novelty) would be possible within utopia. Without the method, it is as if one were confronted with a jigsaw puzzle—the pieces do indeed fit, but one is at a loss to understand why they were shaped in this particular fashion and no other.

Were the author to explain his reasons for presenting utopian social arrangements as the best exemplification of his ideal, the reader would be dealing no longer with a finished utopia but with the creation of utopia—that is, with the author's attempt at a thought experiment in which his ideal or ideals are displayed as a systematic, coherent, and harmonious whole. Moreover, were the inhabitant of utopia in possession of the author's reasons for specifying his ideal in one particular set of institutions and not another, that ideal would become immanent in utopia. To be able to conceive of an alternative method of embodying the utopian principle is to imply that the ideal is not fully expressed, or not expressed in the only way possible, in utopian reality.

In sum, were Bellamy to give his reasons for embodying his ideal in a specific set of social arrangements, he would be introducing into utopia an awareness of the relativity of his reasoning. And if the author admits that his reasoning is relative, he in effect admits that his ideal society is a possibility rather than a necessity; there are, he would imply, various directions in which existing reality could change other than the one indicated by his utopia.

The modern utopian reality has been described as static, meaning that it is not capable of more than weak change or maintenance of the status quo. Utopia does not appear capable of future development; it lacks any sort of political activity, which is one way in which societies make their own history. In addition, an inhabitant of utopia, if he is conceivable at all, would be unable to understand the history of other nations, which, in Bellamy's utopia, is also the history of his own past.

The utopians in Bellamy's ideal state live in an eternal present in which human nature remains at one with itself, neither changing nor undergoing change.³⁹ In classical utopias the fixity of human nature reflected an ideal that transcended utopian society and gave it meaning. By contrast, Bellamy's ideal offers no norm for human nature. His ideal addresses itself, not to men's nature, but to the rationalization of economic relations among them. It is a social ideal, and when it is used to organize all of utopian reality, the result is to freeze utopia into one pattern. Human nature is static in Bellamy's future society because the one ideal it expresses is derived from the inadequacies of the past—a past that no longer exists to the extent that it no longer has meaning for the inhabitants of utopia.

Despite the detail with which Bellamy describes Boston in the year 2000, that society appears oversimplified. Its organization is based entirely on the ideal of economic equality, which is fully expressed in utopian institutions. It might be objected that Bellamy's reality is not as simple as it is presented here. After all, he is an absolute dictator while creating his utopia, and he could have avoided some difficulties, such as the continued existence of criminality, either by simply stating that the criminal class no longer exists or by not dealing with the question at all. But Bellamy is no more free than was the classical utopian author in creating his ideal society. The classical utopian author was limited by the transcendence of his ideal—its greater reality that he could express but not create. The modern utopian author is limited by the nature of the nonutopian society he criticizes. If he wishes his utopia to appear as an adequate substitute for existing reality, he is obliged to deal with most of the major social problems of his day. The model would lack even surface plausibility if the author attempted to abolish too many problems by fiat.

LOOKING BACKWARD AND EQUALITY AS A CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT

In Looking Backward and in Equality the author's presentation of utopian reality appears oversimplified. The reasons for this oversimplification are the social and pervasive character of Bellamy's ideal and the inability of utopian reality to accommodate change. I have suggested that a third characteristic of modern utopias is that they do not afford a standard by which to judge existing reality. The modern utopia is a better critique than a standard. A critique is topical criticism dependent on the conditions it criticizes, and once the conditions that are under attack change, the utopian criticism becomes irrelevant—or at best merely of historical interest. In examining how this occurs, the discussion centers no longer upon the activities that Bellamy describes in his utopia but upon utopia as a finished product designed to be a commentary upon the present.

In one of his many critical discussions of nineteenth-century society, Bellamy remarks that even if the capitalists had been moral saints, the economic defects of the system would have remained.⁴⁰ Capitalism is compared to husbandry: there are objective conditions that must be fulfilled before either can be expected to work. The conditions necessary to the proper working of capitalism can be summarized as follows:

… the fatal weakness of democracy [has been] that the people, who were the rulers, had individually only an indirect and sentimental interest in the state as a whole … their real … and direct interest being concentrated upon their personal fortunes, their private stakes, distinct from and adverse to the general stake … the same economic motive—which, while the capital remained in private hands, was a divisive influence … became the most powerful of cohesive forces [under collective control]. … ⁴¹

The economic motive that was such a divisive influence in capitalist times is competition. Bellamy gives a number of explanations to account for its prevalence. He suggests that it resulted from the excessive individualism of a laissez-faire economy. He mentions the explanation favored by Morris: “ … in that wolfish society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar desperation … a man might not choose, but must plunge into the foul fight. … ”⁴² Greed for the limited spoils of the capitalist system contributed to competition and resulted in even larger monopolies, which, in turn, widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Another factor was the egoism of the well-to-do, with their desire for the prestige and power that accompanied profits. But most frequently Bellamy blames the social organization itself and cautions the reader that it was not human depravity but the madness of the profits system which caused unbridled competition.

By making the economic system responsible for social injustices, Bellamy put himself at variance with the dominant social philosophers of his day: Spencer, Huxley, and Sumner in the United States. The prevalent view still considered man to be depraved, but it departed from the Christian view of man's destiny by substituting economic rivalry for God as the agent of final judgment. Schiffman has suggested that Bellamy discerned in these social philosophies “the appearance of his old churchly foe, the concept of man's depravity, in secular garb” and reacted with corresponding vehemence.⁴³

Whatever the cause, Bellamy rejects those fatalistic explanations that attribute society's malfunctioning to the inherent depravity or inadequacy of man's nature. A competitive system that rewards men, not on the basis of their natural abilities, but for accidents of birth and inheritance is, for Bellamy, immoral, and “the end itself being immoral, the means employed could not possibly make any difference.”⁴⁴

In contrast to the ferocious competitive system of the nineteenth century, Bellamy's utopian society is organized to ensure solidarity through economic equality. As has been seen, the difficulty with Bellamy's ideal is that, while it can be used to construct a new form of economic organization, the industrial army, it cannot by itself provide new motivations for economic activity. Morris noted this problem and explained it by suggesting that Bellamy had introduced into his utopia a preutopian motive: fear of starvation. While agreeing with Morris that the motive for utopian activity is very similar to the capitalist motive, this study differs as to what the motive is.

Morris's motive, fear of starvation, wrongly suggests that the author made no attempt to provide any incentives for men to work that would be acceptable by utopian standards. Bellamy does try to provide such incentives, and if the attempt is unsuccessful, it is nonetheless instructive. A series of honors, designed to encourage men to achieve their best in the future Boston, are an important part of the utopian advance from the nineteenth century. As has been seen, promotion from one rank to another in the industrial army is designated a public honor and rewarded by an iron, silver, or gilt badge. Political honors likewise depend on having risen through the industrial ranks, and as elected officials cannot hope to profit from their position, their only motive for seeking office is public esteem. The artist, also, depends on public approval:

An author of much acceptance succeeds in supporting himself by his pen during the entire period of service [in the industrial army], and the degree of any writer's literary ability, as determined by the popular voice, is thus the measure of the opportunity given him to devote his time to literature.⁴⁵

The highest honor in the nation, surpassing even the gilt badge previously mentioned, is a red badge awarded for “devotion to duty”—mostly to authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors.⁴⁶

Bellamy's incentives are, on the whole, not very convincing. A man motivated solely by a red badge is either playing games or not motivated at all. The badges must be seen merely as a sign of what men desire most in Bellamy's utopia: public recognition. And as the author does not attempt to explain why men desire public honor, the desire itself must be taken as a primary irreducible motive for utopian activity.

The difficulty is that as Bellamy describes public recognition, it is indistinguishable from emulation, which the author considers to be the motive of inferior natures and a residue from capitalist times.

Do not imagine, either, because emulation is given free play as an incentive under our system, that we deem it a motive likely to appeal to the nobler sort of men, or worthy of them. Such as these find their motives within not without, and measure their duty by their own endowments, not by those of others. … To such natures emulation appears philosophically absurd by its substitution of envy for admiration, and exultation for regret, in one's attitude toward the successes and the failures of others.⁴⁷

If the nobler natures in Bellamy's utopia measure their duties by their endowments, public recognition is to that extent superfluous. If, as Bellamy suggests in the artist's case, public recognition is the measure of endowment, the motive for such recognition can hardly be said to be internal.

Public recognition appears to be indistinguishable from emulation in Bellamy's utopia. Emulation, in turn, seems to be a polite name for competition, the motive of the capitalist era. The difference between emulation and competition is that badges are substituted for monetary rewards. But in a utopia of abundance, with adequate consumer goods for all, the absence of the profit motive is of doubtful significance.

If equality is the condition of men in utopia, emulation appears to be their motive. When utopia is seen in relation to its capitalist past, Morris's criticism appears valid; Bellamy has surreptitiously smuggled into utopia a most unutopian incentive. When Bellamy's utopia is considered by itself, in isolation from its preutopian past, the “cause” of emulation (or of the desire for public recognition) is, for want of any other sufficient explanation, the already established social organization of utopia.

One reason for calling Bellamy's utopia a critique of nineteenth-century American society rather than a standard by which to judge it is that his utopia is so much more directly related to the conditions it criticizes. Emulation is different only in degree, not in kind, from competition. The difference is that emulation takes place in a social system that does not permit monetary rewards or allow any of its citizens to starve. And to this extent utopia does succeed in being a much more humane society, reflecting its author's concern with the poverty and suffering he saw in his own environment.

But to the extent that Bellamy's ideal society eliminates only the most unpleasant effects of the competitive activity it criticizes, it offers merely a contrast to competitive society. Considered in isolation from its past, utopia makes very little sense. Because its significance lies in the contrast between itself and existing society, utopia remains dependent on the reality it criticizes. Bellamy's utopia is a critique, not a standard, because it makes its criticism of contemporary society by contrast rather than relying on a coherent vision of what human nature needs for its satisfaction.

It is characteristic of modern utopias—and Bellamy's is no exception—that almost as much time is spent delineating the wrongs of the past as is spent describing their solution in utopia. One reason is, of course, that while utopia is not attractive in itself to the modern reader who thinks in terms of change and development, it is attractive as a critique of—or in contrast to—the present. The modern utopia's detailed criticism of the present thus becomes a means of making men dissatisfied with their society and receptive to the utopian future.

Julian West frequently expresses amazement that “a nation of rational beings consented to remain economic serfs … after coming into absolute power to change at pleasure all social institutions which inconvenienced them.”⁴⁸ His amazement is well founded, because the power to change social institutions is not really explained, despite Bellamy's attempts, by any gradual process of economic evolution or necessary development of social institutions. A theory of necessary evolution provides only historical continuity; it cannot by itself explain such novelty as is claimed for utopia. Evolution can account for novelty only in terms of another factor—such as an increased diffusion of intelligence. And unlike a Condorcet, Bellamy does not give substance to his claims for the innovative powers of intelligence by exploring which characteristics of mind might be responsible for novelty and which would maintain continuity with the past.

Evolution, then, does not really explain innovation, and to the extent it were to do so, a utopia designed to encourage change would be superfluous. The power to change social institutions derives from the nonutopian citizen's awareness of utopian possibilities in the future. Utopia seen from outside acts, so to speak, as the catalyst to bring about its own existence.

It has been suggested that the paradox of modern utopias results from the fact that their raison d’être is extrinsic to utopia and is found in preutopian problems that require change. If, as Bellamy thinks, change is the expression of man's rationality, utopia can be seen as immanent in the present.

So much for the main, general, and necessary cause and explanation of the great Revolution—namely, the progressive diffusion of intelligence among the masses from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Given this force of operation, and the revolution of the economic basis of society must sooner or later have been its outcome everywhere: … [the timing and manner depending on] the differing conditions of different countries. … ⁴⁹

Emulation, the motive of utopian activity, is just as necessary to utopian society as competition is to capitalist society. In either case the responsibility for encouraging emulative and competitive activity can be attributed (as Bellamy is willing to do only for competition) to the respective social systems. The crucial difference between utopia and its past is that change, the antidote to competition, is always immanent to preutopian society; whereas once utopia is achieved, change is no longer possible as an antidote to emulation.

Looking Backward and Equality offer a critique of the present rather than a standard by which to judge it. The competitive motive remains in utopia; it is simply expressed in different social arrangements. Utopian society has a different structure from that of the real world. But a different social structure may not be a sufficient motive for desiring utopia to become reality. By refusing to accept the author's version of the future, the reader can, if he wishes, dismiss his critique of the present.

LOOKING BACKWARD AND EQUALITY AS A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

In the preface to Looking Backward Bellamy tells the reader that his utopia is “a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense. … ”⁵⁰ The triumph of common sense has indeed simplified utopia, but that does not necessarily make utopia more attractive for the reader. From the author's point of view, however, utopia is attractive because it is both simple and logical; it has permitted him to imagine a society fully determined by economic equality.

I have suggested that in the process of constructing a utopia the author tests his ideal by specifying it as concretely as possible, giving to it some of the weight and complexity of the present. While they are being constructed, modern utopias serve the same function as their classical predecessors: the attempt to investigate ideals by means of a thought experiment.

For the classical utopian author, articulation was a means of knowing ideals or values more adequately than he had known them previously. The ideal was already known beforehand in the sense that man's nature required it; without implicitly being guided by it a man would, like Plato's tyrant, be goaded to experience a succession of novel and never satisfying pleasures. But the intellectual conditions that supported such assumptions changed. Under the influence of Cartesian thought, reason was separated from its basis in innate ideas, and ideals were no longer accorded an unquestioned objective status. Reason assumed a more autonomous role, as in Hegel, where it helps determine and not just discover truth. Cassirer describes very well this change in men's attitude toward reason:

The whole eighteenth century understands reason in this sense; not as a found body of knowledge, principles, and truths, but as a kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects. What reason is, and what it can do, can never be known by its results but only by its function. And its most important function consists in its power to bind and to dissolve. It dissolves everything merely factual, all simple data of experience, and everything believed on the evidence of revelation, tradition and authority; and it does not rest content until it has analyzed all these things into their simplest component parts and into their last elements of belief and opinion.⁵¹

The modern utopian author is heir to the Enlightment, and reason is for him a concept of agency, not of being. And the modern utopian ideal is derived from a very characteristic activity of modern reason: a critical examination of the present. The ideal results from an appraisal of inadequacies in the present and an attempt to find a remedy for those inadequacies. As Bellamy constructs his utopia, two complementary processes are at work. A criticism of existing society is being made: competitive capitalism is inefficient and immoral; and reason is attempting to provide an alternative: economic equality.

From a nonutopian point of view an ideal such as economic equality may appear subjective and contingent, as part and parcel of the very reality it attempts to criticize. But in the process of constructing a utopia, the ideal derived from criticizing the nature and purpose of preutopian society becomes the conditions under which activity in utopia is carried out. The ideal becomes increasingly transparent to reason by being specified and then ordered in a utopian structure. Likewise, by producing this new and detailed order of social arrangements by an act of reasoning, the author succeeds in understanding some of the ramifications and implications of his ideal. If, as in Bellamy's case, there is only one ideal, it serves to organize all aspects of utopian reality.

By investigating the implications of an ideal in thought, reason creates a society ordered according to its own standards of consistency and harmony. The modern like the classical utopian author attempts to test the adequacy of his ideal by making it, in its full specificity, as coherent as possible. Because of this common ordering activity of reason, it is possible to speak of harmony as the goal of classical as well as modern utopias. It is in this rather special sense that utopia is timeless, fulfilling its character of eu-topos.

Another similarity between classical and modern utopias is found in the relation of the author to the society he has created. Plato's philosopher-king legislates for a city-state to which he has only secondary ties. He is separated from the city-state by the superior nature and greater comphrehensiveness of his knowledge, by his position as creator and sustainer of that society. The modern utopian author is similarly separated from his utopia. It is his ability to judge society that makes his knowledge superior to that of the citizens of utopia. His knowledge is more comprehensive because it includes the awareness of a past and future that are different from the present. The modern author's position is, however, only partially parallel to the classical utopian legislator. His desire to see his creation in existence makes the modern author presumably only too aware, as he creates his utopia, of his position outside it.

Both classical and modern utopian authors are dictators; they have total power to decide how to specify their ideals in utopian institutions. The arbitrary character of such decisions was not a problem in classical utopias, to the extent those societies were not intended to come into existence. But with the modern utopias' claim to be a viable reality the arbitrary character of the decision becomes a very serious problem. Utopia may be attractive for its author, whose judgments regarding the nature and purpose of social activity in the real world have become the limits or conditions of activity within utopia. But for the reader who imagines himself in utopia, that reality does not appear viable. Once in utopia he would be unable to understand his own past or to create his own future; he would, consequently, find himself in no position to make judgments about the nature and purpose of social activity within utopia. The future citizen of utopia may envy the author-legislator of utopia, who is acquainted with a preutopian reality in which economic equality was only immanent and not fully expressed. An ideal that is only immanent to reality does, after all, allow criticism of that reality and leaves open the question of change.

For a modern utopia, however, a thought experiment is at best a byproduct of its real purpose. The author's primary purpose is to make utopia as real as possible for his reader, a necessity if change is to occur. In a letter to Howells, Bellamy reflects on the problem of presenting a convincing reality:

… I think that every writer of fiction, when his fancy seduces him too far from this real life which alone he really knows, has such a cause of weakness and uncertainty as Antaeus might have felt when Hercules lifted him into the air, a weakness to be cured with the novelist as with the giant only by a return to earth. If this be true of the novelist, it is yet more true of the romancer, for it is the undertaking of the latter to give an air of reality even to the unreal. Though he build into the air, he must see to it that he does not seem to build upon the air, for the more airy the pinnacle the more necessary the solidity of the foundation. … ⁵²

The problem is not at all unique to Bellamy; Wells and Howells indicate their awareness of the same difficulty. One explanation for Antaeus' need to touch ground frequently is the nature of modern utopian values. In contrast to the values of classical utopian writers which were held in common, modern authors need to find a common ground that will help make their values acceptable to the publics they address. If the modern ideal is not to be entirely private and subjective, the author needs to build a bridge to the reader. The author and his reader do share one common ground: their social environment. The bridge that the author attempts to build is a shared critical awareness of what is wrong with that social environment. Bellamy indicates that he feels the part of the bridge that rests on the commonly shared past is solid enough. But he is uneasy about the strength of its span and the solidness of the abutment that rests in the future.

Were Bellamy willing to consider his utopia a “mental exercise on … the possibilities lateral to reality,” as a method of investigating the implications of ideals without intending them to assume reality, he might avoid the risk that his utopia is only a critique, a bridge that ends in midair.⁵³ He could likewise avoid the direct contrast of his ideal with the complexity of the present, which leads to an uneasiness with the former's insubstantiality. If Bellamy were content to justify his utopia by what he learns about his ideal in the process of investigating it, he would be able to acknowledge that his utopians are puppets, or heuristic fictions, not meant to acquire reality, but valuable nonetheless.

The modern utopian critique of existing social arrangements is weakened by offering utopia as a serious alternative to what is criticized. Instead of a standard of judgment the reader is left with a contrast: two pictures juxtaposed one upon the other, with the explanation of why the artist prefers the second picture to be found, not in the picture itself, but in the process of painting the picture. For in painting the picture the author has made the ideal more objective and universal—for himself.

Bellamy's ideal state is not nearly so convincing to a reader deriving his knowledge from preutopian reality, and for the citizen who lives in utopia but no longer understands its raison d’être its meaning is difficult to imagine. The thought experiment is a basis upon which to criticize existing reality only for the author-legislator and, to a lesser extent, for the reader, depending upon the degree to which he already shares the author's values. If the modern utopian author were willing to abandon the idea of his utopia's coming into existence, his critique would become much stronger. While still differing from a standard of judgment, which contains principles different in kind from those found in existing reality, the critique could point to social arrangements in need of change, leaving somewhat more open the question of the nature of the change required and allowing the reader to consider the utopian solution as a possible, but not a necessary, alternative.

It is interesting to speculate about another alternative that would serve to extricate the modern utopia from the dilemma deriving from its attempt both to criticize and to change reality at the same time. It is possible, for example, for Bellamy to argue that he never intended his utopia to be put into practice. The author could maintain that his utopia is only heuristic: it leads the reader to an awareness that contemporary social arrangements are inadequate, and from that awareness to an appraisal of the viability of the new society presented to him. As the utopian single-factor reality would, if this analysis is convincing, not appear viable, the reader would be stimulated to create a utopia of his own more congenial to his tastes.

By this activity of creation, the reader would place himself in the position from which a modern utopia can become an effective critique of existing reality: the position of the author who creates utopia. Although the new utopia the reader might create would most probably continue to be based on a single ideal, a chain reaction could occur, compelling each new reader in turn to go through the same steps. Instead of the complexity of the classical utopian standard of judgment, which offers the reader an independent standpoint from which to criticize existing reality without implying the necessity of changing that reality, one would find that typically modern phenomenon: a subjective judgment, held on personal grounds, but intensely experienced through the effort of creation.

Notes

1. Edward Bellamy, Selected Writings on Religion and Society, ed. Joseph Schiffman (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955), p. xlii.

2. Ibid., pp. xi ff. For an excellent discussion of Bellamy's religious development, see the introduction by John L. Thomas to Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).

3. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d. [ca. 1909]), pp. 140-143.

4. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. xx.

5. Joseph Schiffman, “Edward Bellamy's Altruistic Man,” American Quarterly, VI (Fall 1954), 195-209.

6. Theodor Hertzka, Freeland: A Social Anticipation, trans. Arthur Ransom (London: Chatto and Windus, 1891), pp. 442-443. Cf. Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie (Paris: Au Bureau du Populaire, Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, 14, 1848), pp. i-v.

7. As cited in Vernon Louis Parrington, Jr., American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 72.

8. Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), p. 195.

9. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 127.

10. Bellamy is never clear whether he means by emulation the desire to be esteemed by others or the desire for self-esteem or the desire for superiority. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), pp. 87-127. Probably the first and third senses, which reflect aspects of the capitalistic competition that Bellamy deplored, are nearest to his meaning. (The relation of emulation to capitalist competition will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.)

11. Bellamy's use of badges is reminiscent of Plato's use of different metals to represent differences in the activities of the three classes in the Republic (the contemplative activity of the philosophers being represented by gold). But Plato's ordering of activities involved judgments that Bellamy does not seem prepared to make. Plato's rank order is based on the value and on the perishable nature of both the metals and the activity typical of each class. Bellamy's use of three metals indicates only a numerical ranking. It is not even possible to suggest on what basis one is allotted a badge, since the grounds for promotion, beyond unanimity, are not described.

12. Bellamy, Equality, p. 249.

13. Ibid., pp. 247-248.

14. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 217.

15. Edward Bellamy, The Religion of Solidarity, ed. Arthur Morgan (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Bookplate Company, 1940), pp. 22-23. In a comment added in 1887 to the original manuscript (written in 1874) Bellamy says that the thoughts expressed in it represent the germ of his philosophy of life, which he later expanded but never substantially altered. Ibid., p. 43.

16. William Morris, The Commonweal (January 22, 1889), quoted in A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), p. 154 (Morris's italics; Morton's interpolation).

17. Despite Morris's perception of the weakness of Bellamy's utopia, News From Nowhere also offers but one ideal (pleasurable work in natural surroundings) which is both social and pervasive in nature. These characteristics of the ideal are difficult for modern utopias to avoid insofar as their ideal is derived from a critique of the present, whose multiple defects are explained as resulting from one cause. The relation of the pervasive to the social character of the ideal is discussed later in this chapter.

18. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 201.

19. Samuel Butler, Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (New York: Random House, 1927), pp. 88 ff. (See also the chapter on W. D. Howells for a discussion of morality in aesthetic terms.)

20. Bellamy, Equality, pp. 363-364.

21. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Random House, Vintage paperback, 1962), p. 120.

22. Morris, Commonweal, quoted in Morton, English Utopia, pp. 154-155 (Morris's italics).

23. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. xxi.

24. Ibid., p. 49. Cf. Equality, p. 385.

25. Bellamy, Equality, p. 330.

26. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 278.

27. Bellamy, Equality, p. 392. (Variety in human nature and the value of innovation are the bases on which Wells builds his utopia; this point will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Wells.)

28. Ibid., pp. 267-268.

29. Bellamy's unpublished papers, quoted in Arthur Morgan, The Philosophy of Edward Bellamy (New York: King's Crown Press, 1945), p. 72.

30. In a story called “The Machine Stops,” E. M. Forster takes Bellamy's position to one possible conclusion. He imagines a society in which a machine is the environment. As the automatic self-repair mechanisms with which the machine is equipped fall into disrepair, the machine grinds to a halt. The citizens have long since forgotten how to service the machines upon which they are totally dependent. E. M. Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library paperback, 1964).

31. To justify eliminating atavism, Bellamy speaks of “the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.” Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 222. This type of claim on the future is, no doubt, what Butler had in mind when he required newborn children in Erewhon to sign a deed releasing their parents from any responsibility for their birth or physical defects. (Physical defects constitute a crime in Erewhon.) Butler, Erewhon, pp. 174-176.

32. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 207.

33. Bellamy, Equality, p. 409.

34. Ibid., p. 4.

35. Ibid., p. 382.

36. The only other historian in utopia is Julian West, who experienced, for the first time in his life, a sudden desire to work. Bellamy attributes the authorship of Looking Backward to him, a book addressed in all but name to the nineteenth century, whose history is still to be made.

37. Edward Bellamy, Miss Ludington's Sister, quoted in Morgan, The Philosophy, p. 61.

38. Edward Bellamy, Doctor Heidenhoff's Process (London: William Reeves, n.d.), p. 13.

39. In another, not-too-dissimilar context, Bellamy put the point succinctly: “There is no way of joining the past with the present, and there is no difference between what is a moment past and what is eternally past.” Bellamy, Doctor Heidenhoff's Process, p. 124.

40. Edward Bellamy, “Talks on Nationalism,” Edward Bellamy Speaks Again: Articles, Public Addresses, Letters (Kansas City, Mo.: The Peerage Press, 1937), quoted in Bellamy, Selected Writings, p. 136.

41. Bellamy, Equality, pp. 28-29.

42. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 277.

43. Schiffman, American Quarterly, VI, 204.

44. Bellamy, Equality, p. 108.

45. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 163.

46. Ibid., p. 167.

47. Ibid., pp. 130-131.

48. Bellamy, Equality, p. 16.

49. Ibid., p. 307.

50. Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. xix.

51. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelin and James Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, Beacon paperback, 1955), p. 13.

52. Bellamy, Letter to William Dean Howells (August 7, 1884), quoted in Bellamy, Selected Writings, pp. 137-138. For the distinction between the novelist and the romancer (realism and romance), see William Dean Howells, European and American Masters, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1963), p. 165.

53. Raymond Ruyer, L’Utopie et les utopies (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), p. 9 (my translation).