SOURCE: James, Max H. “The Polarity of Individualism and Conformity, a Dynamic of the Dream of Freedom, Examined in Looking Backward.” Christianity & Literature: An Interdisciplinary Journal 35, no. 1 (fall 1985): 17-59.

[In the following essay, James analyzes the polarity of individualism versus conformity. He compares Looking Backward to other utopian novels, gives an overview of the philosophies of progress and individualism over the centuries, illustrates this polarity in Looking Backward in comparison to Karl Marx's ideas, and asserts that there must be a balance of this polarity to prevent a “short-circuiting of the dynamic of freedom.”]

The tension between the individual man and the mass of men making up his social environment probably has been felt as long as men have practiced self-reflection. The tension operates in both directions, attraction and repulsion. Born a product of social experience, the human being, as we know him, undergoes an early form of individuation at birth and enters a life filled with inward alternations of impulsion both toward and away from his group, and with alternating external compulsions from the group toward him to individuate (“stand on his own two feet”), on the one hand, and to conform (“give in”), on the other. It is the assumption of this paper that the polarity between self-assertion and submission, demanded of the individual both by his instinctive nature and by his group, produces a dynamic that runs throughout his life and is particularly present in the “dream of freedom.” In fact, it may be asserted that this polarity produces the dream of freedom.¹

Although the concept of freedom may be discussed almost wholly in terms of the individual, it usually requires the wider context of society, of culture with its institutions. Most definitions of freedom embody or imply the social context, especially in the United States, for American and English thinking often associates freedom with individualism, with considerable emphasis upon a person being “himself,” but such individualism ordinarily stands in contrast with the mass, and the freedom spoken of frequently refers more accurately to liberties within a sociological frame.²

This article deals with the sociology of freedom as it relates to and springs out of the polarity of individualism and conformity, and uses, as the matrix for this polarity study, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.³ The justification for this matrix is as follows: (1) A limited frame of reference is essential for a discussion of such large abstractions. (2) The term “dream of freedom” implies a utopian element and also refers to an important segment of the “American Dream.” (3) Looking Backward is America's most outstanding utopian work, and it includes, according to Robert Shurter, most of the reform ideas of Bellamy's generation. (4) Looking Backward, like all utopias, is in part a criticism of the society of its own time. (5) Bellamy's work presents a particular form of social structure, state socialism (as distinct from guild socialism), in which the ancient issue of “man versus state,” which still rages today, especially when state socialism is mentioned, may be isolated somewhat and examined. Even though it is plain that no evaluation of the individual-state ratio inside the social structure of Looking Backward necessarily will apply directly to late twentieth-century problems, yet the very discipline of thinking about one of man's most vexing problems, one which seems very nearly incapable of permanent solution, is not without value. In fact, such an effort, even a limited one like this, may be thought a duty incumbent upon each succeeding age. Therefore, this study, although inescapably limited in scope and substance, is nevertheless made with present-day issues in mind.⁴

First, I consider Looking Backward as a utopian dream, briefly reviewing some of its major utopian antecedents, identifying it as to kind of utopia, and paying particular attention to the fundamental concept of the nature of man, (i.e. perfectibility versus degradation) germane to Bellamy's utopian dream. Next, I consider some of the social criticism of Looking Backward, reviewing the social conditions which prompted that criticism, and again paying particular attention to the idea of “individualism” as it arose in the nineteenth century and as Bellamy treats it in his work. Another step is to analyze the social structure of Looking Backward, especially noting the freedom (liberties) allowed to the individual and the extent to which he is obligated to conform. The conclusion is a critique of the polarity of individualism and conformity found in Looking Backward, with remarks on certain points somewhat parallel with Marxism, with limited observations made from the Judeo-Christian point of view concerning the kind of polarity that might function still more dynamically toward a greater realization of the dream of freedom.

I

Looking Backward is a utopian dream; at least, Julian West dreams that it is a dream! Despite Engel's abuse of the term “utopian,” which he applies pejoratively to all social schemes that do not recognize the inevitability of class struggle and despite the subsequent negative connotation the word now frequently bears as a visionary, chimerical, impractical, and even dangerous scheme of social reform, the term, having entered the English language through Sir Thomas More's Utopia, has an honorable history and represents one of the noblest aspirations of humanity.⁵

Not all idealistic programs are utopias, nor all speculators and reformers utopists. Certain minimal criteria, arbitrary as they seem, help sort out this genre from the mass of speculative plans, theories, vagaries, and even noble expressions of ideals. Three minimal characteristics of a utopia as defined here are these: (1) It is fictional, a criterion that eliminates just now interesting experimental ventures in utopian communities. It also eliminates for now specifically planned changes for an existing social structure. (2) It describes a particular state or community, a “no place,” a criterion that eliminates speculative political philosophy or theory, mere statements of values, and the like. (3) Its theme is the social and political structure of that fictional state or community. But a utopia is not sheer fantasy. Although the utopist has complete liberty to plan his society without any restraint or handicap placed upon him by institutions and individuals as they are, and although he may thus populate his utopia with men more ideal than real men have ever seen, and he may construct a configuration of institutions the like of which the world has never known before, nevertheless, there is a point where sheer fantasy goes beyond a utopia in any meaningful sense. A utopia, thus, will bear some resemblance to the existing society of the utopist, presenting not only an escape from reality through the dream, but simultaneously criticising the existing society by the “as if” hints of the direction progress can take. This definition also eliminates mere stories of adventure and romance, even though their settings be in a mythical state, an imagined community, or an idealized environment. In The Quest for Utopia, Glen Negley and J. Max Patrick state, “The true utopist seeks and finds a better society, and what makes that society better is the subject of his attention and exposition. All else is incidental to his quest.”⁶Looking Backward fulfills these minimal requirements.

The historical utopian antecedents for Looking Backward are too numerous for full treatment, but since a mere catalog is pointless, certain important ones are given some attention to enhance the study of Bellamy's work. Utopian-like fictive activity was not scarce among the Greeks, although much of it has been lost. What remains of their legends of the Golden Age, descriptions of ideal states belonging to the mythical past, and their theoretical writings of good government have been sources of inspiration for utopian writers of all ages since. Plato, therefore, is not necessarily the first utopist; nor is the Republic the only work in which Plato attempts some description of ideal societies. Timaeus, Critias, and even the Laws all have points of relevance. What makes the Republic particularly pertinent here is the fact that, appearing as it did during the disastrous termination of the Peloponesian War, when both extreme individualism and oligarchical tyranny were rife, it revives in a measure some of the earlier Hellenic conceptions of the state that subordinated personal subjective freedom and individual interest to the absolute sovereignty of the state. Although influenced by the authoritarian military state of Sparta that had just defeated Athens, Plato's city-state, unlike Bosanquet's nation-state, for example, is not supposed to be an external, alien force, but one in which each citizen feels the state is an enlargement of himself. It is not so much a governing and corrective body as an association of ethically minded individuals who are bound together by a common purpose, each serving in his fit place. While the welfare and happiness of the whole depend on the welfare and happiness of each individual, individual interests are forbidden; because private property and domestic life, education and instruction, choice of rank and possession, and the arts and sciences are all under the exclusive and absolute control of the state, everything individual and particular falls away in the complete assimilation of the individual into the state. Excessive mobility, isolation, social change, and disorganization are the evils Plato is attempting to overcome; therefore, in the Republic, he conceives a new polis having the simplicity, stability, and sincerity which he believed to exist in Sparta, and thus makes the conformity pole extremely powerful at the expense of the individual.⁷

The first and most famous of the Renaissance utopists is Sir Thomas More. His Utopia has an immediate point of contact with Looking Backward in that economic conditions formed the major irritant producing it. The demand for wool for export to Flanders prompted the evil system of enclosures that caused thousands of yeomen to be evicted from their holdings, with pauperism and vagabondage their unavoidable fate. More's Utopia, however, is not merely a criticism of social injustice. He proposes a constructive program which differs from Plato's, in the first place, in retaining the family as the basic unit of social organization. In the second place, Plato considers manual work merely a necessity of life that should be left to the slaves and artisans so that a special caste could be free to concern itself with the affairs of state. More, as well as other Renaissance utopists, insists that work is a duty for all citizens, an attitude which foreshadows Bellamy's idea of three years of honorable “dirty work.” In Utopia, as in the Republic, there is community of property, but for different reasons. Plato seeks a renunciation of natural impulses toward one's individual concerns; More requires the abolition of class distinctions and equality of citizens before the law as the surest way to bring about the abolition of crime. Bellamy's position is nearer to More's. In Utopia, as in Looking Backward, community property makes money obsolete. More's Utopians even heap scorn upon gold and silver by employing these metals for base purposes. Like the people of Boston in Bellamy's 2000 A.D., the Utopians can have their meals at home, but usually consider it a foolish waste when they can, and generally do, have them in common. The family is state controlled although it is the basis of the social organization in Utopia. Education plays an extremely important role, as in the Republic. More follows Plato in adopting the city-state, but More's government is monarchical, elected through a system of “Syphogrants,” representatives of the people. Some spontaneity is allowed to the Utopians in choice of trade, after the common training in country life, but there is an evident lack of individuality in the uniformity of the houses, clothes, strict routine of work, and the like. In fact, a general characteristic of the Renaissance utopias is again their reaction against extreme individualism and their attempt to create a unity at the expense of personal freedom. According to Marie Louise Berneri, “The Renaissance which had allowed the development of the individual also created the state which became the negation of the individual.”⁸

Ninety years after More's outstanding work, another important utopia appeared, The City of the Sun by Thomaso Campanella, an Italian friar who suffered torture during the Inquisition. Campanella sought a threefold reformation: social, by improving the living conditions; political, by making Spain the leader of a unified world; and religious, by modernizing the Catholic Church. One important claim for its inclusion here is Campanella's attempt at a psycho-sociological interpretation of society, remarkably similar to that later developed by Comte. To Campanella, society is based upon power, love, and intelligence, and it can operate successfully only when these factors have received proper distribution and activity in the organs of social control and political administration. The Solarians do not have common property; a minimum of necessities is granted to all, but beyond that, to each is given according to his merits. The best goes to those most apt and most zealous in the service of the state. To eliminate selfishness, individualism, and irrationalism, Campanella subordinated everything to the state. Property is the outward manifestation and guarantee of human individuality, and family is an extension of personality, but both are lost to the individual who is absorbed into and dominated by the state. However, Campanella achieves a number of firsts: his is the first utopia to give the natural sciences a leading role, to abolish slave labor, and to consider menial labor honorable, a point Bellamy later stressed.

In 1619, seventeen years after Campanella's work, Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis was published, not fully a utopia by the earlier criteria, but relevant here because of its Christian core. Andreae, a German who became a Lutheran minister, attempted to set up an actual ideal social system at Calw based upon the harmonious unity of customs and morals that he thought he saw in Geneva. His efforts are practical, and his work is written in the form of a letter that reads much like a recruiting tract for those who wish to take refuge in an ideal city. Religion, education, morality, and science form the foundation of his society in Christianopolis. His strong religious emphasis is made tolerable by his evident love of men, and his scheme of universal education, accessible to all of both sexes and devoted not to a mere acquisition of knowledge but to the development of the mind and personality, has had far-reaching influence through Comenius, his admitted disciple. Lewis Mumford admires the modernity of the layout of the city into zones, with a distinction between light and heavy industries and with an agricultural zone next to the city. Mumford says, “… these seventeenth century Utopians have anticipated the best practice that has been worked out today, after a century of disorderly building.”⁹Christianopolis is probably designed, however, after the medieval city which, it seems, was usually divided into four quarters, each quarter corresponding to a certain trade which prevailed in it but having other inhabitants as well. Government in Christianopolis is in the hands of a triumvirate, a Minister, a Judge, and a Director of Learning, with the allegorical implications obvious. Andreae's work is important to this study because of its forthright statement of the need of a religious-like commitment for dwellers in a utopia, for that idea is implicit in Looking Backward as it is in the classless society proposed by Marx. To Andreae, of course, it is Christianity which conciliates between God with men and unites men together. Mumford explains as follows:

There are some who might object to this statement on the ground that it smacked too heartily of supernatural religion; but it remains just as valid if we translate it into terms whose theological reactions have been neutralized. To have a sense of values, to know the world in which they are set, to be able to distribute them—this is our modern version of Andreae's conception of religion, learning, and justice. … In essence, this blunt and forthright German scholar is standing shoulder to shoulder with Plato; his Christianopolis is as enduring as the best nature of men.¹⁰

Bacon's New Atlantis requires less attention, and James Harrington's Oceana is even less pertinent here. Some feel that Bacon's work is more of a description of an ideal scientific college than a commonwealth, and that it is fragmentary. Plainly, Bacon, like Plato, is concerned chiefly with the ruling caste. Andreae, as well as Campanella, had stressed the importance of natural science. The new scientific method, the utilitarian approach to science, the importance of lecture-demonstrations, and related ideas were not original with Bacon. Bernard Palissy in France, for one, had anticipated Bacon. As Negley and Patrick point out, “Bacon's contribution consists far less in originality than in the effective collection and presentation of significant ideas.”¹¹ Bacon's work is important, however, because his renovation of society is to be realized, not through social legislation, education, or religious reforms but through secular science.¹²

This review of major utopian antecedents of Looking Backward has had an objective beyond the pedantic practice of tracing back to origins. A far more important function in this context is to allow these antecedents to demarcate their own authoritarian structures and to provide a better perspective for a later look at Bellamy's utopia. The power of the State is moral and political in Plato's Republic; in More's Utopia, there is a kind of democracy, for power is exercised by the representatives of the people, but this power is administrative rather than legislative since all major laws had been given by a law-giver; Campanella all but obliterates the individual and the fact that Andreae bases his authoritarian State on religion only makes it the more obnoxious to some. The result is very much the same in all: the individual is obligated to conform to a code of laws or a pattern of behavior artificially created for him. There is very little opportunity for a real polarity between individualism and conformity to operate. Berneri explains as follows:

The contradictions inherent in most utopias are due to this authoritarian approach. The builders of utopias claim to give freedom to the people, but freedom which is given ceases to be freedom. … While they claim to give freedom, they issue a detailed code which must be strictly followed. There are the lawgivers, the kings, the magistrates, the priests, the presidents of national assemblies in their utopias; and yet, after they have decreed, codified, ordered marriages, imprisonments and executions, they still claim that the people are free to do what they like.¹³

Besides providing a foundation for examining Bellamy's work, a review of his predecessors' utopias gives an added dimension to Looking Backward by identifying it as to kind. Demarcation of utopias and other idealistic programs also clarifies the scope and purpose of this study. For example, of the two chief types of dreamers—those who see fulfillment in the world hereafter (prophets, evangelists, millennialists) and those whose schemes for improving humanity pertain only to this world (utopists)—only the utopists have been considered here, and Bellamy is among them. The admitted “this world” thinkers have been divided further into “practical planners” and idealists. The “practical planners,” whose schemes were meant to be attempted—Owens, Fourier, and others—have been set aside at this point to concentrate on the idealists, whose plans were dedicated to the ultimate purpose of improving social conditions, but who presented these plans in fictional form and did not intend to implement them immediately. The fact that Bellamy became enamoured of his own vision and gave the rest of his life to political and social activity in a vain attempt to see his scheme realized does not erase the fact that plans could not be attempted immediately according to the pattern he designed. The fictional utopias have been classified further implicitly and may now be designated explicitly as, first, constructive utopias, including Looking Backward, within the scope of this work. For example, of the two chief types of dreamers—first, those who see fulfillment in the world hereafter: the prophets, the evangelists, the millennialists; and, second, those whose schemes for improving humanity pertain only to this world: the utopists—only the utopists have been considered, and Bellamy is among them. Then, among the admitted “this-world” thinkers, several more classifications have already been made. The “practical planners” whose schemes were meant to be attempted—Owens, Fourier, and others—have been set to one side at this point to concentrate on the idealists, those whose plans were serious and definitely dedicated to the ultimate purpose of improving social conditions, who presented them in fictional form and did not intend to implement them immediately. The fact that Bellamy became enamoured of his own vision and gave the rest of his life to political and social activity in a vain attempt to see his scheme realized does not erase the fact that it could not be attempted immediately according to the pattern he designed. But the fictional utopias have also been classified further implicitly and may now be designated explicitly as, first, constructive utopias, whose pictures of ideal societies, even when the possibility of realization is very slight, present suggestions and “as if” hints of what the better society would be like if those ideals were realized; and, second, satiric and fantastic utopias, whose societies function essentially negatively as extrapolations of existing states by which the shortcomings are satirized. Looking Backward is constructive, whereas Erewhon and The Coming Race are satiric and fantastic. Romantic fantasies, adventure and science fiction stories, and the like often become simply escape literature, without serious proposals for social reconstruction. In that sense, Looking Backward is a utopia of reconstruction, and not a utopia of escape. An additional classification may be made for utopias after Bacon, for, from Bacon on, there is a sharper focus upon means, the aims of earlier utopias being taken for granted. Mumford complains, “Our nineteenth century utopias … do not dream of a renovated world; they keep on adding inventions to the present one. … These utopias are all machinery: the means has become the end, and the genuine problems of ends has been forgotten.”¹⁴Looking Backward, for better or for worse, emphasizes means. The final and least significant distinction of utopias is that Looking Backward is a utopia of time, forward time despite its title, rather than a utopia of place. As the world was explored and became well-mapped, the device of removing utopia from the real by temporal rather than by physical distance became more popular, although the twentieth century has reached out, for equally obvious reasons, to locate utopias on other planets.

II

In a larger sense than the one just named, Looking Backward is a looking forward; that is, it is progressive rather than retrogressive, and the root of Bellamy's progressivism, out of which his whole forward looking grew, was his view of the nature of man. His straightforward statement of this fact is found in his postscript: “All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of great change. The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man's essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion. Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us. …”¹⁵ Of course, no statement by Bellamy exterior to the work can be more convincing than the many infallible proofs of his belief in the perfectibility of man found in the work itself. The belief is evident throughout and finds almost lyrical expression in the sermon by Mr. Barton:

“Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God ‘who is our home,’ the return of the individual by the way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the darker past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.”¹⁶

It is at this point that the interplay of the idea of evolution with the dream of freedom as it is embodied in paradisiacal or utopian dreams comes most sharply into focus. Evolution seems to confirm earlier ideas of perfectibility and progress that had emerged gradually. The result was not only Looking Backward, but a veritable explosion of utopias.¹⁷ The concept of progress, including the perfectibility of man, is so important and basic to Bellamy's work as to require special attention.

The idea of progress in this context means that mankind has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction, a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy for the future, such as we see in Looking Backward. The notion of progress is of comparatively recent origin. John Bury dates the modern conception from the seventeenth century, although, he says, some thinkers approached the idea in the sixteenth century.¹⁸ Certain of the Greeks saw a relative degree of progress of man from a primitive barbarous state to a higher, but these views never were made to contend with their more basic belief in the degeneration of the human race. The general view of Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable degeneration and decay. They looked back to a golden age of simplicity from which man had fallen away. The world was created and set going by the Deity, but while it was perfect when made, it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of duration is 72,000 years; during the first half, the original uniformity and order is maintained, but during the second 36,000 years, order is disturbed and decay sets in. At the end of that time, if left to itself, the world would dissolve into chaos, but the Deity restores the original conditions and the whole process begins again. According to some, each cycle repeats to the least particular the course and events of the preceding. The idea of Moira, which pervades Greek thought from Homer to the Stoics, meant a fixed order in the universe. Human progress toward perfection, in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, could not take place; human nature does not alter, for it is fixed by Moira.

Under the influence of Christianity, the Greek theory of cycles was abandoned, but the Christian doctrine of original sin proved just as inimical to any theory of man's moral advance to perfection, for man, left to himself, degenerates rather than progresses. With the Renaissance came a shift in emphasis to the values of the mundane life, and, particularly in Bacon, the proper air of knowledge was the advancement of happiness of mankind through secular science. In time, both Classical and Christian authority, with their views of degeneration, came to be questioned, then rejected, by the new scientific thought. Rationalism's idea of intellectual progress gradually extended to include the idea of the general progress of man. By the eighteenth century, there was widespread optimistic belief in the perfectibility of man. Although Lord Shaftesbury's doctrine that human nature is good and all is for the best in this harmonious world was challenged by Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees—in which Mandeville said that it was not man's virtues and amiable qualities which cement civilized society, but rather man's vices, and that the moment evil ceases, society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved—Shaftesbury's optimism prevailed and genially warmed the climate of opinion.

Rousseau agreed with Shaftesbury regarding the natural goodness of man, but was, with Mandeville, pessimistic regarding civilization. The theory of progress so far had left the masses out of account. The luxury of the idle enlightened was paid for by the toil of the ignorant masses. If this is the result of progressive civilization, Rousseau felt, what was progress worth? What had been called progress was really regress. The only answer was the doctrine of equality of all men, on the one hand, and, on the other, the developing world of personality, the inner man, the natural man, the man of feeling as opposed to the reasoning man of the Enlightenment. To a great extent Godwin followed Rousseau's pessimistic view of civilization, but at the same time he adopted the doctrine of perfectibility of Rousseau's opponent, Helvetius, that the natures and characters of men are molded entirely by their intellectual and moral environment.

About this time primitivism, which is actually at cross-currents with progress, swirled into the stream of thought, and, amazingly, added to the volume of opinion concerning man's perfectibility. Logically, primitivism contradicts progress, for it can be identified with the traditional view of the degeneration of man and nature, with the view that in his original state man was nobler, purer, better. Primitivism looks upon the abnormal complexity and sophistication in the life of civilized man, the multiplicity and emulativeness of his desires, the oppressive over-abundance of his belongings, and want of inner spontaneity of his emotions, and it denounces this condition, as Rousseau and Godwin did. Primitivism, then, looks backward to the time when man was free from the chains of civilization and was in close communion with nature. The point of contact with progress, however, is in the idea that the happiness and goodness which man once had known could be recovered, easily and simply, by returning to his original mode of life and to the original and normal constitution of society. That such an ideal state already had existed was the more reason for believing that it could exist again if, after so long an estrangement from them, a corrupted race could be brought back to nature's ways—that is, the ways which are most “natural” to man. In this sense, primitivism was not inconsistent with a certain belief in the possibility of progress, provided that the goal of progress was considered identical with the starting point which man had set out. Thus, essentially contrary movements of thought, primitivism and progressivism, actually joined forces and moved in the same direction, toward the ideal of progress and the perfectibility of man. The stream of thought about progress poured into the nineteenth century, and, at about mid-century, it was itself inundated by popular response to the teaching of evolution.

One major contribution which evolution made to the idea of progress was to bring about an emotional re-evaluation of the idea of change. Until the seventeenth century, few philosophers, if any, took time seriously. A world of static and perfect ideas, a world of eternal beings, even a heaven, were realms of refuge to the time-weary philosopher. With the development of the statistical method, infinitismal calculus, and the theory of probability, however, tools were invented for handing change without reducing it to a phenomenal aspect of the unchanging. With the emergence of modern evolutionistic theories, the emotional tone of the word “change” shifted from one of distance to one of praise. With this came the serious attempt to define the idea of progress with some precision and to link it with scientific and philosophical theories of development. As Josiah Royce points out, “… the great historical enemy of the evolutionary interest in philosophy has been, not ‘supernaturalism,’ nor yet the doctrine of ‘special creation,’ but the tendency to conceive the universe as an eternal, and so, temporally viewed, as an essentially permanent order. … Accordingly, whenever these motives are predominant in special science and in philosophy, evolution is likely to be subordinated, overlooked, or denied. Otherwise, however, evolutionary views are the ancient and natural results of the study of Nature.”¹⁹ Ideas concerning progress prepared the minds of men for widespread acceptance of evolution, which in turn not only effected a dramatic change of attitude toward “change” but most vividly and powerfully reinforced the prevailing opinion toward progress.

Perhaps the greatest popularizer of evolution during the nineteenth century was Herbert Spencer. His first major work, Social Statistics (1850), does not contain developed evolutionary laws, but it does contain the idea that progress is the basis of a theory of ethics. Spencer begins by arguing that the constancy of human nature, so frequently alleged, is a fallacy, for change is the law of all things, of every single object as well as of the universe. He says that since nature in its infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development, it would be most strange, if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable. Man also, he declares, obeys the law of indefinite variation. If, then, humanity is indefinitely variable, perfectibility is possible. Moreover, evil is not a permanent necessity, for all evil results from the nonadaptation of the organism to its conditions; this is true of everything that lives. It is equally true that evil perpetually tends to disappear. In the present state of the world, men suffer many evils, and this shows that their characters are not yet adjusted to the social state. There is a process of adaptation which has been going on for a long time, and will go on for a long time to come. Civilization represents the adaptations which already have been accomplished. Progress means the successive steps of the process. That by this process man eventually will become suited to his mode of life Spencer does not doubt. All excess and deficiency of suitable faculties, in other words, all imperfection, must disappear. Progress, to Spencer, is not an accident but a necessity. Spencer's doctrine of perfectibility rests on an entirely different basis from that doctrine as preached in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century philosophers said that human nature is unresistingly plastic in the hands of the legislator and the instructor; Spencer says that the process by which it slowly and continuously tends to adapt itself more and more to the conditions of social life points to an ultimate harmony. In the latter, the legislation and education are auxiliary to the process of unconscious adaptation. Spencer, therefore, was the first philosopher to turn the idea of evolution into the organizing principle of an all-embracing world view. He is recognized as the father of sociology by many authorities in that field. Not all in the nineteenth century agreed with Spencer, of course, but that his influence was tremendous is unquestionable, and if one says that his teaching greatly contributed to the high tide of expectation in the progress and perfectibility of man that peaked toward the end of the century, about the time that Bellamy wrote, he is not likely to be challenged.

Walter Fuller Taylor excellently summarizes the importance of the fusion of the ideas of evolution and progress and the prevailing views of the perfectibility of human nature in Looking Backward:

To him … the source of evil lay in the conditions of human life, and not in any essential core of human character; and hence the felicity of the Utopian state is to require no deep-seated changes in humankind, but only changes in the conditions of human life and in the motives called forth by the human environment. Human nature in the midst of a selfishly individualistic society is like a stunted rosebud struggling for life in the darkness of a fetid swamp. For abundant growth and bloom, no change in the rosebud is needed, but only an environment of sweet, warm earth, of sunshine and the upper air. …

For this hopeful view of human nature, Bellamy found fresh sanction in certain ideas that had been popularized by Victorian scientific thought. He everywhere assumes, though he seldom puts the matter explicitly, an evolutionary view of life. His faith in social progress is supported by the Spencerian concept of the state as an organism, an evolving organism. This concept of evolution he combined … with an informal Victorian humanism and with the idea of progress. Human evolution, to Bellamy, is progress; and it is progress, furthermore, in the distinctively human and “higher” qualities of human nature—in qualities ethical, intellectual, and spiritual. Out of the fusion of such elements of thought—Bellamy's trust in human nature, his humanism, his faith in evolution as progress, above all, his grasp of the new possibilities opened up to mankind by the Machine—out of all these there developed, finally, a new and singularly persuasive version of the old dream of human perfectibility; for the achievement of the Co-operative State was to mean, not merely the setting up of a just economy, but “the rise of the race to a new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress.”²⁰

III

Social criticism is an important part of Looking Backward. On the very first page, Bellamy laments the division of society into four classes: the rich, the poor, the educated, and the ignorant. He almost immediately censures social conditions by means of the unforgettable, almost epic, metaphor or parable of the coach of society, loaded with the idle rich, and dragged along a hilly, sandy road by the toiling masses of the poor, who are flogged on mercilessly by their driver, Hunger. The principle of usury which promotes this condition, the constant competitive struggle for better seats on the coach, the mad scramble when a general overturn takes place, the “hallucination” of those on top that they are of “finer clay” and belong to a “higher order of beings” than those who pull, the conviction of many that “no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil”—all these characteristics of nineteenth-century social conditions represented in the parable, and others not readily includable in it, are criticized directly or indirectly throughout the rest of the book.

The deplorable social conditions in Boston, 1887, described by West are not especially exaggerated. The American Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in this country almost coincide, the latter inaugurated, to isolate a single event, by Samuel Slater, the English textile worker with a prodigious memory, when he built the first spinning mill in America. In a relatively short time, “mill hands” for machine industries became a major social group on the lower level, and six groups of enterprisers emerged on the upper: manufacturers, specialized inventors, industrial bankers, capitalists pure and simple, corporation lawyers, and industrial managers. In the earlier handicraft economy, the workers were not dependent solely upon the sale of sheer labor for livelihood, but were owners of their own tools and had direct control over their own hours and working conditions. Under the machine economy, all was changed: they could not own their own tools; wages, hours of labor, and even employment on any terms were almost wholly beyond their control; and, broken off from their agricultural roots to be concentrated in the mill towns and industrial centers, when the economy of the nation crashed (as it did in 1819, 1829, 1837, 1857, 1873-78, and 1884-87, to mention only the major crashes before Looking Backward) the urbanized workers often suffered actual lack of food, clothing, and shelter. Nor were their conditions very pleasant during the better times. About the time Bellamy was born (1850) women in the New England mills worked twelve and a half or thirteen hours a day for ＄1.00 to ＄2.25 a week and board. The factory bell rang at 4:30 a.m., and work began at 5:00 and continued until 7:00 p.m., with only a half an hour each for breakfast and lunch. During the 1870s, Bellamy's father paid his household help ＄1.50 a week and board, the prevailing rate. In the 1880s, Bellamy himself worked for ＄3.00 a week and board.

Early labor organizations were unable to effect major improvements. They were chiefly local unions in single crafts or trades. For example, as early as 1792, the shoemakers of Philadelphia formed a union. In 1794, the printers of New York and Philadelphia organized typographical societies. By the time of the very severe economic crash of 1837, there were unions of bookbinders, machinists, ironworkers, hatmakers, jewelers, type founders, glassmakers, millwrights, ship joiners, boilermakers, loom weavers, plumbers, and others, and the strongest effort at national federation, the National Trades Union, had been formed, but such organizations were impotent during the panic of 1837 and the hard five years that followed. After the Civil War, a second industrial revolution took place in this country. The key machines of this period were the internal combustion engine and the electric dynamo with the transmission of power by wire. By the time Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, for all practical purposes the cheap or free land of the west, the “escape valve” through which millions had moved from poverty to economic independence, was gone, and by 1893, the frontier hardly existed any longer. Under the leadership of W. H. Sylvis, a convention called the Industrial Assembly of North America was held in 1864, resulting in the formation of the National Labor Union, but this second national effort also failed. During the six years of its existence, the eight-hour day for federal employees was established, but its main projects for social reform were failures. A more successful effort, the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, grew out of a national convention held in 1875. Under “Master Workman” Terence V. Powderly, it reached its maximum vigor in about 1880, when it had an enrollment of approximately 700,000 workers. Meanwhile, federal unions of single crafts were formed: cigar makers in 1864; railroad conductors, 1868; locomotive firemen, 1873; iron and steel workers, 1876; cotton spinners, 1878. Therefore, an effort was made in 1881 to form the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, which, after difficulty, became the American Federation of Labor in 1886. Under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, who formerly had been associated with socialism, the union defeated the efforts of socialists who sought to capture the federation. The capitalistic system of production and ownership was accepted, and improvements were sought within that framework. But the success of the American Federation of Labor more or less confirmed three interpretations of history, as explained by Charles and Mary Beard:

… first, the Industrial Revolution had brought into being a numerous and permanent body of working men and women, despite the fluidity of class lines; second, the individual worker, with little or no savings between himself and want, was not ‘equal’ in wage negotiation—under ‘freedom of contract’—to a million-dollar corporation ruled by industrial magnates; and, third, only by unions of workers could a ‘fair balance’ in wage negotiations be attained.²¹

In Looking Backward, West says that strikes were the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of the nineteenth century. In America, recourse to strikes already had been taken by the workers before Bellamy's day. In fact, every depression brought new eruptions. Of the most outstanding ones immediately preceding the writing of Looking Backward, the anthracite coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania in 1875 is memorable because the Irish strike leaders were branded “Molly Maguires,” originally a society of Irish peasants pitted against English landlords, but the term was applied in this country by employers against unionists, much as the term “Communist” still is used today, and before the agitation ended, almost a score of men were hanged as “murdering Mollies.” As Charles and Mary Beard describe it, “The great railway strike of 1887 was accompanied by so many disorders and so much bloodshed as to make Daniel Shays' rebellion in 1786 appear like a mere argument at a garden party.”²² During the years of 1885 and 1886, when Bellamy began to write Looking Backward, industrial strife was so frequent and violent that the period has been called “the great upheaval.” Perhaps the most notorious outburst, and one which seems to have been uppermost in Bellamy's mind when he wrote Looking Backward, was the Haymarket Riot of Chicago in May, 1886. On the afternoon of May 3, lumber workers striking for a shorter working day held a meeting near the McCormick harvester factory, where there long had been a strike for union recognition. Strike-breakers coming out of the factory were attacked by some of the crowd; when police arrived, they were attacked in turn, and they killed four of the strike sympathizers. The next evening, May 4, a meeting in Haymarket Square, called to protest the deaths of the previous day, was addressed by leaders of the anarchist or syndicalist group. It was, however, an orderly meeting, despite the tense atmosphere. Suddenly, a column of 180 policemen advanced on the small crowd that remained together after the rain had started. Samuel Fielden, the speaker of the moment, called out to the officer in command that the meeting was peaceable. At that moment, a bomb exploded among the policemen, killing fifteen of them. As a result of the trial, which a later governor of Illinois termed unfair, leaders at the meeting and others who had previously urged the use of violence were condemned to death. Four were hanged, while others had their sentences commuted to long prison terms. This event served to discredit radical movements for years and surely had something to do with the following passage in Looking Backward:

“… what part did the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing I knew.”

“They had nothing to do with it except hinder it, of course,” replied Dr. Leete. “They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform.”

(pp. 205-06)

This much criticized passage undoubtedly drew upon the fact that employers, through emigrant agencies, sometimes sought out skilled and unskilled workers in their foreign homelands and brought them to this country already under contract for low wages and long hours for at least a year. These men were thought to have little knowledge or interest in American institutions and were considered hotbeds of radicalism. They were, therefore, doubly distrusted and despised by other laborers for their cheap labor, which kept breaking down the “rising American standard of living,” and for their radicalism. However, Bellamy ingeniously added a footnote by West to Dr. Leete's remarks, disclaiming that any one in the nineteenth century really thought the leaders of industry actually subsidized the radicals to discredit the reform efforts.

IV

Again and again Bellamy indicts individualism as the chief culprit causing the social distress of the nineteenth century.

“The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or concert, were mainly four: first, the waste by mistaken undertakings; second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical gluts and crises, with the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the waste from idle capital and labor, at all times.”

(pp. 186-87)

“Their misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity for cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your social system was founded. …”

(p. 95)

“Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was inconsistent with much public spirit.”

(p. 30)

Here is another concept, individualism, which is so fundamental to Looking Backward and to this study as to require special attention. Henry Reeve, the first English translator of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, believes himself to be the first to coin the term “individualism” in English. In Volume II, Book II, Chapter 2, where Tocqueville defines individualism as “a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself,” Reeve introduces a footnote apologizing for introducing the French term “individualism” into English and says that he knows “no English word exactly equivalent to the expression.” The fact is, Tocqueville was using a well-established French term at this point in a rather peculiar sense, and Reeve was probably mistaken about being the first to use the term in English.

The idea of the individual versus the state goes back to the origins of our civilization. Philosophically, individualism is a necessary result of nominalism, which emphasizes that parts are the real things and the whole merely a name, and collectivist theories have their roots in realism, which says that the whole is the only real and that the parts are not truly real. These concepts, fought out on the philosophical battle fields of the Middle Ages, are antedated by the teachings of the Sophists and Epicureans, which certainly adumbrate the teachings of laissez faire and individualism; while from the Pythagoreans on, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, statism in one form or another has not lacked advocates.

However, the modern term “individualism” may have been coined by Joseph de Maistre, one of the reactionary thinkers called “theocrats,” who were strongly anti-individualistic because they thought they saw the disintegration of society resulting from the French Revolution and from the doctrine of the individual rights of men. In 1820, Maistre referred to the excessive fragmentation of all philosophical and political doctrine as a form of “political protestantism carried to the most absolute individualism.”²³ Hayek says that both the terms “individualism” and “socialism” were the creations of the Saint-Simonians, the founders of modern socialism, but, contrary to his statement, it seems that “anarchy” and “egoism” were Saint-Simon's terms for individualism, and his followers did not take up the term until about 1826.²⁴ After the revolution of 1830, many prominent French writers, including Tocqueville, began to express alarm about the “odious individualism” of modern society. Tocqueville, too, felt that individualism was an undesirable consequence of the French Revolution and the spirit of democracy in general, that individualism was a mentality unknown to the French people of the old regime, when individuals were not yet isolated but felt themselves an integral part of their society. The word “individualism” finally appeared in a French dictionary in 1836 as a term of contempt. The anti-individualism party was convinced that they were living in a period of serious crisis, social upheaval, and disintegration, a period of “intellectual anarchy,” to use a term by Auguste Comte, the most famous of the Saint-Simonians. They felt the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its rehabilitation of the principle of self-interest, its belief in the power of reason, and its distrust of social institutions, including religion, had succeeded in breaking down traditional values, but had failed to devise a positive philosophy. The psychology seems to have been similar to that encountered in Japan after World War II, when the breakdown of traditional values, of the family system and the overall authoritarian pattern, left the nation so much in confusion that the structure of Japan's 24.2-per-thousand suicide rate was altered, with 54٪ of all suicides shifting to the 15-25 age bracket. Individualism, not fully understood, was only one of the factors, but it was sufficient to render the term unfavorable, a flavor the word seems to retain in French to this day.

The end of the eighteenth century brought another movement identified as “individualistic,” contributing to the undermining of the uniformity of norms and beliefs, another disintegrating force in society: Romanticism. The Romantic authors glorified the genius of originality, liked to portray the conflict between the individual and society, and cultivated solitude because it allowed sensitive souls to avoid contact with a vulgar, oppressive, philistine world. However, their emphasis upon subjectivity, individuality, multiformity, and diversity tended to degenerate into a quest for eccentricity, and the blessings of isolation into the anxiety of isolation. After 1830, in France, authors like Byron and Goethe were criticized for social irresponsibility, Stendhal for his aristocratic egotism, Gautier for his doctrine of art for art's sake. Romantic writers such as Lamartine and Victor Hugo exalted individuality while berating individualism; Balzac, complaining about the loss of individuality, called individualism the most horrible of all evils. Tocqueville was one of the first political writers to try to use the term in a less pejorative manner, but even Tocqueville used it in sharp contrast with his ideal of political liberty.

In England, the term “individualism” had no real favor with the supporters of laissez faire and Bentham. Spencer even avoided it for a long time, even though one of his main goals in life was, in effect, to bring into synthesis an organic theory of the unity of the evolutionary process with a doctrine valuing the freedom and rights of the individual. This effort of Spencer's is rather paradoxical. To illustrate his theory of social organism, Spencer compares it both to bodies dispersed through an undifferentiated jelly, and to an animal, although lower than human. He must keep the analogy of a lower species lest the greater coherence of a higher type should demand a highly centralized regulative system—an idea he was seeking to avoid at all costs—and even a “corporate consciousness.” Spencer admits such a highly developed regulative system is needed in the militant or compulsory state of society's development, but not in the industrial. His analogy of society with organisms does not really go on all fours, for in the higher animals a centralized nervous system does not serve for external actions only, such as catching prey, but for sensibility, thought, and will. To Spencer, the proper analogy for the ideal State in which Government is no longer needed is an animal drunk or asleep, with the brain doing as little as possible. In fact, his whole argument against government would indicate that he suspects it is not a part of the evolutionary system, for if government is a part of the organic structure of society, and as such grows and cannot be made, then, like everything else, it must fight its own way out. Obviously, if society is an organism, as Spencer says, every part is conditioned by the whole. In a mere aggregate or heap, the units are prior to the whole; in an organism, the whole is prior to the parts; they can be understood only in reference to the whole. Despite this seeming contradiction, Spencer is a great proponent of the individual and, like John Stuart Mill, assumes that society is an aggregate of individuals and that every increase of the powers of government implies an equivalent decrease in the liberties of individuals. Yet this great champion of the individual carefully avoided the use of the word “individualism” in Man Versus State, and it does not appear until some of his later writings.

The historian, Gervinus, called individualism “the most characteristic feature of modern times and Protestant mankind” and saw its greatest triumph in the rise of the American democracy.²⁵ Karl von Rotteck, Karl Welcher, and others consider America the home of unfettered and energetic individualism, which is to be America's destiny for decades if not for centuries. But even in America, such terms as “self-reliance,” “self-culture,” and “self-help,” rather than the term “individualism,” were preferred by such men as Emerson and Thoreau, outstanding champions of the individual. Emerson's lecture “Individualism” was originally entitled “Character.” William McCall, a Unitarian minister who was one of the first to use the term in English, proclaimed a new way of life dominated by the “principles of individualism” in Elements of Individualism (1847) and in Outlines of Individualism (1853). Following McCall, the American and Democratic Review outlined a philosophy of history in which the progress of man from a state of savage individualism was traced to that of individualism more elevated, moral, and refined. America was to be the first to reach that goal. In England, Samuel Smiles, in his optimistic and popular Self-Help (1859), was probably the first English author to characterize as “individualism” the English tradition of maintaining the ideal of freedom. Increasingly, in England and America, particularly in this country, the individual was placed at the center of interest, and individual enterprise made the primary source of invention, progress, wealth, and national greatness. In 1872, William Graham Sumner at Yale sought to show that all civilization had come from free individual initiative, that all hope for progress and improvement lay in giving fullest liberty to individuals, and that government interference with this liberty was injurious to mankind. One of Sumner's basic assumptions is the struggle for individual existence, a central dogma of the Darwinians. As one of the earliest sociologists in America, Sumner gave the support of his branch of learning to the individualist argument. At Columbia, John William Burgess, political science professor, made that field serve the cause of individualism. A colleague of Burgess at Columbia, John Bates Clark developed a whole system of economics out of individualism, and J. Laurence Laughlin of the University of Chicago propounded a version of the theory that verged on sheer anarchy. Charles A. Dana, conservative editor of the New York Sun, a man who had earlier been a kind of utopian socialist, daily preached individualism to his readers, and E. L. Godkin, editor of Nation, gave weekly versions of the same “truth.”

To summarize this examination of the term “individualism” as it arose and was used prior to and concurrently with Bellamy's Looking Backward, I have demonstrated how the term first was used in France as a reaction against post-Revolution “disintegrating” social conditions and had primarily a pejorative meaning. In England and America, although the term was avoided for some time, it finally was taken up, for the most part freed from its connotation of selfish interest, enlarged to denote the ideal of the free individual, and proclaimed as the “natural” and necessary order of life for a true democracy. Bellamy was not the first to see evil in individualism; it originally had such a meaning, but it had lost that meaning in this country.

Moreover, running counter to the exaltation of the individual was another current of thought which emphasized society and general welfare as the controlling concern and insisted that the individual, however enlightened and powerful, owed his existence, his language, most of his knowledge, and his opportunities to the society in which he lived. As Charles and Mary Beard argue:

The thesis that human beings are actuated merely by a competitive struggle for existence and that society is a product of such individualism was countered by a thesis directing attention to the cooperative nature of human beings and the power of mutual aid in the origin and evolution of society. The sponsors of the associative principle in human life insisted that the creed of individualism, pushed to the extreme of dogmatism, was false to the facts of history, including the history of the United States; or at least so false as to be a gross distortion of reality. They pointed out, with copious illustrations, the heavy debt of all individuals in the United States to the American society for all the tools they worked with, for education, for opportunity, for the protection and benefits bestowed by the government as the representative of society. To ruthless individualism they traced much of the poverty and misery, ugliness and waste, which had marked the years of the uprushing business enterprise.²⁶

The followers of the French idealist, Charles Fourier, comprised one of the earliest schools of American “associationists”. They proposed the abandonment of the capitalist factory system, the founding of colonies of associated workers on the land, and the combination of farming and manufacturing. In colonies of this kind, so they believed, the workers would be self-sufficient, share their wealth on equal terms, and acquire economic stability and independence. Brook Farm, founded by George Ripley in 1841 at West Roxbury, eight miles from Boston, is probably the best known Fourier-inspired experiment. Hawthorne, who invested ＄1500 in the venture, was among the earliest to join the community. He spent several months there and later used his Brook Farm experience as the basis for The Blithedale Romance.

Another associationist school was that of Robert Owen, British sociologist, who made lecture tours in this country and with his son founded a socialist colony at New Harmony in Indiana. Owen's three basic propositions were these: (1) the enormously increased productive powers which man in modern times has acquired involve and, to a certain extent, necessitate great changes in the social and industrial structure of society; (2) the world has reached a point of progress at which cooperative industry should replace competitive labor; (3) society, discarding large cities and solitary homes, should resolve itself into associations, communities uniting agriculture and manufacturing.

Less well-known attempts were made, first in Texas and later in Nauvoo, Illinois, by followers of another French reformer, Cabet. Perhaps the earliest and most enduring of associative cooperative communities were those formed by the Shakers. Ann Lee, an English woman of humblest origin, came to America in 1774, and soon was able to carry out her aim of establishing, at Watervliet, near Albany, New York, the first of a number of colonies of Shakers, so called because their religious exercises, including wordless chants and dances, led them literally into convulsive frenzies. On the economic side, they shared all they had and acquired. George Rapp, a magnetic preacher in Wurttemburg, preceded a band of 600 to a site near Pittsburgh in 1805. After a decade of prosperity, they moved to a new location, which they called Harmony, on the Wabash River. Ten years later, they sold their substantial town and 30,000-acre estate for ＄150,000 to Robert Owen for the New Harmony venture and returned to Pennsylvania. One community, which continues to this day as “Shaker Village,” New Hampshire, has been in existence since 1792. Formerly, the group, which practices strict celibacy, acquired new members through converts, but the New Hampshire group has doomed its future existence by the decision to accept no new members. In these communities, the primitive communism, the holding of property in common, the sharing of work on an equal basis, and the group living quarters, was secondary to religion.

If William Graham Sumner be called the sociologist of individualism, Lester Ward is then the sociologist of social meliorism. He published the first volume of his Social Dynamics in 1883. He dwells on the cooperative nature of human societies from earliest times and marshals a mass of knowledge against the individualist, or laissez faire, doctrine of Sumner. He contends that cooperation among individuals, rather than merciless and unfeeling competition for wealth and power, is the secret of human progress. Ward's position mediates between individualism and socialism. After about 1880, economists Richard T. Ely, Simon Patten, and Edmund J. James questioned individualism in economic thought.

In this section, the social criticism of Looking Backward has been set in its historical perspective by a review of the worker's plight and of the development of labor unions and their efforts to achieve improvements through strikes, and the intellectual milieu of Bellamy's work has been outlined by tracing the key concept of individualism, together with certain countervailing beliefs, teachings, and ventures of the associationists.

V

It is now time to examine the social structure which Bellamy delineates in Looking Backward to ascertain the freedom or liberties allowed to the individual and the extent to which he is obliged to conform, that is, to examine the polarity of individualism and conformity in Looking Backward.

Bellamy by no means ignored individual freedom. Dr. Leete and his daughter are almost defensive in their repeated assertions of greater liberty than under the “old” system. “‘In fact, you will find, Mr. West, as you come to know us, that there is far less interference of any sort with personal liberty nowadays than you were accustomed to’” (p. 92).²⁷ The particular form of economic freedom of their system is one liberty which they naturally emphasize. Every individual, man, woman, boy, or girl, by virtue of being a human being, shares equally in the economic resources of the nation. “That any person should be dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory. What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an arrangement?” (p. 214) The “old” system is abhorrent to them because of the “galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents” (pp. 214-15). It seems to Leete and to Edith that such a system involves maximum personal humiliation to each person so dependent.

The new system also gives freedom from class or caste discrimination. “The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture which all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class, which corresponds to the most fortunate class with you” (p. 125). No type of work, per se, is regarded as being more honorable or dishonorable than another. What honors there are result from exceptional or meritorious work, not from any status or recognition inherent in a particular kind of work or position.

Another liberty guaranteed to the individual under the new system is an education as complete as the individual is intellectually capable and personally desirous of receiving. “You will see … many very important differences between our methods of education and yours, but the main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher education which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed” (p. 178). The educational philosophy of the new system is summarized as follows:

first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.

(pp. 180-81)

From Leete's point of view an important freedom is vouchsafed to the individual regarding the choice of his life's work and his liberty to change to another type of work. As West questions Leete about how the administration possibly can determine wisely the trade or business every individual in the nation shall pursue, he learns that “the administration has nothing to do with determining that point,” but rather, “Every man for himself in accordance with his natural aptitude, the utmost pains being taken to enable him to find out what his natural aptitude really is” (p. 49). Moreover, the work of the nation is asserted to be wholly voluntary. Thus, in order to encourage volunteers for any particularly arduous or oppressive occupation, the day's work was reduced to ten minutes a day and “If even then, no man was willing to do it, it would remain undone” (p. 51).

Liberty to give oneself to a writing career, or to music, art, invention, design, and the like is carefully provided for in the new system, although the details are different. The writer must pay for the publication of his first work (and perhaps all, if they do not sell) out of his personal share in the national product. If he writes a book that meets the now higher taste of popular demand, he then can give himself solely to writing as long as the sales of his works equal his share of the nation's wealth. Artists whose works are popularly voted as acceptable for placement in public buildings also may give themselves wholly to creative endeavors. The highest of all honors in the nation, higher than the presidency, is the “red ribbon” award voted by the people to outstanding authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors. The vocation of a newspaper editor or writer, of a pastor of a church, and similar occupations are provided for through a system of private subscription and payment of an “indemnity equal to the cost of his support for taking him away from the general service” (p. 135).

The “most absolute freedom” of expression is enjoyed by the newspapers. “The newspaper press is organized so as to be a more perfect expression of public opinion than it possibly could be in your day, when private capital controlled and managed it primarily as a money-making business, and secondarily only as a mouthpiece for the people” (p. 134). But the crowning “freedom” of the new system is that life of complete leisure into which all may enter at the age of forty-five. From that time forward, according to his individual taste, the individual may devote himself wholly to “the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life,” or, if he has no scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests, he may travel, spend his time in social relaxation in the company of friends, or cultivate “all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes,” and pursue “every imaginable form of recreation.” In short, Leete insists that “with us … liberty is as dear as equality or fraternity,” and that “our system is elastic enough to give free play to every instinct of human nature which does not aim at dominating others or living on the fruit of others' labor” (p. 136).

Despite the attractiveness of these specifically mentioned liberties, and additional ones implied, and despite Bellamy's own undoubted commitment to the ideal of personal and individual freedom, there is, unfortunately, something almost sinister in the authoritarian statements and consequent implications uncovered by close reading. Certainly, Looking Backward is in the tradition of Classical and Renaissance utopias when the “conformity” pole is charged with such power that the individual, with all his promised liberties, is strictly subordinated to the state. However, memories of the World War II totalitarian states of Italy, Germany, and Japan, and the unceasing concern for human rights in China, Cuba, and Soviet Russia's domains tend to cause a present-day reader to shiver and to fill the margins of his copy of Looking Backward with exclamations of danger.

In the first place, the new system, centered about the industrial army, is admittedly monolithic: “… nowadays everybody is part of a system with a distinct place and function” (p. 143). So completely involved is every single individual in the totally unified structure of the economic system that Dr. Leete confesses the following:

“Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so wholly based upon it that if it were conceivable that a man could [italics added] escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would have excluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide.”

(p. 47)

No place for the rugged (an adjective Hoover added) individualist here! Leete says that a time came in the evolution of the economic order when society decided a return to the pre-industrial period “might indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of material progress” (pp. 40-41). Therefore, the decision was made instead, at the admitted expense of some individual dignity and freedom (although that fact is denied elsewhere), to go on to the epoch of “The Great Trust,” a single economic structure. Compulsion is a “weak way” to describe the subordination of the individual to the total system, Leete says, and it is true that everywhere this rather unpalatable part is made as mild and as sweet as possible; nevertheless, enough compulsion is admitted, apparently as inadvertently to Bellamy as to Leete, as to be actually alarming. “We require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give” (p. 73). This demand is followed up with force. An analogy is made with animals: “In the nineteenth century, when a horse pulled a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we should have whipped him soundly if he had not …” (p. 74). The intended parallel of this analogy with the human condition is not stated vainly; force of the kind used upon only the most incorrigible criminals in the “old” system evidently is used freely in the “new” to bring a reluctant individual to a place of conformity: “A man able to do duty, and persistently refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents” (p. 101).

Not only does the law provide for resort to drastic force, but “a highly important department of our system,” Leete says, “is the inspectorate” (p. 155). The purpose of this arm of the central government is to handle all complaints or information as to defects in goods, insolence or inefficiency of officials, or dereliction of any sort in the public service. “The inspectorate, however, does not wait for complaints,” Leete explains further. “Not only is it on the alert to catch and sift every rumor of a fault in the service, but it is its business, by systematic and constant oversight and inspection of every branch of the army, to find out what is going wrong before anybody else does” (p. 155). The constant surveillance by the inspectorate is not the only prod to keep the individual both “in line” and at peak performance. Another important cog of the works of this vast economic organization, so total and inclusive that the only alternative is “suicide,” is the “file-leader,” or “captain of the force,” “men of proven abilities, who are pledged by their own careers to hold their followers up to their highest standard and permit no lagging” (p. 97). In a eulogistic footnote about this system, West says, “By requiring of every man his best you have made God his task-master,” and one agrees that surely only God knows what is one's “best,” and shudders to think of “captains of the force,” whose careers are at stake, openly being given the position of God in this matter. Although everywhere Leete insists that all the workers gladly, joyfully, and voluntarily apply themselves to the tasks at hand, still the final authority clearly lies in the hands of the “administration,” which ultimately has a slave-owner's power to control and assign the worker: “… administration, while depending on the voluntary system for filling up the trades as a rule, holds always in reserve the power to call for special volunteers, or draft any force needed for any quarter” (p. 53, italics added).

The function of government is considered very paternalistic. No longer are public enemies believed to be external to the nation—hence, no army, navy, or militia—but, rather, they are hunger, cold, and nakedness. “We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of directing his industry in terms of years” (p. 44). That is, government takes the full paternal obligation of providing for all needs, and in turn takes the father's authority of directing the work of his children until “they come of age.” Leete compares the term of obligatory service in the industrial army to a child's minority when he says, “we all agree in looking forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first enter upon the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when we shall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control …” (p. 159). The patriotism of the citizen, like the love of a child for his father, makes his unquestioned obedience to and complete trust in the wisdom, justice, and near infallibility of the government almost a matter of course. “When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens, by virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to the needs of authority” (p. 46). The assumption that government can do no wrong is implicit throughout, an attitude which becomes evident in such passages as Leete's explanations of the national school system: “Our schools are national institutions, and to have passed their tests is a proof of special abilities not to be questioned” (p. 55). More chilling still, however, is the same childlike simplicity of faith and total trust in the almost infallibility of government which is evident in the justification of trial without private lawyers or a jury, with only governmentally appointed judges both to try and to defend: “No conceivable motive but justice could actuate our judges” (p. 166).

Of course, fundamental to Bellamy's trust of government is his trust in the essential goodness of human nature; the latter underlies the former. Crime arises from atavism, a biological reversion to tendencies which first arose and became fixed in human behavior patterns during the old system of money-based economy and social injustice. Since human nature is good, when the evil environmental factors are changed, then society enters a millennial-like static political condition, not subject to change, because no change is needed. “We have no legislation … that is, next to none. … The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation” (p. 169). Bellamy's evolutionary optimism, a faith he shared with many, including Marx, already has been mentioned. However, the essential contradiction found in Looking Backward at this point is so similar to a major contradiction in Marxism as to make a parallel almost unavoidable.

Karl Marx also swam with the stream. That is, he heartily subscribed to the doctrine that there is progressive evolution in human history, moving inevitably toward the day of liberation from social evil. Marx, too, said that evil arises out of the pattern of economic relations that undergirds social life. Furthermore, the real root of all social evil, to Marx, is in one economic relation, the private ownership of the means of production. Marx spent over thirty years in London and did most of his major writing there. English industrialism as Marx knew it was far from humane. The working day for men, women, and children alike commonly began before sunrise and extended past sunset. Working lives started at the age of six and, for many, resulted in appalling mortality. Accident and disease ran rampant, with little or no protection or concern for the victims, whose chief portion before death was immeasurable suffering, grinding poverty, bitter hardship, and galling grief. Pippa in Browning's Pippa Passes rejoices in the thrills of her one holiday in an entire year, but Marx, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, heard “The Cry of the Children” in their working conditions and was roused to a bitter condemnation of the whole inhuman condition of early industrialism. Marx and Engels sneered at those “utopian dreamers” who proposed any program less radical than their own belief in the violent and total overthrow of private property by the proletariat, led by intellectuals like themselves and Lenin, who have deserted the ranks of the bourgeoisie. The reactionaries are to be mercilessly stamped out. Bellamy, of course, does not advocate violent means, but his preaching as well as Marx's violent revolution should be unnecessary if progress is inevitable. Another common contradiction lies in the fact that while both identify evil as being social and general rather than human and particular, both find the cure in restricting, or even stamping out, the individual and particular. West, in his dream of a return to the Boston of 1887 after his visit to the Boston of 2000, makes an impassioned plea before the elegant gathering of Edith's home:

“I showed how in such countries it was counted the most important function of government to see that the water was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals, since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use was strictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their mere caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way tamper with it.”

(p. 269)²⁸

Curiously, both Marx and Bellamy lament the conditions of the individual in a capitalist society. Bellamy has Leete say:

“Before this concentration began … of great concerns with vast capital, the individual workman was relatively important and independent in his relations to the employer. … But when the era of small concerns with small capital was succeeded by that of the great aggregations of capital, all this was changed. The individual laborer, who had been relatively important to the small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness over against the great corporation. …”

(p. 38)

Yet, the solution of both Marx and Bellamy is to reduce the individual still further by taking the last final step into the greatest corporation of all, government, and subsuming all the parts still more completely into the massive, single, totally organized whole. This accounts for the ruthless indifference of Marxism for individual human lives, and for radical pressures upon the individual to conform found even in gentle Bellamy's scheme. The source of evil to both is essentially social and economic, not human and individual—that is, the separation of the working individual in the capitalist society from the ownership of the means of production. But again, their solution does not reverse that trend but rather renders the divorce between the individual and productive property final and absolute! For in Bellamy's system, as in that of Marx, productive property becomes the possession of all, and therefore, ironically, is the possession of none. What belongs to all, for that very reason, belongs to no one in particular. A private individual may own a few shares in a large capitalistic corporation, but no one owns shares in a public building. His abstract ownership of all deprives him of the concrete ownership of any.

By the same token, both Bellamy and Marx absorb the individual into a vast abstraction, “man.” Neither holds the individual responsible for his sins, for evil is external and environmental rather than internal and personal, and the cures that both Bellamy and Marx offer are for society in general, man in the abstract, rather than for members of society in particular. Analysis makes it very clear that their guarantees are to society at large and not to any specific individual. Instead of increasing the feelings of fraternity, the tendency is to insulate one's feelings for specific individuals by absorbing them into a love for an abstract, and in one sense, non-existent, general “man.” Bellamy indicts the capitalistic system which allowed certain personal services to be considered “menial,” thus tending to divide society into classes and castes, thereby weakening “the sense of common humanity.” What is his solution? “The individual,” Leete explains, “is never regarded, nor regards himself, as the servant of those he serves, nor is he in any way dependent upon them. It is always the nation which he is serving” (p. 126). If men have the power to love, it is inevitable that they also should have the power to withhold that love or to despise. It may be easier to impersonalize one's service by mentally blocking out the face of the person whom one is serving and in that blank imagining an idealized “man” or even the entire nation than to love and serve a specific individual, but the question is whether that makes for greater fraternity or for less.

Bellamy abhors competition, which is to him “the instinct of selfishness,” and in one sense, his whole effort is to devise a system in which “the interests of every individual” are no longer “antagonistic to those of every other.” But he cannot eliminate a certain admitted amount of competitiveness from his system,²⁹ and one suspects, especially from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, with certain facts about conditions inside major socialistic experiments now a matter of history, that in a society where salvation is general rather than particular, each individual must make his own salvation for himself. Rather than decreasing competition, such a society unleashes a much more vicious version of it. The passionate struggle for personal power and position in Russia reflects the falsity of Marx's analysis of evil and its cure. The grim brutality by which Stalin, and others after him, sought to assure his own survival was not a deviation from Marxism but an inevitable consequence of it. In Bellamy's fiction, none of this sort of ugliness is visible, but how does society make the jump from a condition in which evil exists—even if it is, as Bellamy and Marx say, nothing but social evil which has caused men to form bad behavior patterns—into the millenium-like condition with, for all practical purposes, no evil? Simply to say “by evolution” is not only an oversimplification, but essentially a contradiction. Because the process is presumed to be general, one might not realize that what both Bellamy and Marx really are expounding is post-history, for between history as it actually is and the condition of the classless society both preach, there is no logical passage at all. Man is competitive and selfish because these behavior patterns have been fixed in him by social conditions. According to Marxism, the very concepts and language which men now employ are fashioned by the environment of class struggle out of which they, like all spiritual forms, arise. Our very thought habits are conditioned by class struggle. Therefore, the language, logic, and thought forms of history cannot apply to the new society. History as it is governed by the dialectic and class struggle cannot apply to the classless society, which, therefore, must be post-history. The assumption which undergirds the classless society is precisely the assumption that the basic pattern of life will be changed. But this leaves the question in stark outline: how will men formed by the pattern of history survive when the pattern of history, the dialectic and the class struggle is destroyed. To escape historical evil, the very selves which now live and act in history would have to be destroyed. There is a curious blind spot in the thinking of most would-be “world movers.” They frequently forget that they have to have a place on which to stand before they can move the world. Thus, Freud proves that all thoughts, except the thought he is thinking about complexes, are the result of complexes. Marx proves all thoughts except his own result from class conditioning. Gentle Bellamy, without telling anyone, or, more probably, without even being aware of it himself, covertly produces deux ex machina: the West who sees “Humanity hanging on a cross” in the last chapter and bursts out into uncontrollable tears, panting, sobbing, and groaning, in an unspeakable paroxysm of anguish over the condition of mankind is, “at heart,” inexplicably different from the West of chapter two, who, like Caligula, wishes that the laboring classes of America had but one neck that he might cut it off. Both Marx and Bellamy smuggle in a radical and unexplained miracle to span the gap between history as it really is and the post-history of their ideal classless societies—the very kind of radical miracle of “new birth” of the individual heart that they both would proclaim unnecessary since “human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad …” (p. 234).

VI

It is clear that Bellamy did not intend his system to be as arbitrarily authoritarian as close reading reveals it to be. The very assumptions he makes, the fundamental outlines which he draws for the new society, lead him almost inevitably into a system in which the conformity pole is drastically overcharged at the expense of the pole of individualism. For that reason, the major portion of this critique points toward the danger of that condition, although the position of the paper is that an overcharged individualism is also detrimental to a realization of the dream of freedom. It is not, therefore, my intention to present an uncritical defense of our present capitalistic system as something impeccable, a position perhaps more vulnerable than Bellamy's. There are, however, certain basic premises of our capitalistic system that possibly ought not be neglected here.

The first premise of a capitalist society is that economic organization arises from within society and should not be imposed from without or only by an elite within. This involves the very kind of risks Bellamy inveighs against: the risk of haphazard organization with over-production of some commodities and little or no production of others. A second premise is that human freedom is respected in the organization for production, a freedom that includes the right to be, although not to stay, wrong. The abuse of freedom by those who acquire vast economic power creates hardship for others and may make intervention by the state as the representative of the whole people necessary at times, but this very temporary abuse underscores the reality of freedom. This is another risk freedom involves. A third premise of a capitalist society is that individual human ingenuity is the best way to solve economic problems, another risk, for that ingenuity may work against as well as for the common good, a hazard society runs for letting ingenuity loose. A fourth premise is that variety and flexibility best meet economic needs. There is constant shift to meet the needs of a changing environment. It is true that if mammoth corporations are allowed to grow larger still, they threaten the very premise itself; how much more is the premise threatened if all trusts are swallowed up in “The Great Trust” Bellamy proposes. Therefore, as imperfect as capitalism is, its very premises allow for the kinds of changes that have radically altered social conditions to such an extent that the industrialism that Marx flayed no longer exists in the Western world. The premises of internal choices to meet economic needs, human freedom, personal initiative, flexibility, and variety in enterprise, despite flaws and failures yet to be, and probably perpetually to be, have proved to be corrected, practical premises in a world where human evil is real and operative.

The Judeo-Christian doctrine of property rests on three basic principles. First, personal property is considered an important element in the self-development of a person, in the unfolding of individuality into personality. The self is reflected in the belongings which an individual has acquired by his effort, and the self develops moral power in the use of goods. The Christian believes his goods are his own, but since he is indebted both to God and to society, he should consider freely and voluntarily his very own property as a trust or stewardship, and recognize that the righteous Judge most certainly shall hold him responsible for the activity of that extension of his personality involved both in the acquisition and administration of goods. Second, the Judeo-Christian position is that personal and productive property is a bulwark of individual freedom, and that should some system succeed in doing what God has never done, in permanently divorcing the individual from ownership of productive property, that system will have succeeded in laying the foundation for a tyranny against which no individual nor any combination of them shall likely have adequate material resource to correct. A great many men in both the old and new dispensations have borne the name of piety while preying upon other members of society, but prophets of both ages have denounced them. The right of private ownership of productive property is considered a right both to the just and the unjust, providing a safeguard against unscrupulous activity as well as permitting the possibility of it. Third, the chief among these principles, the Judeo-Christian position recognizes the right to private property, personal and productive, as inseparably related to the life of personal charity. One cannot give that which is not his, nor can one receive that which is already his. One of the most wholesome of all human experiences is a generous, loving, respectful giving to meet a need genuinely felt. Such giving “is twice blest—It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.” Private property becomes a means by which the giver enlarges, and in a deep metaphysical sense, realizes his soul, and it enriches the receiver not merely physically, but likewise spiritually, inasmuch as honest and unfawning gratitude is one of the most ennobling of spiritual experiences. This does not confirm poverty as a social necessity so that charity may abound any more than Paul thought that sin was necessary that grace may abound. Rather, the Old Testament as well as the New insists that alms are not so much charity as social justice, exercised, not in a legal, but a loving sense, and the individual is responsible for his brother, not merely as one to whom alms are to be doled, but as one for whose well-being the individual and his community are to work until all can know the freedom from fear that is essential to the peace of mind, body, and soul.

The Judeo-Christian position is not inimical to associative systems per se. The Judaic conception of racial solidarity found, like the entire Mosaic system, an expanded meaning and vastly more significant fulfillment in the New Testament, although the Church frequently and persistently has proved to be as remiss in discharging her responsibilities as the Old Testament Jews were theirs. The limited and local New Testament “communism” described in the book of Acts, however, indicates the kind of associative principles many Christians feel to be essential for that kind of relationship. The most fundamental principle is that entrance into an associative relationship is an absolutely voluntary and spontaneous act of love. So free from coercion was the individual's willing sacrifice of productive property in the early church, in that case, land, that one act of simulated generosity was rebuked by Peter with the words: “While it [the piece of property] remained, was it not in thy power?” The act was considered so subversive of an essential Christian principle and experience at that critical moment in the Church's history that the perpetrators of that hypocrisy were visited with terrible divine judgment.

As far as Christianity is concerned, mere materialism, whether it be capitalistic, socialistic, or communistic, seeks simply a temporal paradise and can end only in a kind of hell. The whole concept of culture, in its spiritual sense, is not compatible with the idea of mere finite man, in any society. Culture, in all its highest reaches, not only rests on spiritual foundations, but also suggests the transcendent and timeless in a way that mocks the limited temporality of an earth-restricted paradise. Otherwise, the very fact that culture embodies the idea of the infinite would mean that a man who sees nothing beyond the material boundaries of a temporal Garden would find his finiteness mocked by his own culture. Fine art is suffused with the timeless, and a poem, a painting, or a piece of sculpture defies the time and space of its setting. Art disciplines man by subjecting him to the significance of the eternal, or it is simply evocative of man's own reaction and confronts him merely with himself. Freedom from hunger, from cold, and from nakedness very quickly reaches a limit, for, after all, it requires amazingly little, as Thoreau proved, to suffice these. Freedom from “desire” is another matter, for a mere multiplication of material items, as the aristocrats Tocqueville describes found, guarantees nothing beyond satiety and boredom against which one endlessly must contrive unsatisfying pleasures. Assertion of freedom from all “governing forces” brings, even as the Existentialists preach, chiefly anxiety, which is, after all, a new form of slavery.

Never does man feel so alone as when he whistles most bravely against the universal dark which surrounds him when he is “free.” The courageous figure holding aloft the candle of comradeship and learning in Bertrand Russell's conception of an otherwise empty world is not so much heroic as histrionic. He plays not so much the king of the court as the jester. For his candle illuminates nothing, his learning lays hold of nothing, because his destiny is nothing. Freedom for its own sake is indeed “dreadful freedom,” but it is more: it is slavery.³⁰

The material paradise could only be endurable if society were able to achieve eternity in time. The more sensitive man in such a restricted, temporal, and material paradise inevitably asks: “If I am to die tomorrow, even though tomorrow be a thousand years away, why survive today? Shall I enjoy art? Art mocks me! Shall I be free? Freedom terrifies me! Shall I accumulate goods? Accumulation bores me. Shall I not, therefore, exult in the one final act of self-assertion against all this cosmic meaninglessness and commit suicide?” How many from Kirilov on have so reasoned? As far as historic Christianity is concerned, any paradise without God is hell.

This is by no means an attempt to “escape” into eternity or vacate human responsibility in the nasty now-and-now by invoking deity and longing for the sweet by-and-by. Moreover, the failures of Christians and the Christian community at large are too vividly real to allow one to be smugly doctrinaire. Nevertheless, the conclusion toward which one reaches is not so much a synthesis of individualism and collectivism, even in terms of democracy, but a recognition of a divinely constituted and empirically substantiated tension within the individual between the impulse to individuate, that is, to realize oneself in terms of individual freedom, and to conform, that is to realize one's self in a voluntary, loving subordination to the needs and advancement of the social group. This same polarity of individualism and conformity, whose operation C.S. Lewis compares to a lovely dance in which now one advances and pirouettes alone, now moves back and is “lost” in the harmonious movements of the many, must be maintained carefully in prime working condition in society at large. An overcharging of either pole at the expense of the other can only end in a short-circuiting of the dynamic of freedom.

Notes

1. Charles L. Sanford, in The Quest for Paradise (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961), passim, argues that the image of paradise arises from opposing impulses—an image of desire and an image of release from desire, of the realization and fulfillment of self and of surrender of self. The “quest for paradise,” which he sees at the root of the American dream of plenitude of inward and outward life, arises, he believes, from a tensional equation of life-craving and death-wish, the urge to comprehend both the beginning and the end of striving. Certainly, if the whole of the American Dream, itself a phase of man's age-old quest for paradise, arises from the tension between two such impulses, called by Sanford the “Poles of History,” then that portion of the American Dream called the dream of freedom may justifiably be termed the result of the polarity of individualism and conformity, “the realization … of self and the surrender of self.”

2. This deliberately keeps the terms “individualism” and “conformity” as rather loose complexes of ideas. Some ideas included in individualism are the individual's self-development, more or less, independent from institutional restrictions and requirements, ability to make final choices in matters affecting his interests, power to initiate and develop new ideas, personal ownership and use of productive property, and the like. “Conformity,” on the other hand, represents the demands of the group upon the individual to conform to social institutions and less differentiated patterns of life, including the individual's natural impulse in this direction, frequently with ability to make final choices in the hands of the group or the administrators of the social organization, initiative generally external to the individual, and, in some cases, private ownership of productive property not allowed. These are descriptive terms showing the directions or the spheres of influence of these respective poles.

   Hebert W. Schneider says,

   The discussions of freedom usually take us into a philosophical or scientific context; the discussions of liberty, into the context of social rights and institutions. … I am inclined to think there is intellectual progress in advancing from the problem of ‘Is there freedom?’ to the problem ‘What liberties are there?’ And had I been asked to write on freedom, I should have been tempted to make a philosophy of history out of this distinction and to argue that out of centuries of futile debate concerning the reality of freedom there finally emerged, three centuries ago, not merely a debate but a cultural crisis in the interests of establishing socially certain specific liberties.

   “The Liberties of Man,” Freedom, Its Meaning, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940), pp. 655-56.

3. The term “sociology of freedom” I have borrowed from Scott Nearing's Freedom: Promise and Menace (Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1961), a study made for and published by the Social Science Institute. Although the term was then relatively new, the concept underlying it is not.

   No such thing as the abstract isolated individual is known to social science. Nor are individual rights metaphysical entities. They are but concrete lines and types of sanctioned action essential to the orderly and efficient functioning of the social organism as a whole; and as such they are originated, determined, defined and limited by social interests and necessity.

   Harry Elmer Barnes, Sociology and Political Theory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1924), p. 6.

4. The study of a late nineteenth-century work for this purpose is not without its own justification.

   The decade of the nineties [Looking Backward, published in 1888, was already anticipating the problems of the nineties] is the watershed of American history. … On the one side lies an America predominantly agricultural; concerned with domestic problems; conforming, intellectually at least, to the political, economic, and moral principles inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. … On the other side lies the modern America, predominantly urban and industrial; inextricably involved in world economy and politics; troubled with the problems that had long been thought peculiar to the Old World; experiencing profound changes in population, social institutions, and technology; and trying to accommodate its traditional institutions and habits of thought to conditions new and in part alien.

   Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 41.

5. Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city. … Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

   Anatole France

   A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

   Oscar Wilde

   Both quotations were cited by Marie Louise Berneri in her frontispiece to Journey Through Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).

6. Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick, The Quest for Utopia (New York: H. Shuman, 1952), p. 5.

7. Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, Aristophane's fun-poking at utopian thought, and many other related writings of the ensuing period are passed over, together with millennium meditations of the Middle Ages.

8. Berneri, p. 56.

9. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), p. 85.

10. Mumford, pp. 98-99.

11. Negley and Patrick, p. 360.

12. Gerrard Winstanley's Law of Freedom, Gabriel de Foigny's Terra Incognita Australia, Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, John Eliot's Christian Commonwealth, and a multitude of others fit chronologically into this period, but room cannot be made for them. Interestingly, the eighteenth century contributes very few works directly falling within the limits set forth as minimal criteria for utopias, yet eighteenth-century ideas play a prominent part in preparing the way for the nineteenth-century flood of utopias. Names frequently associated with utopianism—Morelly, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Blanc, Owen, Marx and Engels—should be discussed, if at all, in terms of their ideas and projects for actual social reform or for socialism. More appropriate are Etienne Cabet's Voyage to Icaria and Theodor Hertzka's Freeland: A Social Anticipation and A Visit to Freeland, although the latter two rather resemble the kinds of things Fourier, Owen, Henry George, and others were writing for the sake of immediate action. Other writers of less important utopias or utopian-like works before Bellamy are Denis Vairasse d'Allais, Louis Sëbastien Mercier, Thomas Spence, James Buckingham, Robert Pemberton, Bulwer-Lytton, and Samuel Butler. Vernon L. Parrington, Jr. has dredged up practically all utopian-like efforts in America and sorted them out in American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias (Providence: Brown University, 1947). He includes James Fenimore Cooper's Crater and a great many other works outside the limits of a utopian work as defined here.

13. Berneri, pp. 3-4.

14. Mumford, pp. 146-47.

15. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (New York: Random House Modern Library, 1951), p. 276. All citations are from this Modern Library edition.

16. Bellamy, pp. 238-39.

17. Unfortunately, it is not possible to deal with the flood of utopias since Looking Backward. It was my intention to compare the polarity of individualism and conformity in William Morris's News from Nowhere, written specifically as a reaction to Looking Backward, but ultimately my chief interests led me elsewhere. That remains to be done, however. Albert W. Levi says there were only two nineteenth century utopias before Bellamy's (one would need a fuller definition than he gives to agree), but that from 1884-1900, forty-nine utopian novels were written. “Edward Bellamy: Utopian,” Ethics, LV (1945), 134.

18. John Bagnell Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 6.

19. Josiah Royce, Herbert Spencer (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), pp. 35-36.

20. The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), pp. 198-99.

21. Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, Basic History of the United States (New York: New Home Library, 1944), pp. 314-15.

22. Beard, p. 320.

23. Quoted by Koenraad W. Swart, “‘Individualism’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 1826-1860,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIII (1968), p. 78. Swart's article is the basis for most of the following statements about the uses of the term, particularly in France and by French writers.

24. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.), p. 3.

25. Swart, 89.

26. Beard, pp. 362-63.

27. From this point on, since every quote is composed of the words of some speaker, the practice of using a double set of quotation marks will be considered unnecessary.

28. This passage is an analogy of the resources of labor in a nation with water resources in arid lands. The finding of dangerous evil in individuals and the restrictions placed upon them form the axle upon which both sides of the analogy turn.

29. “While, however, the wish of the lower grade man is consulted so far as the exigencies of the service permit, he is considered only after the upper grade men have been provided for, and often he has to put up with second or third choice, or even with an arbitrary assignment when help is needed. This privilege of election attends every regrading, and when a man loses his grade he also risks having to exchange the sort of work he likes for some other less to his taste” (p. 99).

30. Lester DeKoster, All Ye That Labor (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1956), pp. 56-57. I gladly acknowledge a heavy debt to this splendid, thought-provoking little work.