Over the centuries, many individuals and groups have attempted to put their visions into practice. Some tried to gain political power to do so (few succeeded) and others created social movements (with greater success). Those utopians who gained political power often created dystopias rather than utopias, with, in the 20th century, countries like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Cambodia/Kampuchea under Pol Pot (1928–98) being noteworthy examples.
But the most common form of putting a specific vision into practice has been to create a small community either to withdraw from the larger society to practise the beliefs of its members without interference or to demonstrate to the larger society that their utopia could be put into practice. Although he denied the utopian connection, the historian Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr (1908–94) called the latter ‘patent-office models of the good society’, a label that actually makes the utopian connection.
In addition, small, temporary actions are now being seen as utopian because they generally employ a utopian image against the dystopia that, as their proponents see it, they oppose. These actions take place in many different ways, from performance to protest.
What we now most often call intentional communities, popularly known as communes, have had many names in the past, a number of which relate directly to utopianism, such as utopian community, utopian experiment, practical utopia, alternative society, and experimental community. These labels and their variants have either never been accepted or have since been dropped in favour of a more neutral term; many people living in such communities have rejected the label ‘utopian’ and prefer ‘intentional community’. Still, even given this rejection and the fact that most such communities have not been utopian in the ways the word is commonly used, there are close connections between utopianism and such communities.
There is no absolutely agreed upon definition of an intentional community, but many would agree with something like mine:
A group of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose.
The most important part of this definition and the part that connects such communities with utopianism is the emphasis on living a life based on ‘shared values’ or a ‘mutually agreed upon purpose’.
All communities, even those who believe that they are waiting for the Second Coming of Christ in the near future, have constitutions, rules and regulations, and/or agreements (formal or informal) about how their members are to live their lives. If these documents and agreements had been fictions, we would call them utopias without question, and often they are fictions in the sense that they do not accurately reflect how the community actually functions.
Intentional communities have been established so that their members can live a particular way of life. Some have sought to change sexual behavior radically. Many have changed how people ate, and the vegetarian communities changed what people ate. Many communities have changed how work was organized, and particularly have broken down gender distinctions in how work was to be allocated. Others worked with some success at breaking down the distinction between mental and physical labour.
Many have been religious and they tried to lead a way of life that their members believed their faith required. Many have followed a charismatic leader, preaching their version of religious belief, gaining followers, and establishing communities. Others have followed the ideas of a social theorist. There are many other reasons that people choose to withdraw from mainstream society to live differently.
The first such religious communities were probably Hindu ashrams and then Buddhist monasteries. Among the first such groups to withdraw to practise their beliefs in what became part of the Western traditions were the Essenes, a Jewish religious group that existed in many cities from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, established the Qumran community, and produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, thought to have been their library. Most Essenes were celibate, and they lived communally. Later, some of the earliest specifically Christian communities formed around individual holy men, usually hermits, known collectively as the Desert Fathers.
Many of the religious withdrawn communities based their practices on their interpretation of the early church in Jerusalem, particularly the description of community of goods found in Acts 2:44–45 – ‘And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need’ – which was constantly referred to in the descriptions of themselves by later communities. And many of the founders of the communities believed that the communal practices of the early church reflected the intention of Jesus. Later, community property was thought to be appropriate for those who dedicated themselves to the Church but not for laypeople.
The first major step in the creation of the Christian monastic tradition was The Rule of St Benedict, in which Benedict (480?–?543) gave details of an order designed to provide a structured setting within which it would be possible to lead a better life, closer to the ideal Christian life. Benedict’s Rule requires that no monk have any property, saying, ‘more than anything else is this vice of property to be cut off root and branch from the monastery’. Details are given on the amount of food to be given out (Rule XXXIX) and the amount of wine to be allowed – one pint per day (Rule XL). A rule specifies the amount of manual work and opposes idleness (Rule XLVIII), details the clothing to be issued (Rule LV), and, of course, the various officers, religious rituals, and procedures for admission to the monastery. These rules helped create communities designed to make the righteous life possible. Defenders of monasticism explicitly contended that most people were not capable of such a life and that only within the monastic setting would this clearly utopian goal be possible.
As monasteries prospered and monks appeared to lose the austerity originally recommended, reforms were instituted by the French St Odo of Cluny (c. 878–942), who established the Cluniac form of monastery in order to correct what he saw as the excesses of other monastic orders. St Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) also stressed the need for reform and proposed a wandering order of friars who were actually to practise poverty. Francis’s approach was subverted by conservatives within the Church and a more traditional Franciscan order was ultimately founded.
The attempt to re-achieve the ideals of Benedict, Odo, Francis, and others is a recurring theme in the history of monasticism. A new rule is written, instituted, and practised. The monasteries become successful and fall upon good times, which are their undoing. The monks become idle and used to the good life. Then a new rule is instituted and the cycle resumes.
The Reformation produced many groups that hoped to create a life based on their reading of the New Testament. For example, the Hutterian Brethren were first established during the Radical Reformation in the 16th century. The Hutterites, as they are also known, were named after their early leader Jakob Hutter (c. 1500–36), who insisted on a community of goods and pacifism.
4. Monastic communities are among the oldest intentional communities and continue to thrive and adjust to changes in the societies in which they exist, including in their architecture, as shown by this priory of the Benedictine community in St Louis, Missouri
To escape persecution, they moved to various countries in Europe before becoming established in North America in the late 19th century. In the USA during World War I, they were prosecuted for their pacifism, and many communities moved to Canada. Today, there are almost 500 Hutterite communities, the majority of them in Canada.
Few other communities from the Reformation period still exist, but many that emerged on the Continent during the following 200 years established communities in the United States, notably the Community of True Inspiration, better known as the Amana Communities, in Iowa, which traced its origins to Germany in 1714 and the teachings of Eberhard Ludwig Gruber (d. 1728) and Johann Friedrich Rock (1678? –1749), who believed that they continued to receive direct messages from God.
Other religious groups developed in Britain and the United States and chose to establish communities to enable them to practise their beliefs. The best known are groups such as the Shakers (officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) and the Oneida community. One practising Shaker community remains in Maine, but today the Shakers are best known for their craftsmanship. The Oneida community did not last as long and became a stock company producing Oneida Silverplate. But at their height, both were known for their characteristic sexual practices, the Shakers being celibate and the Oneida community practising what they called ‘complex marriage’, with all community members assumed to be married to all others, although sexual relations were not generally promiscuous. Both believed in and tried to practise gender equality, with the Shakers believing that the Second Coming of Christ had occurred in the female form in their founder Ann Lee (1736–84). And the Oneida community instituted a eugenic experiment by choosing those who were allowed to have children together. The experiment is generally considered successful in the sense that most of the children produced proved both healthy and intelligent, and mostly their descendants have continued to be so.
5. The Shaker meeting house at the Canterbury, New Hampshire, community showing the separate doors for men and women
Other communities were established based on the ideas of reformers, such as the men identified by Friedrich Engels (1820–95) as utopian socialists to distinguish them from Marxian scientific socialism. Engels identified three theorists as utopian socialists: the Welshman Robert Owen (1771–1858), and the Frenchmen Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Although none of them wrote a utopian novel, they did publish expositions of their ideal societies, and others wrote utopian novels based on the ideas of Owen and Fourier. Owen established intentional communities in the UK and the USA, and others founded communities based on his ideas in those countries and in Ireland. Owen was concerned with factory reform, and his reforms at his cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, were very successful. New Lanark is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Communities based on the proposals of Fourier and Saint-Simon were founded in France and later in the USA.
6. New Lanark was the site of Robert Owen’s (1771–1858) first major step in his career as a reformer. When Owen became manager of the cotton mill at New Lanark, he provided the villagers with decent housing, education, health care, and food at affordable prices, none of which was available in most factory towns. He also abolished physical punishment and limited child labour. Owen’s experiment was a great success both in the sense that productivity increased and in the sense that his workers were happier. New Lanark is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Many religious and secular communities were established throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the next major event in the history of intentional communities was the founding of Degania, the first kibbutz, in Palestine in 1920. Many Jews, most of them young people, moved to the area to establish kibbutz throughout what is now Israel. The earliest ones were mainly secular, although religious communities, called Moshav, were also established.
The kibbutz were generally successful until the combination of globalization and troubles in the Israeli economy forced many to make significant changes in their internal economies. Most kibbutz have survived their difficult times, but many are not as communal or as well-off as they once were.
Henry Near, the historian of the kibbutz movement, calls the kibbutz today ‘post-utopian’, arguing that the founding was clearly utopian in that it expected the kibbutzim would create wholly new and better lives for their members but that since no people or social form could ever live up to the hopes of the founding, people must adjust to the reality of daily life with other people and the loss of the original vision. It is ‘post-utopian’ in that many members adjust their utopian vision to the reality, some simply changing the dream, some putting it in the past, some concluding that the current situation is still better than the alternatives, and others putting utopia off to some undefined future.
At its peak, the kibbutz movement attracted a great deal of moral and financial support from the government of Israel, and a few other countries saw the advantages in supporting communal settlements. In the USA, during the depression of the 1930s about 100 communities were constructed as a means of relief and resettlement. And in New Zealand in the 1970s, a programme was put in place to establish communities known as ‘Ohu’, a Maori word meaning to achieve something ‘by means of friendly help and work’. A few communities were established but were quickly undermined by the bureaucracy.
The Chinese communes established under Mao Zedong (1893–1976) were an authoritarian version of communalism and show that it can be dystopian in that the lives of many of the people required to join were clearly worse than they had been before. The mass suicides at Jonestown and the Solar Temple also indicate that participating in a community with an exceptionally strong, charismatic leader can lead people to do things that they probably would not do otherwise, including killing themselves. While many charges against intentional communities have been shown to be false, there are enough examples of mistreatment to require recognition of the dystopian side of communalism.
The Sixties produced an explosion of intentional communities throughout the world, with thousands of mostly short-lived urban groups self-identifying as communes and hundreds of rural communities founded with varying utopian visions. Such communities were established throughout Europe and North America. Because of its perception that the communities practised free love or were promiscuous (some were, some were not), the press was fascinated by Hippie communes like the rural Drop City and the Hog Farm and Kerista in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. Some urban communes served as ‘safe houses’ for anti-war activists trying to avoid arrest, and this led the press to condemn all communities as harbouring dangerous radicals. In both Europe and North America, the majority of communities were simply trying to practise what their members saw as a better, less materialistic, freer way of life, and the continued existence of a substantial number of them more than 40 years later suggests that some people found what they were looking for.
7. Drop City was an intentional community established in southern Colorado in the mid-1960s. Originally established by art students from the universities of Colorado and Kansas, it became an icon of Hippie communalism. It was noted for its dome architecture
Also, in the Sixties many people were attracted to Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism. As a result, Buddhist monks began to move to Western countries to teach and establish monasteries, and Hindu teachers and gurus also came to Europe and North America and established ashrams.
But the communities that were most similar to earlier communities were not based on Eastern religions but on a new vision, like the communities inspired by the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two. The best known of these communities, Twin Oaks in Virginia, long ago moved away from the Skinnerian model, but the other survivor of the original Skinnerian communities, Los Horcones in Mexico, still follows aspects of the original vision of using the institutions of the community to modify and improve behaviour.
Twin Oaks is a member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, a small group of communities that try to meet seven criteria. These criteria are goals, aspirational rather than currently achieved, but they clearly enunciate a utopian vision. Each of the Federation communities:
1. Holds its land, labor, income and other resources in common.
2. Assumes responsibility for the needs of its members, receiving the products of their labor and distributing these and all other goods equally according to need.
3. Practices non-violence.
4. Uses a form of decision making in which members have an equal opportunity to participate, either through consensus, direct vote, or right of appeal or overrule.
5. Actively works to establish the equality of all people and does not permit discrimination on the basis of race, class, creed, ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
6. Acts to conserve natural resources for present and future generations while striving to continually improve ecological awareness and practice.
7. Creates processes for group communication and participation and provides an environment which supports people’s development.
And there is a network of communities in the USA centred on the magazine Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture, which has been published since 1972; a network in the UK centred on the series Diggers and Dreamers, which has been published since the early 1990s; and a worldwide network of eco-villages.
Two recent movements are either directly connected with or related to communalism. The eco-village movement is clearly part of communalism, with small communities throughout the world trying to achieve a more ecologically balanced lifestyle, architecture, and community design. Some of these communities, like the Farm in Tennessee in the USA, also provide support for the development of other such communities. Some communities or individual members of communities use the expertise gained in needing to achieve consensus to train people both in other communities and outside communalism in group dynamics.
The co-housing movement, which originated in Denmark and has spread throughout Western countries, has links to intentional communities. In co-housing, property is a mixture of private and collective, with the site and shared facilities held collectively, usually as shareholders, and the individual houses owned individually. The ethos stresses community interaction. Some co-housing groups see themselves as intentional communities, but others reject the connection, and this division accurately reflects the reality of co-housing. The form of property-holding tends to be the same or at least similar, but the extent of community life varies considerably. At one end of the spectrum, community meetings, community work, shared meals, and the like are the norm. At the other end, community interaction is minimal and exists only to the extent required by the legal agreements. Most groups are somewhere in between these extremes.
Housing cooperatives, which range from a single house providing accommodation for students at a university to massive complexes, are also intentional communities. Even though the larger ones may have little communal activity, the smaller ones often physically look like an urban intentional community and function in much the same way. In addition, some producer cooperatives, such as Mondragón in Spain, are regularly included as intentional communities in that they provide not just jobs for their workers, but involve them in running the business and provide them with amenities, often including housing, that go well beyond those provided by most businesses.
It should be clear that there is no one model of community life; that intentional communities serve many purposes. For example, Black Mountain College was a community that acted as a cultural and political centre, with the folk singer Pete Seeger (b. 1918), the composer John Cage (1912–92), and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) as members.
For many years, Belgium has had communities designed for the mentally ill, and such therapeutic communities have become common. In the USA, the Gould Farm community in Massachusetts and the CooperRiis community in North Carolina have long provided such a setting. The Camphill communities throughout the world, which are based on the teachings of the Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), work with people who have learning disabilities, mental health problems, and other special needs, providing a secure, supportive environment in which they are able to develop as fully as possible as individuals.
A group of communities that are a variant of therapeutic communities are the Catholic Worker communities, which were established to assist alcoholics, drug addicts, and others at the very bottom of the social ladder to better themselves. Such communities include Catholic Worker houses in the worst parts of major cities and a number of rural communities where people can go for fresh air and physical labour to help their recovery. An earlier and quite similar version were the communities founded by the Salvation Army in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. City colonies and rural colonies were both established, and the plan was to expand to overseas colonies where those who had been successful in the rural communities would be able to start an entirely new life.
What makes a community a success or a failure? A standard answer is longevity, with 25 years the standard measure proposed by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (b. 1943), the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School, in her book Commitment and Community (1972), but for most community members this is a deeply flawed measure. While there are many communities today that are well past the 25-year rule, including quite a few founded in the Sixties and generally thought to be long gone, for many people longevity simply misses the point.
The fact that the community lasted does not mean that it contained the same people. Some did, some did not, but most communities had significant turnover. Kanter’s assumptions do appear to fit religious communities, some of which lasted for generations. If God or God’s representative tells you to stay, you stay. While longevity can be a measure of success when combined with other factors, alone it is meaningless. And while Kanter herself was aware of this, the simple measure has nevertheless been applied by others since then.
One approach to success and failure is that stated by the American progressive thinker Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903):
Always failures? Only within these communities has there been seen, in the wide boundaries of the United States, a social life where hunger and cold, prostitution, intemperance, poverty, slavery, crime, premature old age and unnecessary mortality, panic and industrial terror, have been abolished. If they had done this for only a year, they would have deserved to be called the only successful ‘society’ on this continent, and some of them are generations old. All this has not been done by saints in heaven, but on earth by average men and women.
Another measure, and one in favour with community members, is that a community is a success to the extent that it meets the needs of its members for however long they are members. For most members, the success of the community is not the longevity of a community but rather the extent to which it did or did not improve their lives for the time they were members. Of course, needs obviously vary from member to member, and needs change as people change, so the internal dynamics of a community will change over time.
Two recent utopian practices, one of which is related to intentional communities, illustrate the way in which utopianism has moved away from the traditional categories. The first, which Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson, b. 1945) has called TAZ, or Temporary Autonomous Zone, and George McKay (b. 1960) has called DiY (Do it Yourself) Culture, is a space of activity created for a specific purpose. Both Bey and McKay are primarily concerned with protests, but the annual lesbian music camp in Michigan and other temporary sites can be included. In retrospect, they can be called utopian because they temporarily produced what the participants saw as a better life, however briefly, and they relate back to earlier temporary utopias like Saturnalia, Carnival, the Feast of Fools, the tent meetings of some religious revivals, and the ‘happenings’ of the Sixties. And some create quite long-lasting communities, such as the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, England, that lasted from September 1981 until 2000.
Utopian language is also being used for even more temporary phenomena. There is, for example, the British art collective Freee (3 es) which creates political protest in public space by, among other things, simply going to a place, usually with a slogan of some sort, and standing there for hours creating a TAZ or temporary utopian space around themselves. The art is created by the people who interact with them. There are many such groups, but Freee sees what it is doing as utopian.
An aspect of this phenomenon is performance. In every performance, be it music, dance, theatre, or some forms of public art, there are at least two things going on, one among the performers and one in the audience. In rare cases, the two bond together and a truly utopian moment is created; but more often, there are what might be thought of as smaller utopian moments. More often, but still rarely, the performers create the utopian space among themselves in that one performance, and performance theorists have made the utopia connection. For example, Jill Dolan (b. 1957), a professor of drama at the University of Texas, wrote:
I believe that theatre and performance can articulate a common future, one that’s more just and equitable, one in which we can all participate more equally, with more chances to live fully and contribute to the making of culture.
There are lots of such moments, and while we know that the next performance may not reach the heights of the last one, knowing that it is possible and the feelings it produces when it happens are what is important. And it is important in ways that are potentially political because the satisfaction of that moment can leak out of the performance space to inform the dissatisfaction of everyday life.
Dissatisfaction is the beginning of utopianism, and ultimately utopianism is about the transformation of everyday life; utopianism confronts the fact that lives are wholes, that children, families, marriage, education, economics, politics, death, and so on are all connected. And intentional communities are particularly radical in that their members are willing to experiment with the transformation of their own lives. And all members of intentional communities must deal with this transformation every day.
