Utopian Practice as Activism: Visions of Reform in the New Australia Movement

Between 1870 and 1910, more than 350 intentional communities were founded in the United States alone. Although historians have frequently treated intentional communities as isolated aberrations, peculiar instances of retreat from society at large, participants in fin-de-siècle communal experiments labored alongside a rising tide of political and social reform movements and the authors of a spate of utopian literature to confront and address the economic and social disruption that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism. Utopianists, and their many financial contributors and supporters, did not labor in isolation. They were cognizant of the ways their work fit within a larger historical pattern of communal experimentation, were engaged with the major social questions of the day, and contributed to the period’s burgeoning transnational debate about the ideals and values that should shape the future of the modern industrial world.

This paper uses the correspondence, periodicals, and advertising of a core sample of utopian experiments founded by Western reformers in the United States, Mexico, and Paraguay at the turn of the twentieth century to demonstrate how diverse experiences, national contexts, and the circulation of reform ideas across national boundaries informed utopianists’ efforts to craft and practice idealized forms of community. Because national and local contexts, as well as divergent personal experiences, informed people's responses to the challenges industrialization posed to established traditions and social hierarchies, utopian projects posited a range of social critiques and proposed solutions for society's ills. While white middle-class intellectuals in both the United States and Australia often founded communities based upon principles of resource-sharing and universal education as a means to stave off class-based revolution, for example, African American Exodusters and members of ethno-religious communities typically viewed communalism as a temporary measure to promote group progress while agitating for lasting reform at the national level.