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Showing results 1 – 6 of 6

Glossary Term – Organization

utopian communities

Between the 1820s and 1840s, individuals who believed in the perfectibility of the social and political order founded hundreds of “utopian communities.” These experimental communal societies provided blueprints for an ideal society. The characteristics of these communities varied widely, from the Brook Farm’s emphasis on transcendentalism, to the “phalanx” communities of Charles Fourier, to the radical interracial living experiment founded by Frances Wright at Nashoba Colony.

Glossary Term – Person

Charles Fourier

Some forty utopian communities based their organization on the ideas of the French theorist Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who hoped to eliminate poverty through the establishment of scientifically organized cooperative communities called “phalanxes.” Each phalanx was to be set up as a “joint-stock company,” in which profits were divided according to the amount of money members had invested, their skill, and their labor. In the phalanxes, women received equal job opportunities and equal pay, equal participation in...

Glossary Term – Place

Brook Farm

Brook Farm was a utopian community formed in 1841 and in operation until 1847. It was established by former Unitarian minister George Ripley as a communal community in which intellectuals, farmers, and craftspersons and their families lived and worked. The community placed major emphasis on education and intellectual freedom, and attracted interest and support from many famous writers and thinkers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Horace Greeley. The utopian experiment at Brook Farm ultimately failed, however, after...

Glossary Term – Place

Nashoba Colony

Currents of radical anti-slavery thought inspired Frances Wright, a fervent Scottish abolitionist, to found Nashoba Colony in 1826, near Memphis, Tennessee, as an experiment in interracial living. She established a racially integrated cooperative community in which slaves were to receive an education and earn enough money to purchase their own freedom. Publicity about Fanny Wright’s desire to abolish the nuclear family, religion, private property, and slavery created a furor, and the community dissolved after only four years.

Glossary Term – Place

New Harmony

Robert Owen’s experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana, reflected the influence of Enlightenment ideas. Owen, a paternalistic Scottish industrialist, was deeply troubled by the social consequences of the industrial revolution. Inspired by the idea that people are shaped by their environment, Owen purchased a site in Indiana where he sought to establish common ownership of property and abolish religion. At New Harmony the marriage ceremony was reduced to a single sentence and children were raised outside of their natural parents’ home...

Glossary Term – Place

Oneida Community

Perhaps the most successful—and notorious—experimental community was John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida. A lawyer who was converted in one of Charles G. Finney’s revivals, Noyes believed that the millennium would occur only when people strove to become perfect through an “immediate and total cessation from sin.” In Putney, Vermont, in 1835 and in Oneida, New York, in 1848, Noyes established perfectionist communities that practiced communal ownership of property and “complex marriage,” in which each member of the community was married to every...