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p The history of the American Utopia begins with the history of American society. Virtually since the time the news of its discovery spread in Europe, people in the Old World pictured the new continent as a unique land in which "worldly social salvation"  [32•1  could be achieved and the boldest Utopian dreams realized. The Renaissance Europe of the time saw the discovery of America as the long-awaited discovery of the Promised Land; this largely molded the attitude to it both from outside, from across the ocean, and from within, on the part of the settlers themselves.

p Subsequent developments have shown that Americans have always been convinced that they are unique. And, while this conviction clearly exaggerated the actual distinctive features of the development of the United States, it also reflected a perfectly real aspect: America proved to be very, even exceptionally, fertile for Utopian consciousness, a land where Utopian beliefs and experiments tangibly affected the social, political and cultural fabric. " America," Michael Harrington remarked in this regard, "was indeed an exceptional capitalist society. Its Utopian tradition was deeper than that of any European country, which made the practical work of transforming the existing order all the more difficult.”  [32•2 

p One can, of course, argue over where Utopian traditions were deeper-in America or in Europe, or perhaps in Asia, or, more precisely, in the East. A general history of utopia is yet to be written, and different civilizations may cite sufficiently convincing arguments to prove that their Utopian traditions have particularly deep and firm roots.

p After all, Plato’s Republic and Laws may well be called Utopian classics which inspire and serve as examples to many authors of Utopias to this day. Plato’s works, Euhemerus’s Sacred History and lambulus’s Islands of the Sun present the first systematic attempts at a rationalist interpretation of the Golden Age myths and at the 33 construction of images of a better world. It is clear from ancient Greek Utopias that their authors were striving to offer a radical solution—which would satisfy all nations at all times-to a broad range of social problems which were to remain topical for many Utopians over the next two millenia; these problems concerned the principles of government, the organization of work and leisure, man’s moral and physical development, the structure and principles of marriage and family relations, the system of education, international relations and the like.

p The Utopian tradition founded by the ancient Greek civilization was later, and especially during the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th to 19th centuries, developed in the culture of many European countries, primarily Britain, Italy, France and Germany. The names of Thomas More, author of Utopia, Tommasso Campanella who wrote City of the Sun, Frangis Bacon and his New Atlantis, of the Utopian socialists Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen with their numerous Utopian treatises, of Harrington, Morris, Vairase, Dostoyevsky and many others who dreamed of a happy future for their countries and for all mankind are part and parcel of the history of Utopian thought.

p However, from the very beginning the Utopian tradition developed as an international phenomenon, as an element of both Western and Eastern culture. "The entire East, although to different degrees, was shaken by these upheavals [emergent social Utopias and attempts to implement them by mass movements] generated deep inside society and aimed against the injustices of social systems."  [33•1  Today it is clear that the world history of Utopia would be incomplete without the names of Meng-zi, Lao-zi , al- Farabi, Ibn Rushd and many other Eastern thinkers.

p In short, the assertion that the American Utopian tradition was "deeper than that of any European country" may encounter valid objections. Still, in some respects Harrington is right. More than any other country, America stimulated Utopian hopes and favored the conduct of Utopian experiments. This was rooted above all in the specific 34 conditions under which American culture developed, in what is sometimes called the "historical destiny of nation”.

p America possessed huge material resources, and this was important for its subsequent development and the outcome of the emerging social contradictions. Much more important, however, was that the country was free of many of the restrictions which capitalist Europe had inherited from feudalism and which hampered the development of social relations. Marx and Engels noted that repeatedly. It his article "The Labor Movement in America", Engels wrote about the "more favored soil of America, where no medieval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth century.”  [34•1  Engels also wrote about this in his letter to N. F. Danielson of October 17, 1893 and to Friedrich Sorge of December 31, 1892, and in several other works. Addressing President Lincoln, Marx described the United States as the country "where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.”  [34•2 

p The conditions in which American capitalism developed were favorable for the realization of many of the social ideals which had been virtually impractical in the Old World. This bred exaggerated assessments of the opportunities America offered. Having left Europe with its burden of social prejudice and restrictions, with its cumbersome legacy of ages past which, embodied in cultural traditions, both stimulated and hampered progress, the ex-European found himself in a country he saw as “open”. He tended to believe that this country’s salient feature was the " absence of the past", of an integral historical tradition which shaped the sociopolitical ways of its citizens. He could, of course, know or have an inkling of the fact that the new country had a history of its own. But this concerned him little, for this history neither directly affected his freedom nor placed any significant restrictions on his activity.

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p The feeling of "freedom from the past" evoked a feeling of unlimited freedom which made it possible to choose from what was now a foreign legacy (European or originating elsewhere) all that was “useful”, rejecting all that was not—in other words, to see this legacy as a mass of building materials from which, given a will to do so, one could construct almost any social system one’s heart or mind desired. "Our Revolution commenced on more favorable ground," Thomas Jefferson wrote to Major John Cartwright on June 5, 1824. "It presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi- barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved in our hearts.”  [35•1 

p But this was not only the Americans’ view. This was also the opinion of many Europeans who visited the United States. In his famous and still important Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the salient features of America’s historical development in that "the emigrants who colonized the shores of America in the beginning of the seventeenth century somehow separated the democratic principle from all the principles that it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe, and transplanted it alone to the New World.”  [35•2 

p Obviously, one cannot say that American life in Colonial times, severely Puritan and regimented, even though more democratic than in Europe, opened broad vistas for the imagination and aided in the conduct of social experiments. Still, as the Colonies developed, as the revolution drew nearer and theocratic control weakened, conditions for creative initiative and social experiment became increasingly favorable. Besides, as those colonists who "failed to make it" lost their Utopian illusions, new ones were constantly reproduced—in the minds of new waves of immigrants and of new generations of Americans.

p Of special importance in the emergence and development of American Utopian consciousness in the 19th century was 36 the so-called frontier—the boundary of the newly settled lands which was constantly moving farther and farther West, toward the Pacific. This gave rise to the belief that there, on lands out West, one could again and again try one’s luck and work to put one’s social ideals into practice.

p The U.S. historian Harold Rhodes, author of Utopia in American Political Thought, divides all Utopias into three large groups—upward, inward and outward—and regards the latter as images of a perfect society that "exists now—- somewhere—but not here”.  [36•1  To reach this type of Utopia, there is no need to restructure the existing society; it is enough to simply leave it and move to that Utopian “somewhere”. "Thus for Jefferson., Utopia could be realized by moving from the seaport town to the interior country where man could mix his talents and energies with the soil in order to realize the benefits of a virtuous and serene life.”  [36•2 

p Harold Rhodes believes that the concept of the frontier advanced by Frederick Jackson Turner actually offers the same pattern of attaining Utopia. According to Turner, "the existence of the American frontier offered a genuine option to the discontent and depression which afflicted the man living in the nation’s more crowded areas.... ’So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists.’"  [36•3 

p One might note in passing that generally, the concept of the frontier is very important for Utopian consciousness. For, taken in its broadest sense, Utopian thinking is precisely an act of surpassing a spatial or temporal boundary, of going beyond the confines of the usual or that accepted by law or custom. Most frequently, Utopian consciousness becomes widespread either when the “frontier” is too narrowly outlined and it becomes imperative to cross it to ensure further progress, or when it moves further and further away, thereby as if vanishing into nonexistence and producing the illusion of a boundless field of human activity.

p Much has been written about Turner’s concept both in America and abroad. It has been noted, and quite justly, that the attempts to explain almost all distinctive features of U.S. history by the existence of the frontier are clearly 37 untenable. But this sober assessment does not at all belittle the role the availability of "free lands" and the westward drift of the country’s border which continued up to the last third of the 19th century played in the emergence and development of national Utopian consciousness. To be sure, here, the American’s mentality displayed the same aberration which shaped his belief in his country’s " absence of history". America’s lands were not vacant; there was indigenous population there; but in the minds of the white men who were spreading through the country, that was as though they were really vacant.

p The concepts the frontier notion bred were, of course, illusory in many respects. They clearly overrated the freedom the settlers enjoyed on the new lands and the actual opportunities for building their lives according to Utopia. As Ray Billington wrote, "In the West, according to the frontier myth, a veritable Garden of the World awaited to transform newcomers into superior beings. There, where nature’s abundance stifled the competitive instinct, men lived together in peace and contentment, freed of the jealousies and meanness inevitable in the crowded East.”  [37•1 

p Still, for decades, the "frontier myth" remained a tangible factor in the formation of Utopian consciousness in the United States. This was enhanced considerably by the constant influx of immigrants, especially in the latter half of the 19th century. Like their forerunners, these people came to America in the hope of breaking free of the past and starting a new life.

p But American Utopian consciousness did not stem solely from the belief in the "boundless opportunities" open to the people of the New World. It was also stimulated by directly opposite ideas about restrictions on actual opportunities encountered, especially in crisis situations, by members of various social groups-above all by industrial workers, farmers, urban petty bourgeoisie and national minorities.

p Fervent social criticism, a powerful incentive in the development of Utopian consciousness, permeates American history. The way to the American Revolution itself was, to a certain extent, paved by increasingly critical 38 attitudes and socioutopian endeavor. "Colonists began as British subjects with rather common political grievances. As these complaints continued unattended, however, the colonists began to imagine a society more nearly ideal than any in Europe. This vision, based on freedom, abundant land, and the chance to avoid institutionalized error, expressed itself in essays, declarations, and constitutions. Albeit most revolutionaries of 1776 simply opposed British rule, some clearly held in their minds the idea of a model society.”  [38•1 

p The existence of “boundaries”, in economic, political and social terms, became especially manifest in the latter half of the 19th century, when American capitalism put on pace following the victory of the North over the Southern Confederacy in the Civil War. Few areas demonstrated such sharp and -intense contradictions of capitalism straining the class and ethnic relations as the 19th century America. And though throughout the period since, the United States has never approached a revolutionary situation, this was due not to an absence of mass discontent and the ensuing protest eruptions, not to any lack of desire to restructure American society, but primarily to the lack of political prerequisites for revolution.

p But revolutions which have failed to materialize—and sometimes those that have occurred—often give an impetus to Utopian consciousness. Generally, no matter what national tradition we take, the history of Utopian thought displays a feature which may be described as “pulsation”. During some periods, Utopian thought appears to be extinguished—only to flare up again later, perhaps with even greater intensity than before.

p Most often, Utopian thought flourishes during radical social, political, cultural and scientific upheavals, when sociohistorical catastrophes occur, when old institutions, relations and values collapse and new ones spring up. At such times of expectation and tragedy, of hope and despair, people, especially those particularly sensitive to social issues, burn with the desire to rise above the times, to affect history either by urging it onward or by reversing it.

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p Such upheavals stimulate Utopia. Besides, Utopian consciousness becomes active not only directly during a revolution but also prior to it, when many future participants in revolutionary battles are full of hope. "France in the eighteenth century, when the bourgeois revolution was maturing, produced a whole crop of Utopias at a time when in England this form had temporarily almost disappeared. Here the bourgeois revolution had been accomplished, and the question of its successor had not been raised.”  [39•1 

p Utopia’s pulsation is clear not only from the fact that it fades and then surges up again but also from the change in the priorities of Utopia’s functions and in the degree to which the Utopian ideal is transcendental. As a rule, reformist Utopian projects proclaiming an ideal which the subject of the revolutionary change sees as feasible either immediately or in the near future, move to the foreground in prerevolutionary or revolutionary periods. Besides, the euphoria the social upheaval induces in the masses usually leads them to see revolutionaries as virtually omnipotent miracle workers—especially when a revolution uses religious slogans or is directed by religious forces.

p The American bourgeois revolution was no exception. Liberation from the British Crown generated enthusiasm in various strata of the colonists; they believed that now great prospects were open for realizing the boldest projects and the most radical ideas. And still, when subsequent developments demonstrated that these hopes were illusory, the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution frequently inspired critics of the existing order, including those who proceeded from Utopian positions.

p In short, throughout its history, U.S. capitalism has periodically reproduced Utopian consciousness which stemmed from a feeling of both power and impotence, of constraint and unlimited freedom, of hope and despair. As an independent nation, America has gone through at least four stages of a Utopian revival of sorts; three of them coincided with periods when the traditional sociopolitical institutions were suffering from more or less serious malfunctions and an intensive search was under way for new values and institutional structures.

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p The first such phase occurred from the 1820s to the 1840s, the time of an exacerbation of social contradictions and of the first major economic crisis. Naturally, in that period the issue was not replacement of the existing institutions with new ones; the foremost objective was to make the existing institutions, still not quite established, conform to the principles of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. That was the time of romantic quests and hopes, the Golden Age of American Utopia, as many historians described it. That was when Utopian ideals became visible clearly, or at least in general outline—the ideals which spread, developed and evolved throughout the 19th century and, to a certain extent, in the first half of the 20th century.

p Between the 1820s and 1840s American Romanticism reached its peak. James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and their fellow authors molded the national romantic Utopian tradition which still exists to this day. Simultaneously, Americans studied European socialist Utopian doctrines (those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon) and produced the first socialist Utopias of their own (Thomas Skidmore). Jeffersonian Utopian ideals which formed the basis of the socalled farmer Utopias (more about this later) were also making headway. Finally—and this is a substantial element of the national Utopian tradition too—it was in these decades that American involvement in experimental Utopian communities was at its highest.

p The last quarter of the 19th century, when it became clear that American capitalism generated crisis phenomena, was the second stage in the development of Utopian consciousness. Supported by industrial workers, mass action by farmers against monopolies destroying the illusion of equal opportunity were coupled with the increasingly tense relations between the trusts and the government (the latter feeling that the laissez-faire policy was tying its hands). This made the question of America’s future again topical both for the lower classes and for the elite. Utopian projects (advanced by Grangers, Greenbackers, farmers’ unions, the People’s Party, nationalists and other movements, trends and groups) had never before been so numerous. Never before had Utopian novels appeared in such great quantities as in the 1880s and 1890s (Edward Bellamy, Ignatius 41 Donnelly, William Dean Howells); this prompted U.S. historians to refer to this period as the "Utopian era". According to V. L. Parrington, Jr., over 50 Utopian novels were published in the United States from 1887 to 1900. Subsequent research by Kenneth Roemer paints an even more impressive picture: from 1888 to 1900, some 160 Utopian works appeared (including what Roemer calls “partial” Utopias.  [41•1 

p In these years, the two sides to the struggle were partisans of the American farmers’ Utopia which obviously had to be renovated and revised, and those advocating a pettybourgeois image of a socialist America.

p The third stage in the evolution of U.S. Utopian consciousness was connected with the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s and with the New Deal. America was again at a crossroads. "Suspended between past and future, the nation drifted as on a dark sea of unreality. It knew only a sense of premonition and of change; but the shape of the future was as baffling as the memory of the past,"  [41•2  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote many years later.

p The choice of a future was indeed hard. Radically different sociopolitical alternatives were clashing. Besides, now America had an opportunity to watch two actually functioning models tackle the contradictions of capitalism—in Germany where fascism was established and in Soviet Russia which embarked on building socialism. True, there were forces in America which were ready to push the nation toward fascism—witness Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. But there were also those who saw socialist change as the only radical way out of the crisis (although sometimes they interpreted socialism in a rather peculiar way). Some historians called the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s a “Red” decade. "It was Red in the sense that the center of political gravity swung sharply to the Left, and millions of jobless, war veternas, and mass industry workers took to the streets in demonstrations or ‘seized’ factories in sit-down strikes. It was Red in tone, mood, flavor as thousands of artists, intellectuals, movie stars, and 42 literary figures found an emotional haven with various radical parties.”  [42•1  That period gave rise not only to powerful movements of social protest but also to various socialist Utopian projects.

p American Utopian socialism, quite prominent in the 1930s, was represented, among others, by the followers of the nationalists’ tradition with the colorful figure of Upton Sinclair at the head. Often cited as a typical example of the impact made by the nationalists’ ideas and of the radical wishful thinking of the 1930s is the movement initiated by Upton Sinclair in 1933 and designed to implement the EPIC Plan. The plan was devised to reinvolve the unemployed in the production process at cooperative enterprises free from the immoral pursuit of profit and thus restructure the entire society according to cooperative principles.

p On the other hand, it was in that period that a new type of the social Utopia appeared, subsequently to become a key element in the national Utopian tradition—the technocratic Utopia. The official Utopia was changing considerably. And, finally, science fiction, a new literary genre not quite identical with but in many respects close to utopia, was coming into the limelight.

p The latest, fourth stage in the development of American Utopian consciousness occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The great advances in science and technology, coupled with radical sociopolitical changes (the emergence of the world socialist system’and the restructuring of world economic relations, the increasing prominence of the government in America, the changing role of the United States in world affairs, etc.) inevitably produced changes in social consciousness and transformed what different social groups saw as their social ideal. A new view of Utopia as such and of its role in the functioning and development of society was taking shape. A new, massive body of Utopian thought was arising, calling for an independent examination, an important element of the contemporary political field which affected the movements, groups and individuals within it.

p Although most American Utopias share certain characteristics determined by the distinctive conditions in which 43 the national Utopian tradition developed (orientation on practical feasibility, on the use of legitimate political institutions, etc.), nevertheless they do not, just like in other countries, form a single mainstream which could erase their social and political dividing lines.

p The differences in the positions and ideals of social classes are reflected in Utopia too. This is clear from a comparison, say, of the projects advanced by John Eliot and Thomas Skidmore, Thoreau and Bellamy, Henry George and Skinner. To emphasize the inherently contradictory nature of the American Utopian tradition, Vernon Parrington, Jr., writes that American Utopians "have in common only their interest in outlining a different government, or a better way of life. Some of them were wise, some were foolish, and a few simply ignorant.... Their prescriptions for economic, political, social, intellectual and religious change have differed widely. Each generation has worked out formulas which seemed to solve the problems of the day. Each generation has looked for reassurance and been satisfied by different promises.”  [43•1 

p As in other countries, in the United States the classes and groups turning to Utopia were mostly those which either possessed no real power or were facing a real threat of losing it. For this reason, an overwhelming majority of the Utopian projects which arose in the United States in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries were petty-bourgeois—from the viewpoint of their social content and the nature of the social forces they expressed. It was only later that Utopia became the permanent intellectual refuge of the bourgeoisie concerned with retaining its own power and stabilizing the existing sociopolitical structures.

p And now to the reasons behind the evolution of the Utopian tradition in general and of the American tradition in particular. The great body of literature which analyzes the Utopian phenomenon offers different explanations. The evolution of Utopian thinking is attributed either to the distinctive conditions of economic development, or to the evolution of theoretical and artistic thought, or to the 44 dynamics of the political process, or to some other material or ideal factors or their combinations.

p Apparently, the reasons in question can only be traced with the help of the methodology Marx used to analyze the results of spiritual production. According to this methodology, the evolution of the Utopian tradition should be viewed as a distinct form of a reflection of the social reality which cannot be reduced either to a mechanistically interpreted combination of different material factors or to any of these factors taken individually. What determines the actual existence of a Utopian tradition anywhere, including the United States, is the change of the social reality seen as the material conditions in which a social entity exists.

p While on the subject of social consciousness as the “ reflection” of social being, the following point should be made to prevent any crude misinterpretation of Marxist precepts. Marx has demonstrated that each socioeconomic formation as a system of social acitivity, and each of its stages generate a consciousness which, while reflecting a given system, is also its inner, organic element, a necessary condition enabling the reflected system of activity and its products-spiritual values, institutions, etc.—to function and evolve.

p As Marx shows in Capital, a definite mode of production is the key to the understanding of specific forms of the social reality. Here, one should also take into consideration the changes that occur within one and the same mode of production, i.e., within one and the same socioeconomic system.

p The two centuries of American capitalism demonstrate that the evolution of the Utopian tradition and of national social consciousness as a whole is largely shaped by the nature of the mechanisms which regulate social production and reproduction—that is, by the market and the state. At all stages of its development, capitalism needs both these mechanisms, but their roles and functions in both material and spiritual matters of society change depending on the stage in question.

p The hegemony of a self-regulating market with its basis of free competition, the primacy of small-scale over largescale private property, of rural over urban population and the like imply, through a chain of mediation factors, the hegemony of definite types of consciousness and social 45 ideals, including Utopian ones, which operate in the given conditions. The evolution of free enterprise capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, the increasingly prominent role of the state which assumes a number of functions the market used to play in the past, the growing influence of the monopolies in all social spheres, and the related changes in the social fabric-all this inevitably leads to a restructuring of the existing types of social consciousness and social ideals, including the field of Utopia.

p One can easily see that all the listed upsurges of Utopian consciousness in the United States have coincided not simply with periods of exacerbation in the socioeconomic and political contradictions of American imperialism, but with periods of transformation in the mechanisms regulating reproduction of social processes, more specifically, with times when the role of the state increased. Notably, each stage in the growth of the state’s role has been accompanied by similar reactions on the part of social consciousness and generated similar Utopian ideals (different, of course, in their immediate content).

p This book focuses on three types of Utopian ideals, especially pronounced and especially strong in their social impact. These are, first, romantic ideals which reflect an apologia of market-generated relations, institutions and values and are more or less clearly aimed against the state. Romantic opposition to the state was, of course, relative. Each subsequent stage made new concessions to the state, rejecting only its new claims and attempts at attaining “hegemony”. Second, positivist or scientist-technocratic ideals which stem from an exaggerated opinion of the ability of the state (and of the members of the technocratic elite operating within the state) to effectively and promptly tackle the problems facing society and which link this ability to advances in science and technology. Third, socialist ideals which, for all their diversity (and heterogeneity of their social base), are oriented, on the one hand, on eliminating (or severely restricting) market mechanisms and, on the other, on changing the very nature of the state, transferring the socioeconomic regulatory function to it.

p Obviously, when speaking about similar reactions of Utopian consciousness we simplify the actual developments somewhat. Yet, it is a productive simplification. It helps one to grasp both the essence of the past stages in the 46 evolution of American Utopia and the possible directions U.S. Utopian consciousness may take in the future.

However, before we raise the question of the future, or discuss the current stage, or examine the development of the U.S. Utopian tradition in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, we’ve got to unravel a rather tangled question connected with the nature of this tradition and its distinctive features.