84

p The Utopia of a farmers’ America emerged and developed as the petty proprietor’s response to the advancement of capitalism which was pushing him to the periphery of economic, civic and political affairs. But simultaneously, capitalist contradictions gave rise to a different type of utopian response—the romantic Utopia.

p The birth of this type of Utopian consciousness was closely connected with the rise of the American Romantic Movement as a literary and aesthetic trend. For this reason the romantic Utopian ideal was expressed not so much in theoretical form as in the shape of fiction, and the romantic aesthetic credo often formed the basis of Utopian projects. Beauty was frequently the romanticist’s guide to action in his socioutopian experiments (the organization of the Brook Farm Utopian community was a classic example). In this sense American Romanticism as a socioutopian tradition, an artistic and literary trend, an aesthetic doctrine and a model of social behavior embodied a single type of consciousness. Perhaps this explains why outstanding figures of American culture of the first half of the 19th century such as Henry David Thoreau or Nathaniel Hawthorne were, simultaneously, romantic authors, social Utopian theorists and practical Utopians (Thoreau’s experiment reflected in his Walden, Hawthorne’s participation in the Brook Farm community resulted in his Blithedale Romance).

p Nevertheless, the romantic social Utopia and romantic literature were not identical. They followed different laws, and this makes it possible to consider each independently of the other. Having appeared as a reaction to the social 85 consequences of industrialization (the restructuring of the lifestyle, the collapse of the traditional patriarchal relations and the destruction of the old values), the American Romantic Movement was also a legitimate search—this was its salient sociohistorical feature—for ways to realize the promises of the American Revolution.

p Critical of his contemporary sociopolitical order, the romanticist still remained an optimist. He pinned his hopes of more humane social relations not on the overthrow of capitalism but on the development of the traditions rooted in the principles proclaimed by the Founding Fathers. Specifically, this explains the fact that, in the words of Yuri Kovalev, a Soviet researcher, "the romantic protest against the new forms of economic, political and social affairs born of capitalist development was originally devoid of intransigence”.   [85•1 

p The romantic Utopia comprises a diversity of both aesthetic and social aspects. Its authors may hold different views of the specific forms of the Utopian ideal and of the ways to attain it, but these differences do not erode their consensus as to the principles and major values of the Utopian world; this makes it possible to classify the romantic Utopia of the first half of the 19th century as an independent type. The consensus in question is largely explained by the unified nature of the philosophical basis of the American Romantic Movement, transcendentalism. Its central principle is the natural condition and its central value, the free man. The American romanticist is above all a humanist proclaiming "man’s supremacy over the law, the state and the church”.  [85•2  It is man’s position in society which is the measure of the existing system and the point of departure in the construction of a social Utopia. The romantic ideal is a society in which the individual can follow his inner motivations, in which he is free from any external coercion or imposition by others, from the dictates of the state. "Man is not made for society, but society is made for man"  [85•3 —this quotation from Margaret Fuller expresses, 86 with sufficient clarity, the individualistic credo of the romantic Utopian, particularly pronounced in the works of Thoreau. But romantic individualism is not the entrepreneurial individualism of the Utopia of a farmers’ America, based on the fetish of petty private property and the pursuit of wealth and social success. While the romantic Utopian does not in principle reject private property, he does not make a fetish out of it either, seeing it merely as a condition for the normal existence of man and society. He is revolted by the mercenary spirit of greed and breathless pursuit of profit as something that denigrates man. The individualism of the romanticist is ethical individualism. There should be no place in society for a common moral code authorized by some higher authority. The romanticists countered the hypocritical morals of bourgeois society with the conscience of the individual, with the transcendentalist idea of an innate sense of justice which should be the highest criterion and law of human existence.

p The natural man is the ideal of the romantic Utopian. At first glance he appears as the "noble savage" like Melville’s Typee, living on the fruits of the earth, free of the cares burdening the civilized man and of property which is virtually his raison d’etre. But a closer scrutiny of the romantic works shows that the "natural man" is simply a man living a natural life, whether he is a savage or civilized. The only reason why Melville is looking for this man in the Marquesas and Thoreau and especially Emerson, in the Orient  [86•1  and not in America is that they are convinced that this man does not and, given the then social conditions, simply cannot exist in America. To become a natural man, one had to break with society— organizationally (like Thoreau and the inhabitants of Brook Farm) or spiritually (like Emerson and Margaret Fuller) and to establish, or rather restore, unity with nature (in Emerson’s  [86•2  words, “harmony” of man and nature), a most important element of the romantic Utopia.

87

p The romanticist sees nature as the only true source of moral purity, wisdom and power, and so in his Utopia man’s relations with nature are colored neither by "practical expediency" which places man above nature nor by "advances of civilization" which place him outside nature. Technology as such does not enslave man; it subjugates him only when it divorces him from nature. Reason as such is not a repressive force either as long as it does not make man blind to the life of nature, to its shapes and colors, and therefore, blind to his own life. And so the romantic utopia of the 19th century neither denounces nor extolls technology and reason: the railroad as such is not bad and could be a blessing—had it not been built on human bones. Reason could also benefit man had it served the cause of enlightenment and not petty everyday cares enslaving man and had it not turned into a tool for attaining mercenary goals. Consequently, the romantic Utopia is not the kingdom of reason, the way it was with the Enlighteners. But neither is it the kingdom of “pure” nature; it is rather the realm of universal harmony everyone needs to make his happiness complete.

p The romanticist rejects the real world of American bourgeois democracy, but this does not prevent him from seeing himself as a democrat and his utopia, as the world of true democracy. However, this is in no way the democracy of the politician or businessman. "When I ... speak of the democratic element," Emerson explains, "I do not mean that ill thing, vain and loud, which writes lying newspapers, spouts at caucuses, and sells its lies for gold; but that spirit of love, for the general good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the true democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must fall, being wholly commercial." He adds that "the root and seed of democracy is the doctrine. Judge for yourself. Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of the doctrine, where it has any effect (which is rare), to insulate the partisan, to make each man a state. At the same time it replaces the dead with a living check in a true, delicate reverence for superior, congenial minds."  [87•1  Thus the ideal of the romantic Utopian is ethical democracy having nothing in common with the democratic political process although undoubtedly having a 88 profound social content.

p It is natural that the romanticist treats the state with suspicion and mistrust. Although in principle he does not reject it as an institution, he would prefer a state which would govern to such a tiny degree and be so small in its institutions that it could hardly be noticed. Says Thoreau: "I heartily accept the motto,—’That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—’That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”  [88•1  The conclusion essentially echoes Emerson’s: that government is best which enables everyone to be his own government. It follows that the ideal of the romantic Utopian is a nonpolitical (depoliticized) society in which there is neither the state nor parties nor classes nor power struggle—a society ruled by custom, where one’s own conscience is the highest authority.

p The political problems which the Utopian of a farmers’ America or the socialist Utopian seeks to solve do not exist for the romanticist; nor do economic puzzles. Tax reforms, interest rates, financing of public works, nationalization of land, rationalization of the economy and so on and so forth —everything Henry George, Edward Bellamy and scores of other Utopians racked their brains to solve is solved by the romanticist as easily as Thoreau solved the tax problem: he refused to pay the tax. True, the romanticist discusses labor at length, and labor—free labor, of course—features prominently in his Utopia. But to him, labor is not vigorous activity aimed at transforming the natural and social fabric but rather a mystery, a religious rite. "While our enterprise lay all in theory," says a protagonist of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, "we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom.”  [88•2 

89

p To us it is clear that the way suggested by the romanticist is no solution, that it is simply impossible to ignore economic problems. But the secret of Utopia is that unlike the realist, the Utopian does not at all have to answer all the questions, let alone answer them rationally. The meaning of a Utopia may be to try and make unnecessary what is inevitable in real life, so as to imagine what life could be like if built to a “nonclassical” blueprint. In the context of American civilization, this task was tackled above all by romantic Utopians.

p The romantic Utopian tradition which assumed its definite shape during the first half of the 19th century has always remained a living source of American culture and national social awareness. The 1960s highlighted the surprisingly topical nature of many of the ideas and ideals put forward by Thoreau (and consequently, the classic American Romantic Movement as a whole, for Thoreau’s Utopia is both the result and an encyclopedia of the romantic quest and discovery in the social field of human relations). But even prior to the 1960s the ideals of Cooper, Melville, Thoreau and Emerson had led a covert life in American Utopian fiction and Utopian practice. “Covert” we say meaning that these ideals underwent a transformation. First of all, romantic ideals underlay the principles which guided the life of many Utopian communities of the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Secondly, these ideals were echoed-true, often not only weakly but also unfaithfully— in adventure stories and new romantic Utopias which appeared from time to time on the American literary scene, for example, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon or Austin Wright’s Islandia. Finally, Utopian romantic ideals (at least some of them) exerted considerable pressure on the projects which developed throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, within the mainstreams of other Utopian traditions, including the socialist tradition.

After the Civil War the romantic Utopian tradition never rose to its erstwhile heights. That was partly because the social processes that occurred in America in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries developed in direct contradiction to the romantic ideals but did not yet (at that time) go as far as to provoke, as a reaction, a powerful and vigorously creative Utopian upsurge (signs of this upsurge were clearly in evidence in the 1950s).

90 And part of the reason was that the social ideals of romantic Utopia of the first half of the 19th century were so highly transcendental and so far from the actual social reality that to this day they remain unrealized and inexhaustible (hence the topicality of Thoreau’s ideas). At best, they could be reproduced, but not surpassed.