Review of The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias

It is good news for communal studies when a major publisher like Macmillan (Palgrave Macmillan is the company's academic imprint) decides to publish a survey of American utopianism and communitarianism.Unfortunately, however, this book does not live up to its promise.Friesen and Friesen have started with a good and ambitious concept: provide an overview of utopian ideas and North American communal experiments in a single volume.They begin with a chapter on the concept of utopia and another on the human need for utopia.Then comes a chapter on noncommunal lived utopian experiments, including the Amish and the Old Believers (Russian Orthodox dissenters).Next is a chapter on religious communities, followed by one on "Economic-Oriented Communes."Then the Harmony Society gets a chapter of its own, followed by a chapter on "Unorthodox Communes" (largely a discussion of Ephrata and the Oneida Community).A chapter on twentieth-century communes presents such communities as the Bruderhof, the Farm (Tennessee), and the Woman's Commonwealth.Finally there is a chapter on the Hutterites and a wrap-up chapter that tries to identify the elements of communal effectiveness.The book has several strengths: first, with the Palgrave imprimatur right in the title, it will expose the field of communal studies to a wide public.Second, the extensive treatment of Canadian communities makes this volume stand out from other surveys.Third, its mix of communal utopians, noncommunal utopians, and utopian ideas is innovative.Fourth, the work has some excellent yarns that will be new to most communal studies scholars, such as the stories of disaster and mendacity among the Barr Colonists (pp.47ff.).