Natural Limits on the Size and Duration of Utopian Communities

The literature on Utopian communities seems to be largely descriptive and historical.Neal's The Kentucky Shakers is a good recent example. 1 This tendency may be combined with an explanation of why a particular community failed.Bestor's Backwoods Utopias 2 and Holloway's Heavens on Earth 3 are instances.Even Kanter's Commitment and Community, although theoretical in aim, is also fundamentally of this kind, its analysis hinging on an initial classification of American Utopian communities as being either successful or unsuccessful, depending on whether they lasted 25 years or more.4 In the literature as a whole, failure of the communities to survive and to grow is attributed to a variety of causes: debt, fire, rocky land, crackpot or corrupt leaders, and community hostility, among other reasons.The implication is that Utopia, if it is worth anything, should last longer, should attract more than a handful of people-and would do so more often if it were done right, as the "successful" communities show.Kanter studied 30 Utopian communities established in America in the period 1780-1860 (of a total of 91 established).She found 9 were "successful" and 21 were "unsuccessful" in her sample of the James Latimore teaches at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and is the author of Weeding Out the Target Population. 1. Julia Neal, The Kentucky Shakers (Lexington: