Who Were the Utopian Socialists? Patterns of Membership in American Fourierist Communities

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON HAS NOTED that although studies of Utopian thought abound, "the roots, dynamics, and composition of pre-Marxian socialist movements are only vaguely understood." 1 Johnson was referring to Europe, but the same point could be made for the United States, where in the four decades before the Civil War the Utopian socialist theories of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and (among immigrants) Etienne Cabet inspired dozens of communal experiments.Whether at New Harmony, the North American Phalanx, or Icaria, the Utopian socialists shared a distinctive set of assumptions and beliefs.Unlike religious communal sects such as the Shakers and Mormons, these secular communitarians blamed social problems on the emergence of industrial capitalism and championed a "social science" which, they claimed, would unite conflicting classes and interests voluntarily in model cooperative communities.From the beginning their unique blend of anticapitalism and secular millennialism, their literature of social protest and their communal experiments attracted the attention of reformers and radicals; today they continue to interest historians and sociologists.In most writings about the secular communitarians there are generalizations concerning the social composition of the movement, the stimuli that brought individuals into it, and the causes of its demise.With few exceptions, however, these interpretations are supported by no systematic study of those who joined the communities, their ethnic, occupational, and religious backgrounds, and how these affiliations may relate to factors that pushed adherents toward Utopian socialism or eventually pulled them away from it.