paradise now the story of american utopianism

“Uncommonly smart and beautifully written. Their stories remain an inspiration for everyone who seeks to build a better world, for all who ask, What should the future look like? Their most galvanizing ideas, however, lived on, and their audacity has influenced countless political movements since. Over time, these movements fell apart, and the national mood that had inspired them was drowned out by the dream of westward expansion and the waking nightmare of the Civil War.

And in New York’s Oneida Community, a brilliant Vermonter named John Humphrey Noyes set about creating a new society in which the human spirit could finally be perfected in the image of God. Meanwhile, the French radical Étienne Cabet sailed to Texas with hopes of establishing a communist paradise dedicated to ideals that would be echoed in the next century. A decade later, followers of the French visionary Charles Fourier blanketed America with colonies devoted to inaugurating a new millennium of pleasure and fraternity.

Even as the society she founded spread across the United States, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen came to the Indiana frontier to build an egalitarian, rationalist utopia he called the New Moral World. Here is Mother Ann Lee, the prophet of the Shakers, who grew up in newly industrialized Manchester, England-and would come to build a quiet but fierce religious tradition on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

In Paradise Now, Chris Jennings tells the story of five interrelated utopian movements, revealing their relevance both to their time and to our own. To our eyes, the utopian communities that took root in America in the nineteenth century may seem ambitious to the point of delusion, but they attracted members willing to dedicate their lives to creating a new social order and to asking the bold question What should the future look like? In the wake of the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism, a generation of dreamers took it upon themselves to confront the messiness and injustice of a rapidly changing world. Ellis, and Tony Horwitz comes a lively, thought-provoking intellectual history of the golden age of American utopianism-and the bold, revolutionary, and eccentric visions for the future put forward by five of history’s most influential utopian movements.

Paradise now the story of american utopianism