A thoughtful, exploratory, if somewhat rosy study of America's
utopian communities which compares 19th century experiments
(Oneida, The Shakers, New Harmony, Brook Farm, Zoar, etc.) with
today's hippie-ish counterculture communes. Kanter (Brandeis -
Sociology) finds great variety in their organization and structure
- how work is allotted and shared, property arrangements, internal
self-government, housing, dress, child-rearing and sexual
practices. But she is most interested in the several "commitment
mechanisms" which guard against centrifugal tendencies and group
disintegration. These include shared ideologies or religious
creeds, symbols and ceremonies that bind, and strict regulation of
outside contacts. Acknowledging the ephemeral nature of most
communes Kanter searches for the distinguishing characteristics of
those which lasted for many years. Her conclusions go a long way
toward extinguishing the popular conception of these communities as
hedonistic enclaves of drugs and free love; the most successful
groups were also the most highly organized, institutionally
comprehensive, and ideologically monolithic. The anarchistic
"do-your-own-thing" impulse has generally proved fatal - survival
appears to require a high degree of austerity, renunciation, hard
work and especially "mortification" - i.e., diminution of one's
sense of a "private, differentiated, autonomous, identity." Such a
finding raises some disturbing questions about the authoritarian
implications of these experiments. Kanter, who is warmly optimistic
about the commune's potential to foster self-fulfillment, brotherly
love, individual growth, etc., shies away from that nasty word
"totalitarianism" and doesn't really do justice to critics of
communal life or discuss the ones which degenerated into
dictatorial personality cults or worse. Nonetheless, a substantive
introduction to different ideals (from Jesus to Marx to Skinner)
which have inspired these self-created and self-chosen communities.
(Kirkus Reviews)
What makes some communes work, while others fail? Why is it so
difficult to put utopian ideals into practice? In this exciting
study of the success or failure of nineteenth-century American
Utopias and twentieth-century communes, Rosabeth Moss Kanter
combines the results of her first-hand experiences in a variety of
contemporary groups with her thorough research on earlier Utopian
communities. Convinced that the Utopias of the past offer important
models for social organization today, the author also stresses the
need for a historical perspective in viewing contemporary
movements. Kanter analyzes the ideas and values expressed and
developed in communal living, she explores the methods of
organization that led to commitment and success or failure in the
nineteenth-century, and she deals with the dilemmas and problems
that contemporary communities present. The final chapters of this
brilliant study, a discussion of contemporary communes, allows the
reader to see the similarities as well as the differences between
nineteenth and twentieth-century communities.
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