Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side.

By Adam Gopnik @ NewYorker.com, for July 30 print issue, available online now (as is a podcast version)

Michael Robertson’s “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson’s evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren’t likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember [....]

[....] What in the world made “Looking Backward” appealing not only to men of letters like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain but to so many farmers and workers that Bellamy was eventually made a delegate of a populist party? Part of the appeal, Robertson persuasively argues, had something to do with post-Civil War nostalgia for the purity of wartime regimentation. In a time of confused plutocracy, everyone wanted a variant of what William James later called “the moral equivalent of war.”

But pursuing the moral equivalent of war always gives you the warrior’s idea of morality. As Bellamy’s book progresses, power, brutality, and the capacity to dominate become all that matters. Rules are made and harshly enforced. Robertson chides Bellamy for being inconsistently feminist, which is true, but what is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem. It’s the same phenomenon that we find in the Athenian intellectual’s idealization of Sparta: intellectuals always dream of a closed society even though they themselves can exist only in an open one [....]