Imagining Equality in a Gilded Age: Edward Bellamy’s Radical Utopian Critique of Progressivism

Abstract

AbstractEquality (1897), Edward Bellamy’s sequel to his bestseller Looking Backward (1888), has received significantly less critical attention than its predecessor has, with scholars often dismissing it as a minor extension or revision of the author’s utopian vision. Situating Bellamy’s sequel alongside his growing disenchantment with the pace of Progressive reform, this essay argues that Equality radically reframes Bellamy’s utopian project as an extended critique of the economic inequalities of capitalism and the putatively democratic processes that sustain those inequalities. Recovering the full extent of Bellamy’s radicalism during the Gilded Age and the rise of Progressivism offers twenty-first-century readers the opportunity to rethink the range of possible responses to present-day economic inequality.