Review: City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning, by Michael J. Lewis

Abstract

Michael J. Lewis City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016, 254 pp., 75 color and 75 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780691171814 The separatists of Michael J. Lewis's subtitle are those utopianists who saw “no hope for reforming a wicked world” and so chose to withdraw from it (10). Unlike adherents of the main strand of utopian thought, which “aspires to perfect the world,” Lewis's protagonists accepted that the world “cannot be made perfect” and established sanctuaries from it (10), the “cities of refuge” of his title. There is, Lewis writes, a “distinct and unbroken intellectual tradition” of such separatist sanctuaries; the “living continuity of that tradition” is his principal theme (11). The book is rather narrowly focused on a “German intellectual-theological tradition” that produced settlements with a “formal geometric unity” (16). The Ephrata Cloister and the Shakers, for example, are excluded because their settlements lack this geometric unity. Also excluded are utopian communities such as the Oneida Perfectionists and the North American Phalanx, which Lewis apparently considers to be in the mainstream of utopian rather than separatist thought. Within the narrow tradition he defines, Lewis finds rich ground. The book is …