The Seeds of Their Own Destruction: Lessons from Utopian Experiments in Nineteenth-Century America, Part 1

Abstract

Nineteenth-century America provided an unusually fertile ground for economic and social experimentation. The combination of young nation's commercial and religious freedom and its expansive frontier enabled hundreds of social entrepreneurs to attempt utopian societies and--according to their ambitions--a template for changing the world. None of them succeeded, but their parallel challenges provide clear lessons from their failures. This paper focuses on the some of the best organized and longest-lived experiments, each starting with the compelling vision promoted by the community's founder, tracing the problems that plagued their community as it grew, and how their responses to those responses led to further problems in a cycle that eventually undid their societies. We follow up those examples with a discussion how progress was ultimately achieved in the larger societies that these experimental communities had inhabited, including how the lack of ideological constraints enabled them to succeed where the utopians had failed. The overall paper is developed in three parts: Part 1: The Other American Dream Part 2: This Company Town Will Be Wonderful Part 3: Intelligent Design vs. Evolution of Societies The present submission is Part 1, describing the rise and fall of Hopedale, Oneida, and Amana as socialistic communities, and their respective revivals as successful for-profit corporations. We describe the fundamental challenges to societal viability that they all faced, including the incentive problem, the public choice problem, and the knowledge problem.