A Modern Utopia

"In Wells’s A Modern Utopia , like in More’s Utopia , it is not clear whether the author is being straight. Reading Wells is particularly interesting because he drew his observations about utopias from Oneida. He visited the community in the early twentieth century and was disappointed by what they had become. He admired that they were trying to establish more just relationships between labor and capital; but he saw that they did not have any ambitions to expand this model outward. So he found, in Oneida, a parochial and narrow vision of how to revolutionize the world. What is interesting about A Modern Utopia is something the Oneida community had – a distrust of liberal individualism. They shared the idea that the state had to step in to create a society with equal access to education and to the material means of existence; that, otherwise, liberal individualism’s emphasis on competition among people and personal privacy would undermine the common good. That quote is from an article that Wells wrote about his visit to Oneida. What PB Noyes tried to do is secularize his father’s idea of egalitarianism. John Humphrey Noyes had the idea that we were all equal members of Christ’s body. PB Noyes’s generation was basically atheist. What energized them then was to take the labor-capital divide, which was so bitter in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, and to make it better. They wanted to create, between the workingman and management, a brotherhood rather than an antagonism."