Utopian and Scientific

Utopian and Scientific

Mathieu Briancourt, “The Organization of Labor & Association” (1846)

March 22, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Many good minds have long been persuaded that on the present generation must devolve the task of solving the formidable problem of the organization of labor, under penalty of being visited by a social revolution, the terrible consequences of which are incalculable. This belief gains ground every moment, and already this question of life and death for civilization is placed among the orders of the day by the most valuable organs of publication. […]

Utopian and Scientific

Short Sequels to “Looking Backward”

February 23, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

With nerves unstrung by that horrent nightmare, which had replunged me into the cruel vortex of nineteenth century antagonism and brutality, I cast around for some method of restoring my usual equanimity. An excursion into the country would, it appeared to me, serve the double purpose of acting as a nervous sedative, and of enabling me to realize something of the conditions of rural life in this year 2000 A. D. […]

Utopian and Scientific

Paul Brown, “Twelve Months in New Harmony” (1827)

February 3, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

For several years I had been addicted to the contemplation of a new social order, in which all property should be held in common stock, being fully persuaded that this was the only equitable mode of subsisting of mankind in a state of society. I was driven to meditate on this subject by my suffering from the inadequacy of the existing institutions to extend justice to the poor, and the odious grinding influence of individual wealth and unequal usurped power, which in several instances had borne grievously afflictively upon me. I became acquainted with several persons in New-York City and in the state of Ohio, who were in the same train of speculation. […]

Utopian and Scientific

“Gray Light”—Paul Brown in the New Harmony Gazette (1825–1827)

February 3, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

The inception and first instance of any mode, when not immediately perceived, is not an object of intuition or demonstrative knowledge. Such as that of the commencing of a customary way of subsisting, among the individuals of a race of animals with whatever degree of intelligence endued, must be abstracted to the most general sense, before it can be an object of assurance. To go to particulars, as of time, words, &c., is to carry the subject into the province of fiction. If we take into our purport the ideas of the names or shapes of persons,—the place where and the time when, i. e. the number of revolutions of the earth since, such a circumstance took place, as the herding together of several individuals of the human species, or the consociating of two individuals of that species, we cannot make the proposition an object of assurance, by the scale of a dialectic process. True logic excludes sophistry. […]