Which nineteenth century utopian community was known for its practice of complex marriage as well as divorce and remarriage?

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Donald E. Pitzer, ed. America's Communal Utopias.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xxi + 537 pp. $25.00.

Is community still possible in the modern world? For more than two centuries, America's communal utopias have challenged the assumptions of market society, and market society has struck back by undermining or transforming most of them. If the political economy of corporate capitalism dilutes, co-opts, or destroys community, while alternative, intentional communities die of the "double jeopardy" theorized by Donald Pitzer (below), are we destined for Hobbes's war of all against all? Is Gemeinschaft inevitably doomed by Gesellschaft? If not, then what communitarian alternatives remain? And can such viable alternatives be informed by the "lessons" of communal utopias?

In America's Communal Utopias, Donald Pitzer has performed yet another valuable service to communal studies. In addition to his more than two decades of leadership in the Communal Studies Association and the Center for Communal Studies, he has given us a long-awaited book that seeks to accomplish two main goals: to tell the story of America's historic communal utopias and to frame that story within his theory of developmental communalism. Never before has such a distinguished group of scholars attempted such a comprehensive look at communal utopias within a single theoretical framework.

Developmental communalism views communal ownership and living as a phase of a much longer developmental process, often originating in a spiritual or political movement, then utilizing communal forms for a period of time, and finally converting to private ownership and life styles when communalism no longer seems best to the members. This approach distances itself from Rosabeth Moss Kanter's (1972) formerly prevailing view of intentional communities as "successes" if they lasted 25 years or longer and "failures" if they did not. Both John Hall (1978) and Jon Wagner (1985) have insightfully criticized Kanter's success-failure approach, but no clear alternative had captured much attention until Pitzer went public with his own theory in 1988.

According to the double-jeopardy hypothesis of developmental communalism, communes are damned if they stick to communalism and damned if they do not: "If movements that found [communes] eventually make needed adjustments away from communal living, the communes dissolve. If movements embrace communal living as a `permanent' structure or tenet of faith, the resulting rigidity of discipline may cause the stagnation or death of the movements themselves and, thus, their communal utopias" (xviii). Although long-lasting Hutterite communalism seems to be at least a partial exception to this rule, hundreds of other communities fit one or the other of Pitzer's two double-bind alternatives.

How much of America's Communal Utopias is in the stories and how much in the theory? In the Foreword, Paul Boyer gives us his opinion. He notes that in 1965 Frank Manuel wrote that the "full collective story" of Western utopian communities had "not yet been told, despite the availability of individual accounts" (xi). Boyer goes on to say that "the comprehensive work that [Manuel] envisioned remains unwritten" but that this book has "taken a major...

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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Penn State University Press

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A53280217