I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal… — Christine Jennings Copy Share
There are two instances I studied in which a community moved, amazingly, into an preexisting village built by other, earlier communalists. The Rappites were a German millenarian sect I mostly leave out of the story, even though they are fascinating, because they're focused on salvation and retreating from the world, as opposed to transforming it, like the other groups I… — Christine Jennings Copy Share
The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same.… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
These weren't college kids on acid. They were preachers, and bankers, and farmers, and the salt of American society subscribing to ideas that now… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there's gold in the hills.' The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it's not just the war that ends… — Christine Jennings Copy Share
But if you'd only ever lived in small wooden house in the middle of wilderness, it sounded much better. Especially because it provided intense… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to social progress. Progress is work. People need to build things and sacrifice and have a harder life for things to get better. On its own, I don't think even the most brilliant critique stimulates that kind of effort… — Christine Jennings Copy Share
The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was… — Christine Jennings Copy Share Image
They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida probably had far greater practical equality than what… — Christine Jennings Copy Share
![“Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot…” quote by Christine Jennings](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/ac0/christine-jennings-20527_book_utopian-fiction-is-really-boring-i-had-t_68118.jpg)
