1/3/2024 0 Comments Utopian society![]() ![]() The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing established multiple communities devoted to living a simple life and developing one’s talents through hard work. One of the longest-lasting Utopian traditions was the Shaker community. By 1847, the experiment in communal living was over, and the farm closed down. The final factor in its ending was when part of the farm caught fire the community was unable to rebuild because the buildings were uninsured. Like many other Utopian communities, the experiment at Brook Farm came to an end in part because it had little to no real effect on the outside world. However, the general public paid little attention to both the journal and the farm itself. They wrote and published a journal to promote and promulgate their views. By 1844, community members had formally adopted a socialist societal model. Brook Farm was to serve as an example in the perfection of living for the rest of the world. The community supported itself not only through farming, but also selling handmade goods and charging admission to the farm to curious visitors they also earned money through the tuition raised by the excellent school run on the farm by Ripley. Each member of the community was encouraged to work at the farming tasks that they liked best every member was paid the same wage, including women. He and his followers established Brook Farm, where intellectuals pursued both hard physical and mental work as a way of life. In 1840, leading transcendentalist George Ripley of Boston announced his intention of creating a place based on communal living and transcendental values. In some cases, the transcendental and Utopian movements overlapped. Many collapsed after years or even months however, taken together, Utopianism was a significant movement that introduced new ideas to American society. ![]() Most of the communities stressed hard work and commitment to community ideals as a means of achieving this perfected new society. Utopian movements withdrew from the larger society and focused their efforts on the creation of a perfected new social order, not a reformed older one. Many focused on religion as the center of its community and activities others were secular in nature. Over the course of the century, some 100 Utopian communities were founded. Other groups held similar beliefs to the transcendentalists and focused their efforts on establishing ideal communities that would work to perfect the human experience in a social Utopia. In Walden, or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau wrote of his experiences supporting himself living on Walden Pond, Massachusetts he begins his narrative by declaring, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of live, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived.” In his address “The American Scholar,” fellow Massachusetts resident Ralph Waldo Emerson similarly wrote that “We will walk on our own feet we will work with our own hands we will speak our own minds…A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” Many transcendentalists, including Emerson and Thoreau, were also reformers who worked in the abolitionist and women’s rights causes. Much of their literature reflected transcendental beliefs, praising Nature, a simple life, and self-reliance. Many important American transcendentalists were writers who set about establishing an “American literary independence,” producing a flowering of literature. They sought to “transcend” the limits of reason and intellect and allow the soul to attain a relationship, a mystical oneness, with the universe. They emphasized the dignity of the individual and exalted American ideals of freedom, optimism, and self-reliance. ![]() The transcendentalists were an intellectual community mostly centered in New England. ![]()
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