There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.

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 write about.

Margaret Fuller was already a celebrity, travelling around the world. Emerson, who was the axis around which that whole community turned, just didn't like Fourier's ideas very much. He thought it was all too rigid and programmatic. He said, "Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely life." He thought it was an inhumane system - the day is scheduled too precisely. He didn't think it would work, and he was right.

So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.

don't think I should be in the business of making big pronouncements about where we are now, but I would say that dissatisfaction is as acute now as it was then. What's different, and what I think we can learn from these people, despite their abundant folly, is that we're not using the future as the organizing principle for our critique.

That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and the least religious people of their time all drawn to very similar visions of utopia?

The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.