The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.

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 the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.

Some people just think utopians are idiots who are imagining rivers of candy and not really engaging with the world's ills, and sometimes that's surely the case, but I think that imagining the perfected society is a way of expressing your disgust with the current state of affairs.

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 were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.

Utopians don't say, 'The world's corrupt, women make less money, people of color are oppressed at every turn.' You don't list the problems of the world; you describe a world in which those things aren't the case. The critique is implicit and as a result it's kind of a positive critique. You're not listing what's bad, but rather what would be good - you're oriented toward this positive vision.

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 But they're fascinating to me as historical documents.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 about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.

The secular utopians basically said the exact same thing, they just took the Bible out of the equation. The religious and the secular groups recognized each other as fellow travellers. They exchanged newsletters and asked each other questions like, "What's a good soup pot to use if you're making dinner for 800 people?" They had these practical connections.