Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming

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.

The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne [who was briefly a resident] left for reasons I'm sure make sense to you; he couldn't get enough writing done in a house full of people playing music, and arguing. It was too busy.

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.

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.

The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same. Through slightly different interpretations, they all think the same thing is going to happen, that the Earth is going to be perfected and that humans are going to do the work of perfecting it.

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.