The Consequences: Individualism Triumphant. Or not.
The Utopian Impulse in American History.
The Golden Age of Utopianism, 1820’s to 1850’s.
In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Part III.
Postscript Post Election 2024: What do we do now?
Burton Weltman
“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution.
You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Ursula K. Le Guin.
Postscript Post Election 2024. Ahab is taking over the ship.
I wrote this essay during October, 2024 in the midst of a bitter presidential campaign between a right-wing demagogue Donald Trump and a moderate liberal Kamala Harris. The election occurred just as I finished the essay and the demagogue won. I think that his victory exemplifies the moral of the story in this essay, which is the need for liberals to develop utopian thinking to counteract the dystopian theory and practice of demagogues like Trump.
As I discuss in the essay, when a political campaign is run on ideological grounds in this country, the right-wing usually wins. When a campaign is based on competing programs, the liberal usually wins. Liberals have programs that most people like. But they don’t have an ideology or a vision that people can inhabit. The right-wing has a vision. It is based on an individualist ideology that has been inculcated into most Americans so that they respond in knee-jerk fashion to its evocation. It’s a dystopian vision based on myths and lies, but it has power.
In the recent election, Trump and his allies promoted a false dystopian vision of America society, and then spewed endless lies and misinformation in support of their vision so that it was impossible for Harris or the media to keep up with correcting the falsehoods. And even when the lies were exposed, the demagogue kept on repeating them. In this way, he sold his vision.
Harris ran a campaign based on a reasonable picture of American society while proposing specific programs to deal with social problems. But she offered no ideal of what the United States should be. No utopia. Although most people agreed with her specific proposals, her programs did not cohere in a vision in which people could imaginatively see themselves. Her proposals got lost in the persiflage of her demagogic adversary. And, so she lost. You can point to many reasons why Harris lost and, as I type this, the finger pointing is just getting under way. But I think the absence of an overall vision was one of the reasons, and it is a problem that has dogged liberals for many years.
Trump is at this point in control of the federal government for the next several years, and those of us who are politically interested will likely have to focus on local issues. But that should not stop us from thinking in broader terms and developing a vision to go with our programs. Thinking globally, acting locally, as the saying goes. Although utopian thinking is frequently disparaged as a silly and even harmful exercise in futility, I think it is a necessity which is the point of this essay.
BW 11/24
A Fish Story and More.
A couple of merchants outfit a ship, hire a crew to man it and a captain to manage it. All of them – merchants, sailors and captain – have goals for the ship’s voyage. The merchants hope to make a profit from the voyage, some of which they will share with the captain and the crew, and the rest they will invest in outfitting the ship for another in a hoped-for succession of voyages.
The crewmen, as their goal, hope to survive what is expected to be a dangerous voyage, working together as a community to make it succeed, then collecting their shares of the profits and spending them before signing up for another voyage. The goals of the merchants and the sailors are, thus, somewhat different in scope but congruent in content. They all want a safe and profitable voyage.
The captain, however, has a private goal for the voyage that does not fit with the goals of the merchants and the sailors, a personal goal that he never shares with the merchants and does not disclose to the crew until they are well on their way. The captain’s pursuit of his personal goal results in the sinking of the ship and the deaths of himself and all but one member of the crew.
It is a tragic story of a selfish person wreaking havoc on all those around him because he insists on having his own way come hell or high water, or both hell and high water in this case. Self-centered people wrecking things for others is an all-too-common common theme in literature and history, which are full of such people right up to the present day. I am, for example, writing this essay in late October, 2024. We are currently coming to the end of a bitter presidential campaign in the United States in which one of the candidates is a selfish, self-centered, megalomaniacal demagogue who is threatening to wreck everything for everyone if he wins, or if he doesn’t.
The tragedy described above is an outline of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. First published in 1851, Moby Dick is often considered the greatest American novel. It is a tale of deadly doings on the whaling ship Pequod. On a voyage whose purpose is supposed to be the killing of whales, the tables are turned when the whale Moby Dick destroys the ship, killing all but one member of the crew. It is a disaster precipitated by Captain Ahab’s megalomaniacal pursuit of vengeance against Moby Dick and his ability to mesmerize the crew into joining him in his mad pursuit. In so doing, the crew abandon their duty to the ship’s owners to hunt whales and their duty to themselves to stay safe.
What to make of this story? On one level, Moby Dick is a big fish story, a tale of daring-do like others Melville had previously written. But, unlike the others, this one is intermixed with philosophical and scientific speculations, much deeper than a mere fish yarn. It can be likened to a combination of Richard Henry Dana’s sea tales and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy, an adventure story joined with metaphysical musings. And this is the way the novel is usually read.
But I think there is more to the story. I think it also deals with ideological issues of importance in Melville’s day and in ours too. Told in a first-person narrative by Ishmael, the survivor of the Pequod’s destruction, the book functions as a voyage of ethical and intellectual discovery for the narrator, and maybe for the author Melville as well, whose opinions of whalers and whales dramatically change in the course of the telling of his tale.
Ethical issues permeate the story and it can be seen as a moral allegory. Questions of who and what is good and bad underlie the book’s various episodes and link what can be seen as the two main plotlines in the book. One plotline focuses on the crew of the Pequod, the whalers. The other focuses on the whales that they are hunting. The two plotlines track the moral trajectories of the whalers and the whales, describing a moral ascent of the whales during the course of the book and a moral descent of the whalers.
Beginning as a warm celebration of hearty sailors and adventurous whaling, the book’s characterization of the whalers becomes increasingly harsh and even bestial as they first slaughter whales and then assent to Ahab’s barbaric obsession with killing Moby Dick. The whales, in turn, are at first rendered in coldly taxonomic and economic terms. In what are often criticized as the boring whale chapters of the book, the whales are initially described as dumb fish-like creatures who make a fit crop for human harvesting. Most of the opening whale sections are boring, maybe even intentionally so, but they play an important role in the story.
Because as the story proceeds, the whales are depicted in increasingly sympathetic and humanized terms, while the whalers are at the same time being portrayed in increasingly unsympathetic and inhumane terms. Instead of dumb beasts, the whale are portrayed as intelligent beings who peacefully cooperate with each other in organized communities, with parents even sacrificing themselves to protect their young from the whalers’ onslaught. Almost like a utopian cooperative community.
The two trajectories, whale and whaler, crisscross in the middle of the book, with the whales ethically ascending, the whalers morally descending. The whales become sympathetic beings, more empathetic than the humans chasing and killing them. And in the face of Ahab’s single-minded fury and the crew’s intoxication with his malevolence, readers may even come to root for the whales and have mixed feelings about the demise of the Pequod. Mixed feelings that seem to be shared by Ishmael and the author Melville as Ishmael finally finishes his tale.
What seemingly began as merely a big fish adventure story has become a moral allegory about the dangers of demagogues and the susceptibility of people en masse to demagoguery. It is a demagoguery that tends to the inhumanity of humanity and the decivilizing of civilization. Melville has challenged us with a moral allegory, and more.
The story is also a social allegory. And it is a reflection of the debate in the first half of the nineteenth century between proponents of mercantilism, socialism and individualism. Melville’s whaling ship is a miniature society, and the story of that society revolves around what can be characterized as the conflicting views of mercantilists, socialists and individualists. The mercantilist view is represented by the ship’s owners. They personify a propertied but paternalistic elite whose goal is for sailors and owners alike to make a profit on the voyage, and then keep their joint enterprise going in future voyages.
The second view is represented by the cooperative community of sailors on the Pequod whose goals are to work together, and keep the whaling ship afloat to the end of its voyage so that they can collect and spend their wages. The third is the view of the individualistic Captain Ahab who thinks and acts as though he is a world unto himself and places the satisfaction of his personal desires above his duties to the ship’s owners and the community of sailors on the ship.
The novel ends with the destruction of the society represented by the ship, a disaster that is brought about by the selfish, self-centered actions of the individualistic captain. The story can be seen as a warning from Melville as to what he saw happening in the society around him.
Mercantilism, Socialism, Individualism: The Debate.
Nineteenth century social, economic and political debate in the United States revolved largely around three utopian ideals that evolved into political ideologies. Mercantilism, socialism and individualism began as intellectual ideals, morphed into political arguments, succeeded and failed in part as social realities, and left us with a legacy with which we are still trying to cope.
Mercantilism was the predominant form of government during the colonial period up through the 1820’s. Mercantilist republicans promoted a paternalistic government that was controlled by a meritocratic elite whose ascendance was accepted by the general public. It promised good government by qualified leaders who were well-educated and invariably from the upper classes, and who worked in the public interest.
Mercantilism promoted government regulation of the economy toward creating a commonwealth, that is, a society in which wealth was generated for the common good. The assumption of the mercantilist Founders of the United States was that if only the interference of the British government in American society could be ended, and especially the hamstringing of the American elite, virtue would be unleashed on all sides, the American people would willingly and happily follow their natural leaders, and all would be well in the land. This was a utopian assumption that partly played out in practice, but only partly.
Utopian socialists promoted a cooperative society in which people would work together doing things for the community. Division of labor would be based on people’s qualifications for specific tasks and leadership would democratically fall to those who were most knowledgeable and skillful in regard to a given issue. What we might today call a participatory democracy. The assumption of utopian socialists was that the small communities in which Americans settled were inevitably cooperative, as no one could survive without help from others, and that it was just a small step from a community of cooperative citizens to a cooperative community. This was a utopian assumption that partly played out in practice, but only partly.
Laissez-faire individualists promoted a small-government society in which freedom was the operative term. The assumption was that if everyone did what they wanted, the “hidden hand” of the law of supply and demand would ensure that everybody and everything would work out OK. It would be a society in which the free market would control everything and government’s role was merely to keep the market free. This was a utopian assumption that partly worked in economics but not in society more generally.
The debate between proponents of mercantilism socialism and individualism was vigorous. Laissez-faire individualists won the debate and laissez-faire individualism became the predominant view of society and law in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. As the story is usually told in conventional histories, this was an inevitable development and the only logical way for the country to go.
Most history books treat laissez-faire capitalism and individualism as the American Way and the way the country was destined to go from the start. And, looking backward at the history of the nineteenth century, we can see a chain of seeming causation with one thing leading to another, so that we can easily conclude that since everything is connected, what happened had to happen. But that just isn’t so. Like much conventional history, it is an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that because event X followed event Y, event X must have caused event Y,
History is not just a chain of causation. It is a function of choice and chance as well as causation. If you were to put yourself in the place of people in the nineteenth century, looking at what was most prominently happening around you, and surveying the options that you and others had, I think you would come to the conclusion that there was nothing inevitable about the development of laissez-faire capitalist individualism. People’s choices, some wise and good, others stupid and wicked, combined with chance circumstances, some fortuitous, others unfortunate, played at least as much of a role in the rise of individualist as causation.
The Decline of Mercantilism and Utopian Socialism.
Mercantilist theories had been fairly successfully practiced in most of colonial British America since the early 1600’s. Following independence from Britain, mercantilism continued as the premise of most local, state and federal governments in the United States until the mid-1820’s. So long as there was a supply of Revolutionary War leaders to fill the office of the Presidency and other important governmental positions, mercantilism was the basic theory and practice of American government. And in presidential elections from that of George Washington in 1788 to that of John Quincy Adams in 1824, presidents were routinely chosen from among the elite.
But by the 1820’s, the revolutionary generation of men who embodied the meritocratic ideal was passing. And the next generation of elite leaders, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, did not have the same charisma or clout. The demise of mercantilism was presaged by the passing of the Revolutionary leaders who had largely ruled the country for a half-century and who were recognized as republican royalty.[1]
At the same time, the electorate was also changing. At the time of the Revolution, the right to vote had generally been restricted to people with substantial amounts of property. These were people who seemed willing to support the mercantilist policies and the elite ruling class being promoted by most of the Founders. But by the 1820’s, the United States had become the first country in the world in which the franchise was held by all white men, propertied or not.
This was an increasingly democratic electorate that was increasingly hostile to self-styled ruling elites. Many people, mainly less educated and from less prosperous areas of the country, felt that they were being left out and left behind by an urban, educated elite. They rallied around an anti-urban, anti-intellectual populism that was promoted as being more democratic. It was a development that paved the way for demagogues like Andrew Jackson.
Conventional histories generally hail the Age of Jackson, which began upon Jackson’s election as President in 1828, as a major democratic turn in American history. But I don’t agree. Populist, yes. Democratic, no. Not if you define democracy, as I do, as majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of a minority to become the majority. It is individual liberties and republican institutions, the Separation of Powers in the Constitution plus the Bill of Rights.
Alex de Tocqueville, when he visited America during the Jacksonian era, worried that with little or no respect for established republican institutions, demagogues could transform a democracy into a mobocracy, a majority rule government and society with little room for differences and little regard for the rights of individuals. That is what he feared Jackson represented.
Jacksonianism in the 1820’s, much like Trumpism today, was more demagogic than democratic, filled with hostility to immigrants and suspicion of people’s differences. It was a contradictory call for individualism without individuality. And during the Jacksonian era, the triumph of individualism as a theory became an exercise of conformity in social practice. It is a contradiction that we see today in the hypocrisy of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
Andrew Jackson did not respect republican institutions. He repeatedly disobeyed orders when he was in the army, killing at least one man for personal reasons, insisting against orders on the execution of at least two others, and unilaterally against orders invading and attacking supposed enemies. As President he unconstitutionally refused to implement a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Native Americans, saying that “(Chief Justice) John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Trump, who cites Jackson as his favorite former President, has done the same when he was President and promises more of the same if he is elected again.
Populism in the 1820’s was similar to the situation in America today in which many people, especially older white men, and especially white people from small towns and economically declining areas, resent the equality being asserted by women and people of color and feel that the country has been ruled and ruined by a self-styled highly-educated liberal elite. This resentment opens the door to the sort of racist, sexist, nativist, anti-intellectual demagoguery being promoted by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement to remake America as manly and white. Ostensibly democratic, actually demagogic. Ostensibly utopian, actually dystopian.
Utopian socialism went through a similar rise and decline as mercantilism. Although mercantilism had been the ruling ideology in America since the 1600’s, cooperative communes also had a significant history. Dozens of communes, both religious and secular, had gone into and out of existence, and peaked during the first half of the nineteenth century. While not as successful in practice as mercantilism, the socialist ideal inspired many small experimental communities, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana during the 1820’s. The communal ideal also had many influential supporters, such as the newspaper magnate Horace Greeley. Socialist theory – the word socialism was coined by Robert Owen – was widely popular and quite successful, albeit as a moral force more than as a practical plan for society.
Despite the popularity of socialism in theory and the success of mercantilism in practice, laissez-faire individualism became the controlling ideology in politics and law in the United States. It was not, however, an intellectual victory in which better arguments prevailed over weaker ones. It was an ideological victory that was facilitated by the rise of large-scale corporate businesses and large cities. Mercantilism and utopian socialism were not compatible with big cities and big businesses, and that left the field to laissez-faire individualism. Although conventional histories generally portray these developments as inevitable, they were not. They were a function of choice and chance as well as causation. Things could have been different. And, very soon they were. Because, ironically, the same developments that helped make laissez-faire individualism dominant in theory made it effectively impossible to implement in practice.
The Corporate Revolution: A Frankenstein’s Monster.
The nineteenth century was an age of unprecedented growth of gargantuan businesses and civic enterprises. It produced large-scale farms, factories, and cities that dwarfed any previously in existence. Conventional histories generally treat this development as inevitable, a law of nature that smallness quite naturally grows into largeness. But that was not so. Most of this development was a result of legal changes and, particularly, the enactment of what were called General Incorporation Laws. There was nothing natural or inevitable about these laws. And the resulting growth in the size of businesses and cities was widely regarded at the time as unnatural and even unwelcome.
General Incorporation Laws were arbitrary changes in the law and a sharp break from the ways that business had traditionally been conducted since ancient times. A corporation is an artificial being that in various ways is treated as a person, like a human being. There is nothing natural about that. The key point is that incorporation gives the owners of a business the benefit of limited liability for the debts of the business. Limited liability means that the investors are not liable for the debts of the business beyond what they have invested in it. If the corporation goes bankrupt, the investors are liable to lose only the amount of money they put into the business.
In contrast, the owners of an unincorporated business can be completely liable for the debts of the business. If the business goes bust, all of the owners’ other investments and their personal property can be confiscated to pay the debts of the business. This was the risk that almost all businessmen faced from ancient times to the mid nineteenth century. And it made people cautious about investing in risky businesses. Limited liability dramatically changed that risk factor and it became an enormous advantage to entrepreneurs who wanted to convince people to invest in their businesses.
Previously, going back to the Middle Ages, incorporation had been available only for public works and other projects in the public interest that could not otherwise attract investors. Bridges, roads, canals, and other public works were the primary examples. An owner who wanted to incorporate a business had to get a special charter from the legislature and had to demonstrate that the business served some public interest which was not otherwise being served.
This limited liability afforded corporations was intended as an incentive for rich people to invest in businesses that served the public welfare. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, these public welfare requirements were part of the mercantilist ideal of government control of the economy to serve the public interest. With General Incorporation Laws, government approval and a public purpose were no longer required in order to incorporate and get the benefit of limited liability. Incorporation went from being a very limited exception to being the general rule for businesses. And the General Incorporation Laws were a tremendous blow to the mercantilist regime.
Since almost anyone could incorporate almost anything and get the benefit of limited liability, the laws were politically promoted as an example of economic democracy. They were cited as an instance of laissez-faire individualism that was more democratic than mercantilist methods which ostensibly favored the rich and well-born. An ordinary individual could incorporate his little business without having to get permission from a government bureaucrat who primarily served a well-to-do elite. It was supposed to be a boon to small businessmen.
But this change in the law had the opposite effect. Its primary effect was to enable capitalists to attract rich investors who would put their money into big businesses that could then swamp their small competitors. It was not the case that the big businesses were more efficient than the small businesses. It was their money power that made them formidable. The new incorporation laws, rather than being an encouragement to small businesses and individual enterprises, made possible the rise of corporate behemoths that squelched small enterprises.
The tables were also turned on the relationship between government and business. Mercantilism had been a system of government regulation of business in the public interest, and this had been the purpose of the prior corporation laws. With the rise of big corporations, government became dependent on business rather than vice versa. In turn, with the influence that money can buy in politics, the General Incorporation Laws had the effect of undermining the democratic power of ordinary people.
General Incorporation Laws initiated a corporate revolution that was like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. They were enacted with utopian idealist expectations. Everyman’s business would be a corporation, everyman would be a corporate owner. But they generated dystopian results. Everyman’s businesses were swallowed up by corporate monsters. A revolution gone wrong.
The Debate Derailed.
General Incorporation Laws were revolutionary in their effect on the debate between mercantilists, socialists, and individualists. They took the ground from under the proposals of utopian socialists and mercantilists who assumed that businesses would be of a moderate size that could readily be converted into socialist communities or regulated by government. The decline of mercantilist and socialist ideas was not primarily a result of their inefficacy in theory or in practice. Their decline was largely an unforeseen consequence of the rise of corporations.
Utopian socialism had been premised on the small farming and manufacturing communities which had been ubiquitous among European settlers in early America and in which neighborly cooperation had been necessary and natural. Socialists had repeatedly said that it was a small step from a community of cooperative citizens to a cooperative community. Mercantilism had been similarly premised on small to medium scale enterprises that governments could control.
The rise of corporations led to the development of large farms and large factories which, in turn, meant large cities. Small cooperative participatory democratic communities were increasingly impracticable. Likewise, mercantilist control over behemoth corporations seemed implausible. Mercantilists such as Henry Clay struggled to come up with programs that would deal with the new economic situation, especially in the face of the money power that the new corporations were able to wield.
This turn of events was not inevitable. It was not even logical. Nor even economical. It was politics and not economics that gave rise to big corporations and precipitated the decline of the mercantilist and utopian socialist movements. It was political choices for political purposes, coupled with unforeseen and unintended consequences, that undercut mercantilism and utopian socialism. Ironically, the same circumstances ultimately undermined laissez-faire individualism.
The Golden Age of Free Enterprise Capitalist Individualism that Never Was.
Free enterprise individualism coupled with small government capitalism was a utopian ideal that never matched reality and that triumphed as an ideology in this country just at the moment when the conditions that made it plausible were passing away.
From the early 1600’s through the mid nineteenth century, European settlement in America was mainly on small farms and in small towns. Most European Americans had their own farms and businesses. The pervasiveness of small farms and towns made an ideal of small government free enterprise individualism seem plausible. And there grew up a myth of America as a free enterprise Eden that took hold in the nineteenth century and persists in conventional histories and among political conservatives to the present day. But although it was superficially plausible in theory, small government capitalist individualism was never actually the practice in America.
The myth of a Golden Age of self-sufficient small farms was belied from the start by the pervasive cooperation among farmers and townspeople and by pervasive government actions in support of farmers and small towns. The fact is that American farmers had never been self-sufficient individuals and had always been dependent on each other and on government. Economic development in America had invariably been fostered by government interventions. Farmers and small businessmen would not have survived without the licensing laws, tariffs, monetary subsidies, Homestead Land Acts and other direct supports provided by colonial, state and federal governments.
In addition to these direct supports, state and federal governments built the infrastructure that connected farmers and businessmen to the national and international markets in which they sold their produce and from which they bought manufactured goods. The extensive network of roads, canals, railroads, and ports that were built during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, and that tied farmers to their markets and enabled them to spread out across the interior of the continent, were all built with government money and other government support.
In any case, by the late nineteenth century, small farms began to give way to giant corporate farms that were for the most part owned by absentee investors and that have dominated agriculture from that time to the present day. Small manufacturing firms and commercial enterprises suffered a similar fate. In general, the economic conditions that had made laissez-faire individualism plausible as an ideal in the early to mid-nineteenth century quickly disappeared in the late nineteenth century with the rise of large-scale corporations that came to dominate the economy and, increasingly, politics.[2]
As a consequence of these developments, the United States turned a corner in the mid nineteenth century and moved toward a corporate capitalism in which individuals increasingly became cogs in a giant corporate system. Although small businesses remained a large part of the economy, and still employ about fifty percent of American workers today, the utopian ideal of a society made up solely or even predominantly of self-employed, self-styled individualists became strictly speaking utopian in the sense of being implausible and even impossible.
The Anti-Government Capitalism that Never Was.
The ideal of free enterprise individualism targeted government as a problem and something to be limited and eliminated as much as possible. In a shameless act of irony, however, big business proponents of laissez-faire small-government capitalism routinely relied on government to boost the profits of their businesses through executive actions that repressed labor unions and farmer alliances, court rulings that overturned legislation that might assists workers and family farmers, and military intervention that was routinely undertaken against striking workers and farmers. Corporate capitalists claimed that labor unions, farmers cooperatives and other organizations of farmers and workers undermined what they saw as their Constitutional right to do whatever they wanted with their property, which included their workers and tenants.
The federal government and most state governments during the late nineteenth century agreed. These governments essentially required laissez-faire competition for individual workers and small farmers while allowing corporations to grow into anti-competitive monopolies.[3] And the ideology of laissez-faire individualism, which was initially developed as a means of combating entrenched mercantilist regulations and established business interests on behalf of striving entrepreneurs, was instead used in the late nineteenth century to promote the entrenched interests of large corporations against striving small farmers, small businessmen and workers.
Led by the influential Justice Stephen Field, the United States Supreme Court made the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution into a vehicle for protecting the rich and powerful against what Field decried as the grasping designs of the weak and the envious, thereby reversing the intent of the Amendment’s authors to provide Constitutional protection for the powerless against the powerful. Field and his colleagues read laissez-faire individualism into the Constitution, although not to promote the utopia of small-scale entrepreneurs promised by the original proponents of that ideology, but to protect the privileges of corporate wealth and power that those original individualists had opposed.[4]
Based on this laissez-faire reading of the Constitution, and particularly the Fourteenth Amendment, federal courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century increasingly struck down any government regulation of the economy that might restrict the freedom of corporations to operate at will including, for example, laws that helped small farmers by forbidding railroads from discriminating in favor of some farmers and against others.
Federal courts also regularly struck down laws that provided minimum wages, maximum hours, health and safety standards, and other pro-labor regulations laws on the grounds that they infringed on the Constitutionally protected freedom of individual workers and farmers to compete against each other, compete freely against the giant corporations, and bargain individually for their own wages, hours, and health and safety protections. In the same vein, courts routine ruled against labor unions as restricting workers’ individual rights, and prohibited labor union activities, such as strikes and boycotts, that might interfere with business interests.
As a final ironic twist in the law and the ideology of individualism, conservative Supreme Court justices began in the 1870’s to refer to corporations as “individuals” which are entitled to the rights of “persons” under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Although corporations are artificial creations of state governments, legal fictions that exist only with the support of state governments, the courts began giving corporations the rights of real people which they can use against real people and even against the governments that created them, rights that which they retain to the present day.
The rights of corporate persons include freedom of speech, which has in recent years been interpreted to mean the right to contribute unlimited amounts of money to election campaigns, and freedom from many of the regulations imposed on corporations by the governments that created them. The result has been that huge corporations — collectivist organizations ruled by unelected elites of owners and managers — are today arguably among the last remaining individualists in America.
In sum, the anti-government, laissez-faire ideology that had begun as an assertion of freedom for small farmers and small businessmen early in the nineteenth century became by the late nineteenth century a rationalization for the unbridled wealth and unconstrained power of big businessmen and giant corporations, and as a defense against any government restraints on their plundering of the country’s resources, fleecing of consumers and exploitation of workers.[5]
The Persistence of Utopian Mercantilism.
Americans are almost alone in the world today in adhering to a laissez-faire individualist ideology, and the myth of a laissez-faire Eden has become part of the conventional historical narrative about the nineteenth century. The persistence of this ideology is in sharp contrast with the history of other countries. In England during the early nineteenth century, a group of self-styled liberals championed laissez-faire capitalism as an antidote to the mercantilism that they claimed was stifling social and economic progress.
But laissez-faire ideas never became popular among the general public in England and willingness to acknowledge that the rise of big business and big cities had given the lie to the ideology led most of its advocates to abandon it. John Stuart Mill, for example, one of the ideology’s most influential proponents in the early part of the century, came to reject it and he even became a socialist.
Laissez-faire ideology also never took deep root among English conservatives. They promoted a top-down big government paternalism, a variation of mercantilism, to compete with the liberals’ bottom-up big government social democracy, a remnant of utopian socialism.[6] Other European capitalist countries went through patterns of political development similar to that of England.[7] In these countries, mercantilist ideas have persisted as ideology and as well as practice as opposed to the United States where individualism has become the dominant theory even as mercantilism remains a dominant practice.
Unlike Europe, laissez-faire individualism took root in the United States both among the general public as a bottom-up ideal of freedom for the common man and among wealthy conservatives as a top-down ideology of freedom for big businessmen. This contradictory appeal of laissez-faire ideology has roiled American politics for a century and a half.
For most Americans, there is an emotional charge to the individualist ideal — the idea of the self-made person and the independent individual — that resonates with an almost religious tone. Many Americans even equate the hidden hand of laissez-faire economic theories, the mechanism whereby the law of supply and demand makes everything come out just right, with God or Providence.
What has come to be called liberalism in the United States is largely an uneasy combination of top-down mercantilist paternalism and bottom-up social democracy. The former relies on the central government to make up for deficiencies of the hidden hand and to make capitalism work. The latter relies on labor unions, local governments and other popular organizations to make up for the deficiencies of the central government and to make democracy work.
The major reform movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Progressive Movement of the early 1900’s, the New Deal of the 1930’s, the Great Society of the 1960’s, and the reforms of President Obama’s administration in the early 2000’s – have relied on bottom-up socialistic sentiment to power them but have in practice reflected a top-down mercantilist ethos. It is a contradiction that generates conflicts among reformers and hampers the reform effort.
And the persistence of the laissez-faire individualist ideology has also been a drag on social and economic reforms. Largely because of the persistence of antigovernment ideas, the United States has the least developed system of public social services, government economic regulations and communitarian institutions of any industrial democracy, and has the largest wealth gap and income gap between the rich and the rest of the population of any capitalist country.
Remarkably, antigovernment sentiment in America is often strongest among people who have the greatest need for community assistance and who receive the most government aid. People in small town and rural regions of the Midwest and South who are the most dependent on federal government services and funds, and who get back more in services and funds than they pay in taxes to the federal government, are generally the most fervently antigovernment, anti-taxation and the most fervent believers in the idea of self-sufficient individualism. It is a contradiction that seems lost on most of them.
The Ambivalence in Americans’ Ideologies.
By the late nineteenth century, individualism was American’s predominant ideology but not completely. Most Americans remained then, and remain now, ambivalent about the idea. And both the mercantilist and utopian socialist impulses were still evident. A mercantilist desire for top-down sympathy and assistance, regulation and security. A bottom-up desire for empathy and mutual aid, cooperation and unity. As a result, there developed a contradiction between the predominant theory of individualism and a predominant practice that includes mutualism.
De Tocqueville noted this contradiction in his book Democracy in America on his visit to the United States during the 1830’s. That while Americans espoused an ideology that he called individualism – he coined the term – this ideology was largely contradicted by the communalism of their day-to-day lives and their underlying character.
Even as Americans trumpeted an ideology of self-centered individualism and justified selfish business practices with a laissez-faire economic theory, they participated incessantly in mutual aid societies, political parties, churches, local governments, labor unions and all sorts of other communal organizations. Much like Americans today.
But de Tocqueville worried that Americans’ individualistic ideology hid from them the communalism they desired and practiced in their daily lives, and undermined their support for government and other communal institutions needed to foster the common good.[8] Much like today.
It is a contradiction that can be seen in the differences between most Americans’ reactions to ideological questions and their responses to pragmatic questions. When, for example, Americans are asked broad ideological questions about government by public opinion pollsters, such as “Do you believe in government welfare programs?” or “Do you believe in government control of the economy?”, large majorities of respondents say “No.”
But when Americans are asked concrete, specific questions about public services, such as “Do you believe that hungry people should get government assistance?” or “Do you believe that the government should keep corporations from selling unsafe and unhealthy products?”, large majorities generally say “Yes.” And these results have been quite consistent since polling of this sort began in the early part of the twentieth century.[9]
Similarly, when national political campaigns are conducted on broad ideological themes, laissez-faire conservatives generally have the advantage but when they are conducted on pragmatic issues, pro-government liberals generally win. An ambivalence is seemingly built into most Americans’ psyches. Selfish self-centered individualism struggles with cooperative communalism. It is an ambivalence that is even taught in American public schools where children are required to share and cooperate in the lower grades before they are encouraged in the higher grades to compete against each other for class ranking and college entrance.
Despite Americans’ knee-jerk individualist reactions to ideological questions, there is a persistence of mercantilist action coupled with socialist sentiment, what has been called “socialism of the heart,” that keeps the utopian impulse alive even in the midst of periods of depressing dystopian actuality.
The Persistence of Utopian Socialism.
Utopian socialism as a form of community experiment and experience has persisted through thick and thin to the present day. It is a movement that generally flies below the radar of mass media attention. Waves of utopian socialist cooperatives and communities have, however, peaked about every fifty years since the early nineteenth century, first and foremost during the 1830’s-1840’s, but then again during the 1870’s-1880’s, the 1920’s-1930’s, and the 1960’s-1970’s. Each wave was a reaction against an era of dystopian despondency like that today.[10]
Utopianism seems as American as apple pie.[11] Robert Sutton, a historian of utopian communities, has noted that “the utopian tradition is an unbroken motif [in American history]. There was never any extended period of time when an important experiment, or experiments, was not underway.”[12] That includes recent history.
Sutton estimates that there were over 700 utopian socialist communes in the United States in the year 2000, and many hundreds of cooperatives of one sort or another.[13] This is a larger number of communes and cooperatives than during the nineteenth century.[14] Utopian socialist ideals permeated the labor movement. In taking refuge during the nineteenth century in labor unions and farmers’ alliances, workers and farmers were essentially building on remnants of the utopian socialist movement that had been promoted by Robert Owen and others. Owen, the founder of the New Harmony community in Indiana, was also influential in America as a founder of the labor union movement in England. Nineteenth century labor unions and farmers cooperatives did not serve merely as bargaining agents for their members but also as communities of members and their families, providing social, economic and emotional support for them.
Although one of the key premises of utopian socialism has been experimentation in small-scale communities, many utopians have attempted since the late nineteenth century to keep pace with changing social and economic realities by proposing urban industrial utopias. The most famous of these proposals was Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, that was second only to the Bible as the best-selling book of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Published in 1888, Bellamy’s novel outlined an urban industrial socialist utopia and was one of the most influential books of the time. Within two years of its publication, some one hundred and sixty-five “Bellamy Clubs” had been organized all over the country to promote its socialistic aims.[15] Although these clubs lasted only a few years and never had any significant political influence, the book remained an inspiration to reformers for half a century.
And Bellamy’s book was just one among a host of popular utopian socialist novels written at the turn of the twentieth century by prominent English and American authors. These include novels by H.G. Wells, William Morris, and William Dean Howells. Utopian socialism was a realistic topic of conversation and consideration in that era.
In a more recent example, Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed portrays a utopian socialist community in a modern, urban, technological society on the moon. First published in 1974, it won multiple awards, was an inspiration to a generation of political thinkers. As is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy portraying the efforts to build a utopian society on Mars. Published in 1994-1998, it has won multiple awards and has stirred ongoing interest in planning for utopia.
The persistence of utopian thinking has seemingly been part of a reaction against the pervasiveness of laissez-faire individualism, both of which are unique. This persistence of utopian socialism may also reflect the absence of a significant socialist political movement in the United States, which is an important difference in the political situation in the United States as compared to other industrial democracies in Europe and Asia.
Socialist political parties are part of the mainstream of politics in most countries around the world, often the ruling party. Socialists have never gained this sort of position in the United States, and the persistence of utopian socialism may reflect the weakness of practical socialism which, in turn, may reflect the continuing appeal of laissez-faire individualism.
There has been a pattern in American history of utopian thinking alternating with dystopian thinking. Depressing times breed depressed thinking. But depressed thinking has heretofore been followed by optimistic thinking. Utopian ideas have, in turn, generated progressive reforms, so that despite the ups and downs of American history, the overall trend has been up. Three steps forward, one or two steps back but, overall, an upward movement. It is important, therefore, that in the midst today of what most people seem to be experiencing as a dystopian era that we generate utopian ideas as a counterpoint. We have done it before.
BW 10/24
[1] Edward Pessen. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, Politics. (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969), 215.
[2] Thomas Schlereth. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life. (New York: Harper & Row, 1991), 35, 43-44.
[3] James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 7-8.
[4] Robert McCloskey. American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise, 1865-1910. (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 77, 81-82, 84.
[5] James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 32.
[6] Richard Reeves. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 221, 293.
[7] Guido de Ruggiero. The History of European Liberalism. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 136, 148-149.
[8] “Democracy in America (excerpt)” American History Online. Facts on File, Inc., 2011. Garrett Ward Sheldon. “Tocqueville, Alexis.” Encyclopedia of Political Thought. American History Online. Facts on File, Inc., 2011. Hugh Brogan. Alexis de Tocqueville, A Life. (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2007), 355-356.
[9] Jerome Bruner. Mandate from the People. (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1944), 80, 125, 163, 226.
[10] Timothy Miller. The Quest for Utopia in the Twentieth Century, Vol. I, 1900-1960. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), xi, 198.
[11] William Goetzmann. Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism. (New York: Basic Books, 2009),xi, xiv.
[12] Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2003), ix.
[13] Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 132.
[14] Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 132.
[15] Edward Bellamy. Looking Backward. (New York: Signet Classic, 1960). See the Forward by Erich Fromm. Also see Bellamy’s dramatic description of capitalist society on pages 25 to 28. Also, Ursula Le Guin. The Dispossessed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars Trilogy. (New York: Random House, 1992, 1994, 1996).
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