The most influential utopia America ever produced — reached not by revolution, but by department stores.

Looking Backward, 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy · 1888

In 1888, Bellamy imagined socialism arriving in America the way a monopoly finishes consolidating — peacefully, efficiently, almost by accident — and readers believed him enough to found political clubs around it. Julian West falls asleep an idle Boston gentleman and wakes in a Boston where the state runs the economy like a single well-managed department store, everyone drafted into an 'industrial army,' everyone paid the same. It is a strange, sincere blueprint: no strikes, no bosses, no money, no want — and, read now, an object lesson in what a planner's utopia leaves out. It set off Marx-inflected debate on one side and, a few years later, William Morris's very different, decentralized News from Nowhere on the other.

28 chapters · 77,278 words · ~5.9 hr read