Abstract:
One of the abiding problems with utopian imaginings, as William Morris makes clear in his review of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, is that one person’s dream is likely to be another’s nightmare. Set in the year 2000, Bellamy’s initially very successful novel of 1888 envisages the peaceful evolution of monopoly capitalism into an admirably equitable but also highly bureaucratized, thoroughly urbanized and politically centralized form of state socialism, in which the mechanization of all production has enabled the lowering of the retirement age to fortyfive. While Morris acknowledges that there is no point in quarrelling with ‘a man’s vision of the future of society, which … must always be more or less personal to himself’, he is concerned to counter what he considers to be two serious flaws in the reasoning that informs Bellamy’s technotopian brand of socialist futurism. The first is the premise that increased mechanization would translate into reduced hours of labour.
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