BOOKS

To Build Jerusalem

It CHRISTOPHER HilLL UTOPIAN thought springs from the contrast between reality, and possibility; from a realisation that society could be organised on utterly different and much better lines. It there- fore arose in the sixteenth century, when the . discovery of America and the opening up of sea routes to the East made men aware of different types of civilisation; when the accumulation of capital and the growth of towns suggested that Poverty might not be inevitable; and when the development of modern science first revealed the prospect of man mastering his environment. Francis Bacon was the greatest Utopian of all, not only in the New Atlantis but in his vision of a planned industrial society developed for 'the relief of man's estate.' So the seventeenth- century Utopians cry out with Gerrard Win- Stanley : 'This is the bondage the poor complain of, that they are kept poor by their brethren in a land where there is so much plenty for every- one.'

Meditrval man had dreamed of the Land of Cockaygne, where no one worked and roast geese flew to be eaten, crying out 'All hot, all hot!' But this was a consolatory fantasy, . a materialist Heaven : it was not a programme. Whether More's Utopia was intended as a pro- gramme to be lealised is disputed : it certainly contained a fundamental criticism of the insti- tutions of his own society, and therefore an assumption that they were not eternal and im- mutable. Social criticism remained a primary ingredient of Utopia. From the seventeenth century a second ingredient was added : a pro- gramme of action for the transformation of society. At first this took apocalyptic millenarian forms familiar to mediteval urban heretics: if unjust rulers were overthrown, 'the Kingdom of God on earth could begin. It was under the in- fluence of Baconian science that men like Hartlib and Harrington envisaged the possibility of a man-made Utopia, a society in which the con- sequences of the Fall would be reversed without tarrying for the Second Coming. That 'ardent Baconian genius, Gerrard Winstanley, trans- lated Utopia into a political programme for im- mediate realisation. in 1649, the year of the execution of Charles I and the proclamation of the English Republic, he and his humble Diggers began to cultivate the common lands or St. George's Hill, near Kingston.

Winstanley was the reverse of a millenarian.

For him the word 'God' was a synonym for ,

k Reason.' He looked forward to the establishment I of an agrarian communist society by the force of example and persuasion. The Diggers' col- . lective farm was soon broken up by indignant landowners and parsons, with the help of a troop of horse from London; but Winstanley left in The Law of Freedom a theoretical critique of the principle of private ownership of property Which was not to be equalled until the nineteenth

century: 'No man can be rich but he must be rich either by his own labours or by the labours of other men helping him. If a man have no help from his neighbour he shall never gather an estate of hundreds and thousands a year. If other men help him to work, then are those riches his neighbours' as well as his.'

There is a succession of British thinkers with this utopian vision of a society in which the selfishness of individualism has been eliminated. It runs from Winstanley through Robert Owen to Ruskin and William Morris. It was studied in Mr. A. L. Morton's excellent The English Utopia, published in 1952. Professor Armytage's book* has a much narrower theme, though Winstanley, Owen and Morris appear in his pages too. Professor Armytage's subject is the criticism of society by the establishment of small communities which aspire to create a fellowship not to be found in existing institutions. In Mr. Morton's book Winstanley, Owen and Morris appear as prophets looking forward to sOcialism (rather than to Mr. Gaitskell): in Professor Armytage's book they look forward to Welwyn Garden City and the Town and Country Plan- ning Act.

The result—though this does not seem to be Professor Armytage's intention—is a profoundly depressing book. Many of his utopians hoped to build Jerusalem in England. But others simply wanted to escape from a world they disliked or with which they could not cope. Many were cranks. All were failures. We meet Chartism only in the heart-breaking muddle of O'Connor's dubious land schemes; we meet vegetarians and teetotallers galore, living in parallelograms and wearing green tunics 'somewhat like the rep- resentation of Robin Hood and his foresters,' and ladies (in 1840!) 'with trousers, and the hair worn in ringlets.' We meet Coleridge, Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence in Contexts which seem calculated to make them appear ridiculous. If Professor Armytage had deliberately combed their correspondence with this end in view the result would hardly have been different.

Nevertheless, Professor Armytage is to be congratulated on bringing together art extra- ordinary mass of material dealing with attempts, often obscure, to found communities. His book is especially strong on the nineteenth century. But his method of presentation was, for one reader at least, confusing. A dead-pan factual narrative, briefly describing scores of small and very diverse groups, leads up to no clear con- clusion except that the communities studied are valuable because they 'kept dissent alive' for a world in which the Labour Party has surrendered to Fabian planning. This seems rather a lame and impotent conclusion to the hopes and en-

- - * Iii INS lit" ow : UTOPIAN EXPERIMENTS IN FNII AND. 1560-1960, By W. H.G. Armytage. (Rout- ledge. Kegan Paul, 45s.)

deavours of 400 years, including those of Blake, Wordsworth and Ruskin.

What is lacking in Professor Armytage's book is sociological comment, and in particular an attempt to classify the types of experiment studied. Often, interestingly enough, the same individual participated in hard-headed schemes as well as those which seem the most eccentric: this was a point well worth establishing. But more attempt at differentiation would have been help- ful. Some of the communities studied were purely religious .in motivation, ranging from the charlatanry of the Southcottians through the business acumen of the Mormons to the Shakers, the model for many later secular communities. In order to face the problems of living in an artificial community, in the modern no less than in the Middle Ages, a strong element of faith, discipline and subordination is necessary, and this seems to have been best supplied by religion.

Another type of community which Professor Armytage chronicles is the back-to-the-land movement, that pathetic will-o'-the-wisp which haunted the working-class movement from the great evictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Professor Armytage does not grapple with the problem which its survival well into the nineteenth century presents, but some elements of a solution suggest themselves from his nar- rative. We observe the prominence of Irishmen in English working-class land colonisation schemes: the land dominated Irish politics long after it had ceased to be anything but a mirage for English workers. In the days of Chartism's -decline, trade unions found land schemes cheaper to finance than unemployment relief. Simul- taneously, intelligent local government officials, especially in Yorkshire, saw the advantages of moving 'refractory elements in the pauper popu- lation' away from the influence of urban 'political agitators.' If the lower orders have not places where they can engage in sports and keep their minds engaged in matters of that kind, it is the very thing to drive them to Chartism.'

But financial backing from official sources was rare in the mid-nineteenth century. In its absence, the outcastes of industrial society could establish the sort of community life they had lost only if they were supported by capital, whether supplied by a benevolent employer like Owen, or by an organiser of subscriptions like O'Connor. Inevitably they foundered when the rich backer lost his interest, or his money, or both; or When he used his financial position to impose rules which contradicted the community principle. The communities which did best flouted the whole object of the back-to-the-land movement by emigrating, like the Mormons who in the 1840s and 1850s swept disillusioned Chart- ists away to the freer soil of America.

So the moral does not seem to be quite so simple as Professor Armytage suggests. In so far as any recent communities enjoyed a temporary success, they did so because they received either a State subvention (in the depression of the Thirties, or after the bombing of the Forties) or support from—say--the Nuffield Trust. It may be better to keep dissent alive With govern- ment support than to have no dissent at all; but State-licensed dissent is no more likely than Her Majesty's Opposition to realise the dreams of a Blake, a Morris, a D. H. Lawrence. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City are a great improve- ment on London slums, though Professor Armytage's narrative does not suggest that many slum-dwellers found their way there. They are no doubt nice places to live in, but they are not quite what Blake meant by Jerusalem. or Win- afanley when he asked, 'Why may we not have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable liveli- hood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too?' .

Professor Armytage's researches have given us many sociological problems to ponder. It is understandable that education, for instance, 'was the invariable concomitant of Utopist endeavour.' But why was it that 'the real by-products of nearly all the English communities have been new developments of and new departures in education'? Is it simply that a school needs less capital than a model village, afid that education is more vendible than vegetables and sandals? Another unsolved problem is presented by the attitude of the clergy to Utopia. Winstanley's heaven below was specifically anti-clerical. (There is no evidence for Professor Armytage's statement that he subsequently became a Quaker.) Local parsons took the lead in destroying the Digger colony. Those of the early communities which were religious derived from the more radi- cal sects, like the Saint-Simonians who thought (as Winstanley had done) that a true Christian was 'one who turns the world upside down.' Again and again in Professor Armytage's narra- tive we find the clergy of all respectable denom- inations denouncing as communist and athetistic the most innocent communal experiments (as well as one or two that were not so innocent). It was only in the 1840s, when men came to realise the possibilities of land-settlement as a safety-valve for class hatred, that the Church of England Self-Supporting Villages Society appeared. Henceforth religious organisations— the Salvation Army, the Church Army—play a different role. Professor Armytage has collected the raw material from which we can proceed to sociological generalisation.