It used to be virtually unquestioned that history belonged to the
successful. Individuals and movements deemed failures were usually
disregarded or entirely forgotten.
Communitarians of the 1840s set forth a variety of radical critiques of
contemporary American society, based both on their own experiences and
on their visions of a better world. Their attempts to realize these
visions met with strong opposition and practical obstacles. Even as they
began to retreat, they were cast by their opponents as insignificant or
as fanatics, and those views have influenced most subsequent historical
accounts of them. This book joins other recent studies that have sought
to reevaluate the efforts of communitarians on their own terms, to
locate them in their social and political contexts, and to understand
the dilemmas that they faced. The Northampton Association provides an
ideal opportunity for a study of this kind. It is easily the most
obscure of the main New England utopian communities of the 1840s, so its
story remains unfamiliar even to many specialist scholars. In his book,
Clark aims not to celebrate the men and women of the Northampton
community, but to understand them better, to trace how their vision was
formed, and how it came to fade again into something less radical, less
ambitious, and more forgettable.