Looking Backward 2000–1887

Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898).Looking Backward is the story of a privileged but troubled nineteenth‐century Bostonian who awakens from a hypnotic sleep in the year 2000 to find a commonwealth of abundance and solidarity instead of the competition, egotism, and waste of industrial capitalism. Influenced by Protestant millennialism and Fourierism, an antebellum utopian movement, Bellamy intended his tale to demonstrate how “Nationalism” (the term he used to distinguish his version of the cooperative society from materialistic socialism) would peacefully evolve by accelerating industrial capitalism's tendencies toward consolidation. In Bellamy's vision of the future, every able person owes society a reasonable service and in turn receives an equal share of a productive output that belongs to the whole nation, not to select individuals. The society depicted in the novel is one in which equitable distribution of goods, rational planning, and industrial progress render poverty, class conflict, and gender discrimination relics of the past.

Attracted by the book's moral vision of social harmony, its forecast of the peaceful transition to the new society, and its celebration of the middle‐class virtues of work, character, and expertise, 500,000 Americans bought the work in its first year alone, and many joined Nationalist clubs to bring Bellamy's vision to fruition. Among those who acknowledged their debt to Looking Backward were the socialist Eugene v. Debs, the philosopher John Dewey, the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the social analyst Thorstein Veblen, and numerous Populists, whose cause Bellamy endorsed. In subsequent years, it inspired Arthur Morgan, first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Al Haber, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society.

Although criticized for its unrealistic view of human nature, its misunderstanding of markets, its constricted view of human possibilities, and its undemocratic reliance on experts, Looking Backward remains one of the most striking American visions of an alternative to capitalism.
See also Gilded Age; Haymarket Affair; Populist Era; Populist Party; Protestantism; Social Gospel; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

John Thomas , Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition, 1983.

Daniel H. Borus