Looking Backward

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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

Looking Backward, 2000–1887, Utopian romance by Edward Bellamy, published in 1888. Its immense popularity led to the founding of Bellamy clubs and a Nationalist party. Equality (1897), a sequel, is more a tract than a novel.

Conceived as a “fairy tale of social felicity,” the book describes a future social and economic order through the narrative of Julian West, a young Bostonian, who enters a hypnotic sleep in 1887 and is revived 113 years later in the changed city. He falls in love with Edith Leete, a descendant of his former fiancée, and through her father, a physician, learns of the scientific and social developments that have taken place. In contrast with the squalor of the slums and the injustices and inequalities of the earlier time, he finds an America in which the business monopolies have evolved to become “The Great Trust,” economic chaos having been replaced by a democratic form of state capitalism. Private enterprise has disappeared, each citizen is both an employee and a member of the state, and the collective organization of wealth and industry has eradicated crime, poverty, advertising, warfare, and many diseases. The cultural level of the people has consequently risen, and Dr. Leete ascribes these changes to the spread of social intelligence and social ethics among a good people formerly victimized by an evil system.