From Chaos to Order: Labor and Class in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887
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This paper examines how the novel’s presentation of the class and labor problems of the nineteenth century and configuration of the industrial army as the organizing form of a future utopian society are invested with the narrator’s class consciousness as a member of the ruling class. Written at a moment when class polarization put issues of national cohesiveness and social obligation at the forefront of national discussion, Bellamy’s Looking Backward reimagines the utopian desire that has shaped American history in an attempt to provide possible solutions to the problems of this transitory time and thus redirect the nation’s path. Bellamy’s future utopian society, however, brings a new class system and ideologies that serve the upper class’s interests even though Bellamy introduces to America utopianism, nationalism, and brotherhood as antidotes to the prevalent ideologies of industrialism, social Darwinism, and individualism in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Bellamy’s alternative world, where chaos is dismissed and order is regained, maintains the limitations of utopian imagination toward a highly engineered society in which the distinction between consent and coercion is hard to make. In Bellamy’s utopian America, the omnipotent bureaucratic state would not only weaken the collective power of the working class but also eliminate the need for democratic control and participation from below―a participation made possible only through the kind of associative activity that was so difficult and perverse from the standpoint of the ruling class.
Abstract
This paper examines how the novel’s presentation of the class and labor problems of the nineteenth century and configuration of the industrial army as the organizing form of a future utopian society are invested with the narrator’s class consciousness as a member of the ruling class. Written at a moment when class polarization put issues of national cohesiveness and social obligation at the forefront of national discussion, Bellamy’s Looking Backward reimagines the utopian desire that has shaped American history in an attempt to provide possible solutions to the problems of this transitory time and thus redirect the nation’s path. Bellamy’s future utopian society, however, brings a new class system and ideologies that serve the upper class’s interests even though Bellamy introduces to America utopianism, nationalism, and brotherhood as antidotes to the prevalent ideologies of industrialism, social Darwinism, and individualism in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Bellamy’s alternative world, where chaos is dismissed and order is regained, maintains the limitations of utopian imagination toward a highly engineered society in which the distinction between consent and coercion is hard to make. In Bellamy’s utopian America, the omnipotent bureaucratic state would not only weaken the collective power of the working class but also eliminate the need for democratic control and participation from below―a participation made possible only through the kind of associative activity that was so difficult and perverse from the standpoint of the ruling class.
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