The demise and survival of utopian communities. A question of commitment?

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, printed single-sided, grade: 89%, University of British Columbia (Department of Anthropology and Sociology), course: Community Studies, language: English, abstract: And me, I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it s not some place you can look for, cause it s not where you go. It s how you feel for a moment in your life when you re a part of something, and if you find that moment... it lasts forever... says Leonardo di Caprio at the end of the movie The Beach , upon return from a failed utopian island community. This statement, together with the whole movie, expresses a widespread conviction: utopian communities are bound to fail. Paradise is nothing that one can realize in an actual community. If anything, it can be realized as a feeling or a state of mind; but why do we think that way? Do we all feel that there is a sociological law that inevitably leads to the demise of a community that tries to realize the ideal society? Is this point of view empirically provable? These were the questions that intrigued me when I decided to make utopian communities my research topic; or, formulated into a single research question: Is there a single, most important feature or process that led to the demise or survival of former utopian communities?To answer this question, we should first have a brief look at the great field of studies about the various kinds of utopias. This will help us achieve a better understanding and localization of the aspect of utopia we are looking at in this paper (utopian communities). At the same time, it will help us to find a useful definition of the vague and ambiguous term utopia and, more specifically, utopian communities . Subsequently, we will also have a brief look at the history of those communal experiments. After these prefatory remarks, I will introduce Rosabeth Moss Kanter s concept of utopian commitment as a conceptual framework for the exploration of the longevity of utopian communities. Kanter s functional concept is one of the few analytical models in this field. However, its functional approach is not unproblematic. Therefore a brief evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses seems necessary. Finally, I will use Kanter s concept to analyse the developments of a failed utopian community (the Finnish colony of Sointula), which contrasts with a more successful community (the Shaker sect) and, thus, serves to test the concept s validity.