Alternate societies, cults and fringe-living have long been fascinating subjects. Anna Neima’s meticulously researched account follows six breakaway groups that emerged from a world order still reeling from the First World War. During that time, communities comprised of “the optimistic and the determined” attempted to create “a new beginning… snatching paradise out of the jaws of hell.”
From the religiously-inspired Bruderhof in Germany to Trabuco College in America, founded in the 1940s by Aldous Huxley, the common goals of these alternate societies were laudable, even if the execution often went awry.
Neima records the hopeful beginnings of Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan-Sriniketan in west Bengal; a Nobel Prize-winning poet, novelist and songwriter, Tagore viewed education as the “ultimate tool” for global betterment. Soon enough, though, “democratic ideals” started to clash with Tagore’s “patrician instincts towards leadership.”
Dartington Hall in Devon, a place inspired by Tagore, also struggled with double standards. Its Anglophile American landowners lived in luxury, while their “labourers pursued frugal lives in experimental cottages.” Neima writes that “the only solution was to put up with the dissonance that came from preaching one way while living another.”
The shift from academic writing to a more mainstream tone can be a daunting one, but Neima—whose PhD focused on counterculture in interwar Britain—has produced an engaging and immersive blend of macro- and micro-histories. The fascinating protagonists of each story are expertly situated within wider socio-economic history, with parallels usefully drawn between each community.
Many of these utopias might have come to an end—like the now deserted Atarashiki-Mura in the Japanese mountains—but they put forward ideas that “gradually percolated into the wider world.” As Neima demonstrates, the values espoused by such communities led to wider changes in societies, including the UK’s. So often it is only by experimentation and finding out what doesn’t work that we can see what does.
The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Societyby Anna Neima (Picador, £25)
