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Chapter 2 zooms in on the ideal of a loving two-generation family and how it was shaped and embedded in the republican society and its structures. The chapter unfolds this story from a contemporaneous critical perspective by presenting it through the eyes of John H. Noyes, the leader of the Oneida Community, which provided a religious and sexual countermodel to life in a nuclear family. Yet by looking at Noyes and his utopian and seemingly progressive commune, the chapter unfolds the meanings and significance of religion and sex in the republic, and it also shows how patriarchal patterns persisted in the new American society. The chapter draws on Noyes’s many writings and the papers of the Oneida Community in the Syracuse University Library.

This chapter addresses the potent US utopianism that greeted the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. US Americans tethered perfection to new telegraph technology with all the idealism utopia has come to connote but without the spatial or temporal inaccessibility that we traditionally associate with the “no-place” coined by Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia. In most formulations, utopia is set in a far-off land or distant future. Yet for many US Americans, the moment the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was strung across the ocean and Morse code was sent pulsing beneath the waves, this technologically empowered utopian world began to arrive. With an anchoring focus on the Oneida Community, a small religious community that became obsessed with the telegraph’s possibilities for unity among all people and with God, this chapter argues that in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, utopia was not understood as a distant land or future event. Rather, the utopianism of this network imaginary demands a redefinition of utopia as proximate.

The creation of a white-collar class in America brought with it changes in demographic patterns, particularly where romance was concerned. No longer largely economic, marriage became increasingly seen as an emotional and romantic fulfillment of human needs. Spiritualists agreed that love was of utmost importance but recognized that many unhappy marriages resulted in women and children caught in impossible situations. Spiritualists advocated an eternal love between soul mates but fought for reform of marriage and divorce law at the same time. True love was understood using Aristophanes’ portrayal of the primal androgynous unit from Plato’s Symposium—love gathered the halves of bodies as well as souls. At the fringes of the movement were sex radicals and free-love adherents like Victoria Woodhull who called for dramatic legal reform in both marriage and eugenics.

This chapter introduces the terminology of studying alternative communities and interrogates the terms utopian, communal, and intentional as applicable to the subject of the book. Finding "intentional communities" to be the preferred term, the chapter provides five qualities that are shared by all groups who may be defined as such. An overview of the types of communities prevalent in American history follows, including religious movements such as the Shakers and Harmonists, social reform movements such as the Oneida Community and Brook Farm, and socialist experiments such as the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth and Llano del Rio Cooperative. The chapter explains why company towns, residential institutions, and temporary communities are not intentional communities and provides justification for the geographic limitations of the volume.

Were we able to talk with other animals, it is extremely unlikely that we should hear them debating the problem of population control. They don't need to debate: nature solves the problem for them. And what is the problem? Simply this: to keep a successful species from being too successful. To keep it from eating itself out of house and home. And the solution? Simply predation and disease, which play the role that human beings might label "providence." As far as the written record reveals, no one recognized the self-elimination of a species as a potential problem for animals until the danger had become suspected among human beings. One of the earliest descriptions of this population problem for other animals was given by the Reverend Joseph Townsend, an English geologist. His key contribution was published in 1786, twelve years before Malthus's celebrated essay (Box 25-1). Townsend was dependent upon others for the outline of his story, and there is some question as to whether the details are historically correct. But the thrust of the story must be true: a single species (goats, in this case) exploiting a resource (plants) cannot, by itself, maintain a stable equilibrium at a comfortable level of living. The animals will either die after eating up all the food, or their numbers will fluctuate painfully. (Details differ, depending on the species and the environment.) Stability and prosperity require that the gift of exponential growth be opposed by some sort of countervailing force (predatory dogs, in Townsend's example). However deplorable predators may be for individuals who happen to be captured and eaten, for the prey population as a whole predators are (over time) a blessing. With millions of different species of animals there are many different particular explanations of how they manage to persist for thousands or millions of years. The species we are most interested in is, of course, Homo sapiens. A meditation on Townsend's account led to a challenging set of questions. "If all this great earth be no more than the Island of Juan Fernandes, and if we are the goats, how can we live "the good life" without a functional equivalent of the dogs? Must we create and sustain our own dogs? Can we do so, consciously? And if we can, what manner of beast will they be?"