SOURCE: “Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality” in Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought, MIT Press, 1974, pp. 113-44.

In the essay that follows, Hansot places Bellamy's fiction in the larger context of utopian thought from Plato to H. G. Wells, and argues that Bellamy imagines a fundamentally conservative ideal.

Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward: 2000-1887 in 1884 and Equality in 1897. The latter was Bellamy's last book, part of which was written during illness.¹ Equality is a much longer and more detailed account of the utopia presented in Looking Backward, but, apart from the later volume's increased attention to religion and its place in society, the argument of the two books is similar.

Reared in the Calvinist faith by his father, a mildly evangelical Baptist minister, Bellamy later rejected orthodox religion and traditional Emersonian self-reliance in favor of his own “religion of solidarity.” The new religion was to...