Edward Bellamy was a writer who wrote the Utopian novel 2000-1887: Looking Backward,where Julian West wakes up in a Utopian society in the year 2000 where everyone is equal and everyone is wealthy. A while back I did an essay on the Robber Barons, the ruthless capitalists who ruled America during the Gilded Age of the 1900, and I included a short critique of Bellamy’s views which I felt were very insufficient.  Here’s an excerpt of that essay. I’d appreciate your feedback. As usual, complete references are available on request.  – Mark

It may be a tempting proposition to suppose that the Robber Baron era did not have to occur and that there were any number of different ways in which society could have more effectively evolved.  Certainly no one relishes the struggle that the workers of this era had to endure.  They were squashed at gun point by Fiske and his band of armed thugs (Josephson 150).  They were put on trial for defending their jobs at Carnegie’s Homestead works.  But some of the alternatives that have been espoused seem severely lacking in both substance and reality.  One such idea espoused by Edward Bellamy in the utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 shows the vision of a utopian American society gradually forming out of the continued concentration of capital into the hands of a few until one day the government becomes the sole capitalist for the benefit of everyone in society.  Bellamy’s socialist ideals which may have profoundly attracted many who were being torn under the cogs of the industrial giants’ great economic wheel seem overly naive from a modern day perspective.  But of course, Bellamy did not have the benefit of hind-sight.  Nor did he have the opportunity to feel the effects of a modern regime which tried to partially duplicate his utopian society.  Vietnam in the mid 1980s had nationalized everything from heavy industry to beer halls, and all of them lost money (Lamb 115).  Food was scarce, starvation was not uncommon, shoes were too expensive for most, and personal freedom was non-existent except for the communist elite (Lamb 115).  Bellamy’s criticism is well founded, but his solutions are sorely lacking. I suppose if Bellamy’s protagonist Julian West would have awoken in the year 2000 as we know it, he equally would have been impressed to see a wealthy nation with unparalleled freedom, incomparable choice in consumer products, and matchless wealth for a citizenry which was one of the most prosperous of the world.  And would it not have been interesting for him to see that the giant corporation did not go the way of a sole nationalist capitalist entity but that they had spurred on technological innovation and legitimate competition both locally and globally.  He also would have seen a reformed government structure which had worked to regulate the business community and to ensure the rights of all workers.  In fact, Julian West would have seen a more fair society which still had direct roots in the Gilded Age.