In 1516, Thomas More conceptualized the first utopia as a purified, faith-driven community that was antithetical to English life under King Henry VIII. When individualistic competition and extreme class inequality arose from the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers responded, like More, with utopian plans. In the second half of the nineteenth century, businessmen like Jean-Baptiste André Godin and writers like William Lane designed utopian socialist communities in pursuit of revolutionary democratic and egalitarian ideals. Utopian socialism is a global phenomenon because it pursues a widespread goal of equality through social reform. This goal makes it an applicable form of resistance to societal ills in various contexts, including colonial settlements. By standardizing living conditions for workers, limiting community membership, and prioritizing secular morality, planners of Le Familistère de Guise and the Colonia Cosme demonstrated that utopian socialism could be adapted to communities around the world in response to universal struggles.

 

French blacksmith turned industrialist Jean-Baptiste André Godin incorporated the utopian socialist commitment to egalitarianism into Le Familistère by standardizing housing across socioeconomic classes. Inspired by philosopher Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery–a theoretical structure housing a community of 1620 people, apartments, workshops, and social spaces in three connected enclosures–Godin created a “social palace” in the French town of Guise for workers at his nearby iron foundry (Benevolo 56-64; Schuman 23). Le Familistère, which was built between 1857 and 1870,  included three four-floor housing blocks; each apartment had the same base format of two rooms and one bathroom but could be adjusted for changing family size and closed off from the rest of the community for privacy (Adda). By repeating one apartment model throughout Le Familistère, Godin ensured that the spatial needs of each worker were met and eliminated the possibility of extreme health and status inequalities based on finances. While Fourier envisioned a society totally unencumbered by commercialism, Godin used Le Familistère to pursue egalitarian harmony within an industrial, capitalist context. He used the utopian socialist principle of standardized housing to raise living standards for his working-class employees, joining a global effort to combat class inequality that was exacerbated by industrial production. 

 

While journalist William Lane did not replicate a theoretical plan as Godin did, he demonstrated equally careful commitment to standardized housing as a conduit of egalitarian living in his plans for the Colonia Cosme, an 1894 Australian settlement in Paraguay. Because Lane settled in a rural area with significantly fewer monetary resources than Godin, his dwelling designs comprised grass and slab huts clustered along the edge of a hill instead of an elaborate apartment structure. In the Handbook of General Information on Cosme, Lane asserts that, because all members have access to communal savings, they should forgo “special personal outfitting” of their dwellings and contribute surplus resources to the community (“Illustrated Handbook” 13). Without the finances to equalize living standards through architecture, Lane relied on residents to standardize their own housing. He appealed directly to the socialist idea of shared resource management reducing inequality, demonstrating that, because utopian socialism is founded in the universal goal of egalitarianism, planners were able to adapt it to dramatically different physical circumstances. Godin and Lane pursued the same end–standardized housing–by different means, united by a global movement toward universal harmony.  

 

By limiting membership in their communities to individuals with common financial interests, Godin and Lane demonstrated their commitment to the utopian socialist concept that quality of life depended on scale, and they rejected a global shift toward capitalist competition and individualism. Le Familistère housed only 860 tenants who lived, shopped, learned, and played inside the compound. Tenants were already financially connected by their employment at Godin’s foundry, but the idealistic industrialist reinforced their interdependence by issuing stock certificates in his company with the long-term goal of worker self-management (Schuman 23). In Le Familistère, Godin established a scale that provided all residents with sufficient quality of life by limiting membership to his employees, and then he encouraged tenants to maintain this equality by giving them monetary stock in community well-being. Godin’s “enlightened corporate version of utopia” inverted the mainstream capitalist tenet of unchecked population and financial growth and illustrated how utopian socialism could achieve equality and harmony in industrial societies (Schuman 24).

 

Lane also used financial interdependence to cultivate unity, but again appealed to members’ ideological commitment over their financial interests to obtain a small-scale, cooperative community that provided for all members equally. Cosme’s terms of membership required physically, mentally, and morally healthy applicants who demonstrated their commitment to utopian socialism through a trial period (“The Cosme Agreement” 9). Upon gaining membership, residents relinquished any commercial interests outside of Cosme and agreed to contribute all acquired wealth to the colony (“Illustrated Handbook” 2). With these requirements, Lane ensured that incoming members would balance the resources they required from the community with manual labor and assets, tying the size of the colony to the communal labor that supported it. While Lane did not establish a population limit for Cosme, he understood that the colony’s survival depended on scale and, in a more fundamentally socialist way than Godin, encouraged mutual responsibility for members’ quality of life. By limiting membership to individuals with common financial interests, Godin and Lane reframed work and wealth, common sources of rivalry, as cooperative tools for sustaining a healthy, egalitarian community.  

 

By encouraging the development of virtuous character through secular moral education, Godin equalized the accessibility of moral teachings and broadened the applicability of utopian socialist social reform. Instead of a church, as Fourier planned, Godin placed a theater across from the central housing block of Le Familistère, between the older children’s schools and opposite the younger children’s nursery. As its placement along the “educational axis” connecting the children’s nursery to the adult’s educational theater suggests, the theater was the location Godin used to lecture adult residents on morality (Adda). By prioritizing a common understanding of morals over specific religious practices, Godin made the utopian socialist tenet of behavioral reform through education equally achievable for all adult residents, who were united by employment, not necessarily religion. In addition to equalizing residents’ opportunities for moral development, distilling ideals of working-class behavior into secular teachings enabled Godin to directly address social ills he observed in a society consumed by industrial-age commercialism. Le Familistère thereby embodies the adaptability of utopian socialist resistance to geographically and temporally pertinent issues.

 

Lane extended this connection between moral education and egalitarianism from widely accessible teachings to an explicit prioritization of residents’ responsibility to one another over their responsibility to a designated god, highlighting that the central tenets of utopian socialism could be applied regardless of physical circumstance. In the Handbook, Lane explains that, instead of a church or even a common place of moral teaching like the theater of Le Familistère, morality in Cosme revolves around the “uplifting of man’s moral nature in everyday tendencies of living” (“The Cosme Agreement” 6). The overwhelming focus on agricultural work shown on the Plan of Camp Cosme, with a small cricket ground as the only designated recreation area, as well as Handbook outlines of work expectations, shows that “everyday tendencies” in Cosme revolved around communal labor and ownership (“Illustrated Handbook” 2). Lane recognized that members’ fellowship was essential to sustain such a community, so he framed morality as peaceful, cooperative action. Almost forty years after Godin implemented formal moral education in a community of industrial workers, Lane adapted social reform to an already financially egalitarian colony, indicating that social reform and universal harmony depends on change in thought, not just practice. Because change in thought does not require a specific physical environment, utopian socialists attempted to spread the ideology around the world. 

 

In his adherence to utopian socialism in every aspect of Cosme’s organization, Lane showed disdain for Paraguayan ways of life, revealing how the goal of resolving social problems sometimes evolved into paternalism that fueled colonialist impositions. Utopian socialists adapted the oppositional ideology of More’s Utopia to what they perceived as the most egregious social ills at the time. In the nineteenth century, Lane saw “free and healthy English homes” as one resolution of his quest for higher standard of living; he considered interracial marriage between Australians and Paraguayans as well as “inferior” Paraguayan animals used for labor to be obstacles to achieving his utopia (“The Cosme Agreement” 5, 13). As he pursued a perfect society, Lane strayed from the utopian socialist principle of universal equality and harmony that he espoused in Cosme’s plans. This misinterpretation represents a widespread use of utopian ideals to justify the imposition of planners’ ideals on people they sought to help with inadequate respect for existing practices, from Godin lecturing to his “big children” (employees) to Lane criticizing indigenous wildlife (Adda). By designing communities in pursuit of specific ideals and in resistance to existing conditions, utopian socialist planners offered a widely applicable and adaptable approach to the universal problem of inequality that fueled other global phenomena. 

 

Godin and Lane pursued equality of physical and moral well-being through utopian socialist guidelines for the management of space, resources, and behavior. They standardized housing, limited membership based on shared financial interest, and promoted secular moral education in an industrial French town and rural Australian-Paraguayan colony, respectively. These features showed Godin and Lane’s common commitment to the pursuit of equality and converse resistance to Industrial-Age wealth disparity, demonstrating that utopian socialism is global in action and intent.