The difficulty of building heaven on Earth: why utopias usually fail

The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict began to recover, many were drawn towards experimental ways of living. Anna Neima looks at six of these communities, asking what brought them together, what kept them going and what legacy, if any, they left behind. In doing so, she offers an original perspective on the entire period and a new way of navigating its artistic and ideological upheaval.

She begins with Santiniketan Sriniketan, the community founded by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal. Part ashram, part school, part agricultural college, it promoted the twin causes of educational reform and rural regeneration, and went on to influence countless other communities. It also established a pattern of sorts, with a charismatic leader and devoted disciples; a remote setting and uncomfortable accommodation; a mix of ancient wisdom, political radicalism and alternative therapy, along with failed attempts at self-sufficiency and a constant shortage of cash. This pattern is repeated by almost every one of the book’s communities, yet thanks to Neima’s rigorous research, each chapter offers something new.

The most interesting figures were usually the founders, typically idealistic men and women from comfortable backgrounds, who were good at starting social movements but less suited to communal life. Alongside Tagore we meet Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst (she an American heiress, he a failed priest turned trainee agronomist) who started Dartington Hall in Devon. Then there was the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, who set up the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in the forest of Fontainebleau; the Japanese author Saneatsu Mushanokoji, who began the Atarashiki-mura community on Kyushu island; and the polymath Gerald Heard, who established Trabuco College in the foothills of California’s Santa Ana Mountains.