How Utopia shaped the world – BBC Culture

Perhaps the most surprising reverberation of Mores utopia, though, was found in the towering figures of Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. Its a little-known fact that the Indian nationalist corresponded with the aristocratic Russian novelist. Tolstoy, an anarchist and a Christian, held that the state was responsible for most of the bad stuff: taxes, wars and general irresponsibility. Tolstoy counselled passive resistance and non-violence instead.

Communes based on Tolstoys version of Christianity sprang up in the UK. The familiar elements were there: a return to handicrafts and small-scale agriculture, partial rejection of the gewgaws of the modern world, communal dining and shared expenditure.

Two of these communes still exist today in the UK. One is the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, which, according to a recent New Yorker piece, is home to four humans, a deaf cat, a few hens and an enormous cow. The other is the Whiteway Colony in the Cotswolds, formed in 1898. More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting.

In 1909 a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy. He called himself the Counts humble follower; the two men discussed Indian home rule, pacifism, passive resistance, freedom from toil and other utopian issues. In 1910, the young man Gandhi launched a cooperative colony in South Africa which he named Tolstoy Farm. It was Gandhis utopian thinking, inspired by Tolstoy, that led to his doctrine of passive resistance and his campaign for Indian home rule.

Dark visions

One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Here, from 1936 to the start of Francos reign in 1939, authority and rank were suspended, people called each other comrade and an anarchist system ruled. It is described without sentiment by George Orwell, who fought for the anarchists, in his account Homage to Catalonia.

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How Utopia shaped the world - BBC Culture