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Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest

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Abstract

In this chapter, the theoretical framework and context for the bygone utopia concept is outlined. The broader argument is composed of four claims. First, the Polanyian double movement concept may apply to any moment of culturally catastrophic, rapid social change. Second, this reaction is due in part to the communities’ and individuals’ inability to integrate the social changes with their general understanding of how the social world is ordered and how to act, based on the American philosophical pragmatic theory of action. Third, these instances of social change may prompt individuals or communities to reflect on better times, a bygone utopia. Fourth, in an attempt to return, and/or convince society to return, to this past, some activists may embody this past idyll.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Frederick J. Turner, “The Development of American Society,” The Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois 2, January–October (1908), 120.

  2. 2.

    Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 2 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995[1959]), Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (New York: Verso, 2007[1920]) 125–126.

  3. 3.

    Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995[1959]), 75, 157–158, 188.

  4. 4.

    Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Dark Side of Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). David S. Meyer and Sydney Tarrow (eds), The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

  7. 7.

    Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  8. 8.

    Carl C. Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement, 1620–1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953).

  9. 9.

    Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  10. 10.

    See, for example: Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 4–5, 11–12; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990[1980]), 53; Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004[2001]), 88.

  11. 11.

    Of course, almost no contemporary sociologist would argue that social structures are permanent. However, there is a consistently problematic assumption that systems are shockingly static, upheld by a variety of social forces, including hegemonic understandings, functionalist narratives, or, more recently, a habitus derived from one’s position in the social system. See, for example: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984[1979]). The book illustrates the resilient and seemingly static social hierarchy derived from one’s social position, as expressed via embodied dispositions (tastes), but the argument is quite clear in pages 374–378, 386–396. For views similar to this point regarding sociologists’ overemphasis of a static social world, but via a radically different argument and implications, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  12. 12.

    Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–639; Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press 1996); Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press 2001); John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212–1241; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movements: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  13. 13.

    Tilly, Popular Contention.

  14. 14.

    Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds. New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994); Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989); Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Westford, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  15. 15.

    Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” Radical America 6, Winter (1977): 99–122; Andrew Cornell, Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011); Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); David Graeber. “The New Anarchists.” New Left Review 13 (2002): 61–73; Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2008); Marianne Maeckelbergh The Will of Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press: New York, 2009); Randy Stoecker, Defending Community (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press 1994); Luke Yates, “Rethinking Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals in Social Movements,” Social Movement Studies 14, no. 1 (2015): 1–21.

  16. 16.

    See, for example: Mikhail Bakunin On Anarchism (New York: Black Rose Books, 2002); Peter Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread (New York: Black Rose Books, 1990); Pierre-Joseph Proudhon What is Property? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  17. 17.

    Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 159–219; Chris Dixon, Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 82–105; Lenny Flank, ed., Voices from the 99 percent: An Oral History of the Occupy Wall Street Movement (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2011); William A. Gamson and Micah L. Sifry, “The #Occupy Movement: An Introduction,” The Sociological Quarterly 54 (2013):159–163; Juris, Networking Futures, 1–26; Maeckelbergh, Will of Many, 188–222; Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and its Aspirations (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 68–70; Jackie Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 215–217.

  18. 18.

    Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959[1896]), 173; John Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 139–141, 226, 406–407, 588–589, 629–631; Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 64–120, 167–198; George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. New York, NY: Routledge (2012[1945]), 468.

  19. 19.

    Dewey, Philosophy of John Dewey, 237–239.

  20. 20.

    Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001[[1913]), 101, 196; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 277–278; 380–381, 438–442.

  21. 21.

    William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 124–151; see also Boris Groys, On the New (New York: Verso, 2014), 1–18, 76–84.

  22. 22.

    This perspective is also popular among French pragmatists. See, for example, Latour, Reassembling, and Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011[2009]), 27, 36, 57–58, 119–120.

  23. 23.

    Bergson, Time and Free Will, 211.

  24. 24.

    Dewey, Philosophy of John Dewey, 237–239; Joas, G. H. Mead, 82, 87–88, 115–116; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 380–381.

  25. 25.

    Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Robust Utopias and Civil Repairs,” International Sociology 16, no. 4 (2001): 582; Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1976), 17; Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 16; Rosabeth M. Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 33–34; Ruth Levitas, “Sociology and Utopia,” Sociology 13, no. 1 (1979): 22–23; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxfordshire: Peter Lang Oxford, 2011[1990]), 9; Lyman T. Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  26. 26.

    Erik O. Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010); Nick Crossley, “Working Utopias and Social Movements: An Investigation Using Case Study Materials from Radical Mental Health Movements in Britain,” Sociology 33, no 4 (1999): 809–830; Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

  27. 27.

    Bloch, Principle of Hope v1, 316, 193, 299–300.

  28. 28.

    Bloch, Principle of Hope v1, 299–300; Timothy Luchies, “Anti-oppression as Pedagogy; Prefiguration as Praxis,” Interface 6, no. 1 (2014): 99–129; Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2002).

  29. 29.

    Cooper, Everyday Utopias; Goodwin and Taylor, Politics of Utopia; John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2010); Levitas, Concept of Utopia; Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Wright, Real Utopias, 1–8, 106–109, 366–373.

  30. 30.

    Bloch, Principle of Hope v1, 198; Bloch, Principle of Hope v2, 583.

  31. 31.

    John W. Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014); Kanter, Commitment and Community; Timothy Miller, The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America, Vol. 1:1900–1960 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998).

  32. 32.

    Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1996[1983]), 89.

  33. 33.

    Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (New York: Verso, 2017), 34–40, 95–118.

  34. 34.

    Bloch, Principle of Hope v1, 373, 386.

  35. 35.

    For an example of a lengthy, and convincing, discussion of the creative roots of pragmatic theory, see: Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); for a discussion of pragmatism’s association with progressivism, see: Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 3–8.

  36. 36.

    William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 34–35.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 35.

  38. 38.

    Dewey, Philosophy of John Dewey, 410, 588–589, 629–631.

  39. 39.

    Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

  40. 40.

    Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978 [1852]), 595.

  41. 41.

    Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963).

  42. 42.

    Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer, The Relational Subject (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  43. 43.

    Daniel Jaster, “Protest and the Experience of Time: Action as Synchronizing Temporalities,” Time & Society 29, no. 3 (2020): 750–71.

  44. 44.

    Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261; Bergson, Matter & Memory, 28, 130, 236; Joas, G. H. Mead, 167–198; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 380–381.

  45. 45.

    Dewey, Philosophy of John Dewey, 221.

  46. 46.

    Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936[1929]).

  47. 47.

    Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 6–8, 52–54; Chris Dixon, “Building ‘Another Politics’: The Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Current in the US and Canada,” Anarchist Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 36, 43–45; Dixon, Another Politics, 8–95; Graeber, “New Anarchists,” 70–73; Maeckelbergh, Will of Many, 66–67; Yates, “Rethinking Prefiguration,” 14.

  48. 48.

    Goodwin and Taylor, Politics of Utopia, 22–24; Levitas, “Sociology and Utopia,” 26, 30.

  49. 49.

    Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 87–91.

  50. 50.

    Alexander, “Robust Utopias,” 583–585. For a detailed analysis of utopian thought, organized almost exclusively along these future-oriented Marxist perspectives, see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 2.

  51. 51.

    This understanding is different from Charles Tilly’s proactive/reactive/competitive typology, which largely focuses on gaining or defending access to resources. See: Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978), 144.

  52. 52.

    Dona Brown, Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 89–94; Friesen and Friesen, Palgrave Companion; Miller, Quest for Utopia, l; Sargent, Utopianism, 66–74.

  53. 53.

    Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982); Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12–42; Charles Price, Donald Nonini, and Erich Fox Tree, “Grounded Utopian Movements: Subjects of Neglect,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2008): 127–159; Sargent, Utopianism, 21–22, 52, 66–74.

  54. 54.

    Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001[1944]).

  55. 55.

    For examples of sociologists illustrating the cultural embeddedness of economic thought/practice, see: Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510; Jamie Peck, “Economic Sociologies in Space,” Economic Geography 81, no. 2 (2005): 129–175; Matthew Watson, “The Great Transformation and Progressive Possibilities: The Political Limits of Polanyi’s Marxian History of Economic Ideas,” Economy and Society 43, no. 4 (2014): 603–625. For examples of scholars limiting the double movement concept to the realm of economics, see: Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Michael Burawoy, “For Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi,” Politics and Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 193–261; Nancy Fraser, “Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down? Post-Polanyian Reflections on Capitalist Crisis,” Economy and Society 43, no. 4 (2014): 541–558.

  56. 56.

    Previous sociologists’ work hints at such an argument, though they never explicitly make the link nor the claim. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989), 392–396; Charles Tilly’s The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

  57. 57.

    Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 320–321, 350–352; Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action v2, 119–197; Eppo Maertens, “Polanyi’s Double Movement: A Critical Reappraisal,” Social Thought & Research (29) (2008): 129–153.

  58. 58.

    Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action v2, 325–327, 392–396.

  59. 59.

    Emile Durkheim, On Suicide (New York: Penguin Group, 2007[1897]); Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3, no. 5 (1938): 672–682. Both of these theorists’ conceptions fit the process described here.

  60. 60.

    Benjamin, Illuminations, 257–258.

  61. 61.

    Zygmunt Bauman argues that the contemporary rise in nostalgia is what is currently feeding what he labels as a desire for a “retrotopia.” However, as I hope to have already illustrated, this compelling argument neglects how many movements fitting his retrotopian impulse have existed throughout history. Perhaps more importantly, as pragmatists illustrate, people are also generally well-conditioned for an ever-changing world. It’s not the quantity of change that is important, but the quality. See Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), for his argument.

  62. 62.

    Daniel Jaster, “Figurative Politics: How Activists Lead by Example to Create Change.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2018): 65–81.

  63. 63.

    For more on the moral economy, see: James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971):76–136.

  64. 64.

    John L. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (The University of Illinois Press: Urbana, IL, 1965), 79.

  65. 65.

    Jon K. Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2013).

  66. 66.

    Catherine McNicol Stock, Main Streets in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 42–43.

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    Daniel Jaster

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Jaster, D. (2021). Introduction. In: Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71013-2_1

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