California State University, Dominguez Hills

California State University, Dominguez Hills

Essay 2

Topic #3: Comparing and contrasting the views of Morris and Skinner on governance and social control

in their utopias.

Casey Robertson

HUX 544: The Individual and Society

03 16 2012

The concept of creating a utopian society has long been a topic of much discussion and

fascination ever since Henry David Thoreau published his influential work of Walden in 1854.

While Thoreau’s work proved to be centered upon a very much individualist society, later

authors such as William Morris and B.F. Skinner would evolve upon his ideas to envision

utopian societies which embody a more community-based structure. This discussion will

attempt to compare and contrast the utopian societies within the works of News from Nowhere

from William Morris, and Walden Two from B.F. Skinner. Through this comparison, the goal

will be to gain a greater understanding of how these two men desired to implement the

institutions of governance and social control in their utopian societies.

The first utopian society to be examined is that of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, which was

first published in 1948, and has consistently been amongst the most fiercely debated utopian

works of modern times ever since.1

As an influential and also controversial psychologist of his

time, Skinner envisioned a type of utopian society in his novel which depicted a synchronized

community that exercised social control through a series of “non-punitive” measures. Through

behavioral control methods, Skinner hoped to create a utopia where individuals were not only

happy and productive members of society, but also free of the attributes of anger, jealousy and

competitiveness.

Walden Two embodies a number of rather interesting notions of governance and social

control throughout its story. In this community, the typical political and economic traditions of

the west have been abandoned in favor of a science of behavior exercised through experimental

fashions. Absent from the governing body are the responsibilities of enforcing laws, community

protection, collecting taxes and monetary spending. With this in mind, the social control of

behavior is exercised by operant means of positive reinforcement as opposed to that of negative

means. While the community is governed by a board of planners who oversee the work of the

managers and the community as a whole, their sole function resides in establishing policies and

rules, with the other responsibilities distributed amongst the workers of the community. The

institution of democracy is also not of great importance in Walden Two. Frazier, the founder of

Walden Two even described it as inherently flawed due to his view that humanity is a product of

environment.2

Despite the possible connections with the concept of cultural engineering, propaganda

and indoctrination are both items of non-interest within Walden Two due to their potential

interference with its experimental nature. Religion is also viewed as a form of social control in

the community, and therefore not embraced either due to its potential conflicts with the science

of behavior. With this said, the exercise of experimental behavioral science is viewed as the only

legitimate form of social control in Walden Two, and very much the pinnacle of its ideological

foundation. While varying labels have been placed upon this community by those interpreting