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