The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening Learning Resources Contents History Seminar 16: The Revolt against Reason T Wolfe, The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening 3. Him? the new man? Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century such as Saint- Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Mars lived for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (SaintSimon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen's New Harmony commune in Indiana and thirty- four Fourier-style "phalanx" settlementssocialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that it would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the U.S. in the 1940's. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the homo novus | |
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