ABSTRACT
Attempts at establishing cooperative settlement and utopian community projects in the nineteenth century help us to understand concepts of Transcendentalist thinkers and utopian socialists. These concepts, in turn, crystallized in communal land ownership based on the principles of equality, simple living, and trusteeship. We aim to demonstrate how certain farming community examples from English and North American (Curl 2009) history became relevant for the social and political thought of their contemporaries such as Thoreau, Tolstoy, Ruskin, Gandhi, and Kumarappa.
