ABSTRACT
When in 1888 Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward he gave a huge impetus to the Utopian romance. Not since Uncle Toms Cabin had an American novel reached so many readers, and Edward Bellamy became at once a national figure, the prophet of a new industrial order. It is not easy to trace the origins of Edward Bellamy's interest in collectivism or the sources of his thought. The animus of Shays's Rebellion is compressed into a few paragraphs that suggest how clearly Edward Bellamy had analyzed the social struggle. Nine years after Looking Backward Edward Bellamy published Equality, a critical examination of economic history with a view to creating an adequate social economics. It was as a political economist that Edward Bellamy attacked the problems of a democratic society, and his radicalism begins and ends with the interpretation he puts on the phrase. Only too clearly Edward Bellamy was an incorrigible idealist.
