ABSTRACT
During World War II, Anton Pannekoek wrote two separate memoirs, one about his life in astronomy, another about his life in the socialist movement. Historians have often wondered what the deeper unity behind these two different accounts of Pannekoek’s life may have been. Here it is claimed that the answer is utopianism. Pannekoek encountered utopianism in the work of the American novelist Edward Bellamy and this utopianism strongly resonated with the ideas of the socialist thinker Joseph Dietzgen, who was much admired by Pannekoek. Careful reading of the memoirs reveals that the ideal of purity, so common around the turn of the nineteenth century, was common to both Bellamy’s picture of future society in Boston and Dietzgen’s and Pannekoek’s ideas about how to arrive at the socialist state.
