The demise and survival of utopian communities. A question of commitment?

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Sociology - Individual Groups Society grade: 89% University of British Columbia (Department of Anthropology and Sociology) course: Community Studies language: English abstract: And me I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it's not some place you can look for cause it's not where you go. It's how you feel for a moment in your life when you're a part of something and if you find that moment... it lasts forever... says Leonardo di Caprio at the end of the movie The Beach upon return from a failed utopian island community. This statement together with the whole movie expresses a widespread conviction: utopian communities are bound to fail. Paradise is nothing that one can realize in an actual community. If anything it can be realized as a feeling or a state of mind; but why do we think that way? Do we all feel that there is a sociological law that inevitably leads to the demise of a community that tries to realize the ideal society? Is this point of view empirically provable? These were the questions that intrigued me when I decided to make utopian communities my research topic; or formulated into a single research question: Is there a single most important feature or process that led to the demise or survival of former utopian communities?To answer this question we should first have a brief look at the great field of studies about the various kinds of utopias. This will help us achieve a better understanding and localization of the aspect of utopia we are looking at in this paper (utopian communities). At the same time it will help us to find a useful definition of the vague and ambiguous term utopia and more specifically utopian communities. Subsequently we will also have a brief look at the history of those communal experiments. After these prefatory remarks I will introduce Rosabeth Moss Kanter's concept of utopian commitment as a conceptual framework for the explorati