Item Detail
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27966
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0
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0
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English
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Early Mormon Communitarianism
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Mormonism and American Culture
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New York, NY
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Harper & Row
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37-58
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At about the time Robert Owen established New Harmony, and the Transcendentalists their Brook Farm, and literally scores of additional experiments in communal living flourished as part of the general spirit of reform, the Mormons too indulged in a significant effort to create a self-sustaining communal order, based on the Puritan assumption that in the use of the goods of the earth man possessed only a lease, or "stewardship," from God. Here Leonard J. Arrington describes this experimental effort of the 1830s, noting the differences between the Mormon system and communal societies elsewhere, and also suggesting how the Mormon failure reflected certain inherent weaknesses in any such economic system. After the Mormons moved to the Great Basin they tried other forms of socialistic community at Orderville, Utah. This effort had no more success than the earlier one, and for many of the same reasons. [Editors' summary]