Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars and Visitors

In a letter to Emerson, George Ripley outlined his original vision for the community. He wrote:

Our objects, as you know, are to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker...to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents...to do away the necessity of menial services, by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institution.

This is a review of the short-lived commune show more during an era of such experimentation. Growing from informal Transcendentalist gatherings, the agricultural and social experiment became an earnest effort on poor land consuming members' monetary investments. This author takes the opinion that the introduction of the socialist approaches of Charles Fourier, a French philosopher and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Fourier's social views and proposals inspired a whole movement of intentional communities.

Perhaps most interesting here is the biographical details of Association participants, including notables ones such as founder Ralph Waldo Emerson and an initially enthusiastic Nathaniel Hawthorne.

There seems to be bitterness here about Fourierism (socialism) bringing down the experiment without much analysis and reflection on poor choices made before that switch in philosophy:

* Not very arable land chosen for an agricultural venture,
* Insufficient initial financial investment,
* Not insuring an important building which burned down after being built.

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