a colony of that nature during any step of its purely experimental stageâ ...... across central Africa they begin to wonder âwas denn geschehen werde, wenn.
Utopia, Science, and the Nature of Civilization in Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland Elun Gabriel
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Volume 48, Number 1, February 2012, pp. 9-29 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/smr.2012.0003
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smr/summary/v048/48.1.gabriel.html
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Utopia, Science, and the Nature of Civilization in Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland elun gabriel
St. Lawrence University
In November 1889, the Viennese political economist and journalist Dr. Theodor Hertzka published Freiland: Ein soziales Zukunftsbild, a novelistic account of the formation of a colony of Europeans in East Africa meant to illustrate his solution of the “social problem.” The paradox of modern capitalism, as Hertzka saw it, lay in the fact that consumption continually failed to keep pace with the ever expanding productive capacity of the modern industrial economy, creating crises of overproduction even in the midst of widespread poverty and want. Freiland depicts a new economic system in which free access to capital (which cannot be owned, but can be used by anyone) and universal availability of production information stimulate the rapid and tandem expansion of production and consumption, leading to universal prosperity. Embedded in the novel are adventure narratives, two love stories, and a war, but what dominates its 400-plus pages are lengthy discussions of the Freeland system of production (replete with detailed lists of agricultural and industrial output) and descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Mt. Kenya region in which the colony is located. The characters are flatly drawn (even for a utopian novel) and the plot lacks any real tension, as the Freelanders proceed from triumph to triumph, guided by the lodestar of Hertzka’s economic theory. Despite its stylistic shortcomings, the novel proved a popular success, running through ten German editions in seven years. By 1892 the novel had been translated into English (1890), Czech (1891), French, Hungarian, Dutch (1892), and further editions in Polish, Romanian, Russian, Italian, and Swedish were in preparation (Horr, The Freeland Movement 1; Neubacher 10–11; “Neue ‘Freiland’-Uebersetzungen” 1). The novel’s popularity inspired Hertzka to publish the 1893 sequel, Eine Reise nach Freiland, which addressed criticisms of his system through the memoir of a new and skeptical immigrant to the society. Though not as successful as the original, the cover of a 1905 English translation boasted that it had sold over 70,000 copies in Germany (A Trip). As its author had hoped, the novel’s success extended beyond the literary realm. Within months of its publication, Freiland-Vereine had sprung up throughout German-speaking central Europe. By the end of 1890, the movement boasted ten chapters with a total of 245 members. Six months later, membership had climbed to about a thousand people in twenty-four chapters and Hertzka had begun publishing a biweekly Freiland insert in his seminar 48.1 (February 2012)
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Zeitschrift für Staats- und Volkswirtschaft (Freiländische Actions-Comité 59; Neubacher 23–25). Freeland Associations continued to proliferate in cities throughout Austria-Hungary, Germany, western Europe, and even the United States. At its height, the movement encompassed nearly a thousand local chapters (Glass 267 n.35; Hertzler 236). In 1891, Hertzka established the Freeland Action Committee, which began to plan an expedition to found a colony according to his principles and by 1894 had accumulated over 87,000 Marks in contributions (Hertzka, Freiland xxiv). In February 1894, under the leadership of Viennese businessman Dr. Julius Wilhelm, twenty men drawn from over 300 applicants set out for Africa in a ship purchased by the society, charged with finding a suitable location in the Kenya highlands for the colony (“Freiländische Nachrichten” 1). Upon their arrival in Africa, the group ran afoul of British authorities suspicious that the Freelanders represented an attempt to establish a Germanic sphere of influence in British East Africa, despite Wilhelm’s belief that he had gained British government approval for the venture during a visit to London (“Wiener Freilandverein” 1–2; Horr, The Freeland Movement 2–3). The would-be colonists remained stranded in the coastal town of Lamu, unable to begin their inland trek up the Tana River. In July, when it became clear that British colonial authorities would not let them proceed, the last of the dispirited Freelanders returned to Europe (“Nachrichten aus Afrika” 4–5). Following this disappointment, the movement soon fell apart. Hertzka “left the field of propaganda,” according to his committed follower Alexander Horr, “knowing that nothing less than a political party of the proportions of the Social Democratic Party of Germany could prevent any government from laying violent hands on a colony of that nature during any step of its purely experimental stage” (The Freeland Movement 3), and instead turned his energies to working for his goals through economic and political reform in the Habsburg Empire. The Freeland movement left little enduring legacy and its history has been preserved mostly in compendia of utopian movements and a few scholarly investigations of fin-de-siècle Austrian utopias. The half-decade of Freeland fervour illuminates three important aspects of the role of science in the utopian imagination in late nineteenth-century Europe. First, the persuasiveness of Hertzka’s utopian vision derived directly from the author’s status as an economist who claimed to have solved through the application of scientific reasoning the key social problems of his day. Marx had, of course, advanced a very similar claim, and his followers, who represented a force vastly greater in scope than Hertzka’s movement at its height, proudly proclaimed their allegiance to “scientific” socialism, disdaining competitors as utopian. In fact almost every theorist of the age claimed to be supported by the authority of science (Wagar 107–09). While Marx always displayed a deep aversion to articulating any vision of life in the socialist future, the response to Hertzka’s novel suggests how powerful was the appetite of millions of late nineteenth-century Europeans, including many of
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 11 Marx’s own followers, for pictures of the future that a scientific remaking of society could produce. Second, the wave of Hertzka enthusiasm illustrates how widespread were hopes that science would provide the conditions for the transcendence of social conflict, among not only socialists but liberals of a variety of stripes as well. Whereas Marx regarded science as the key to understanding capitalism’s irresolvable conflicts but saw political revolution as the only way to overcome them, Hertzka promised that scientific insights into the economy would enable an orderly and nonviolent transformation of industrial society into a form that would produce abundance for all (Rosner 115, 117). What set his utopia apart from Social Democratic reformism was his liberal assurance that economic prosperity could be achieved only through a system of free competition, not through the kind of centrally planned economy imagined by state-oriented socialists. This vision of peaceful social change appealed to prosperous workers committed to reformist trade unionism and even more so to middleclass professionals and business owners troubled by the poverty, squalor, and social unrest bred by the capitalist system but averse to the class-based revolutionary millennialism of Marxism (and anarchism). That Hertzka’s utopian plan could garner so much support and then fade away so quickly also suggests how ideologically broad was the utopian faith in scientific solutions to the era’s social problems, encompassing traditional economists and other social scientists as well as a wide spectrum of liberal reformers and socialists, not only in Austria-Hungary and Germany, but throughout Europe and the United States. The vast majority of those attracted to the Freeland project, like Americans enamoured of Edward Bellamy’s nearly contemporaneous utopian novel Looking Backward, were already committed to some version of scientific utopian change, so support for the new movement required only a minor adjustment in beliefs, or even none at all (Bowman 110–21; Morgan 245–98). Though every reformist and utopian movement had its own set of core beliefs and theoretical positions, many people excited by hopes for social change approached these groups with little concern for doctrinarian shibboleths, moving easily among even those with very different theoretical premises. When the Freeland movement, like the Bellamy fad, died out, its devotees for the most part simply migrated elsewhere within the vast utopian-reformist milieu. Some returned to the movements from which they had come to Freeland, while others gravitated toward other utopian reform projects (such as the land reformers in Germany, Austria, Britain, and the United States) or toward large organized socialist parties. Revealing of contemporaries’ awareness of this ideological promiscuity was German and Austrian Social Democratic leaders’ constant preoccupation with how little their parties’ members understood even the most basic elements of Marxist theory, which was supposedly their guiding intellectual framework (Kautsky; Langewiesche 199; Lidtke, The Alternative Culture 182–86, 265–66, n. 54; Martienssen 244, 257–60, 374, n. 4). Utopian promise more than theory lay
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at the heart of the socialist appeal, just as it did for so many other “scientific” reform movements. Finally, Hertzka’s scientific utopia shows that faith in science could undermine as well as buttress European racist imperialism. The importance of scientific thinking to the rise of biological racism in the last third of the nineteenth century is well understood (Gould; Shipman). What Hertzka’s utopia makes clear is that an emphasis on science’s ability to solve social problems could also point toward an antiracialist conception of the world, in which “civilization” was not linked to biology or even to cultural traditions but to social organization, making it accessible to all who grasped the correct principles of economic organization, irrespective of race or culture. To be sure, Freiland did not escape some central tropes of imperialist racism, but it nevertheless offered a model of potential racial equality strikingly at odds with the dominant attitudes of its day. In this sense, it is a salutary reminder to the jaded, postmodern eye of the emancipatory dimension of faith in science, too easily forgotten in the shadow of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century horrors conducted under its banner. The universalism at the heart of Hertzka’s utopian vision resisted the logic of enforced European domination and racial inequality. Yet in so doing, it also rejected the value of cultural diversity by positing an ideal civilization that must perforce obliterate distinctions among peoples. Though based on the premise that Freeland would conquer purely through its attractive force, the novel remains silent on what would transpire should non-Freelanders choose to retain their traditional ways and resist its universalizing impulse. Hertzka’s novel illustrates the ambiguous nature of an enduring liberal belief that a free-market system will end social and cultural inequalities, uniting all members of the family homo economicus. When Hertzka published his novel, trust in the power and authority of science was at its zenith. Diverse thinkers believed not only that the power of nature could be harnessed to produce cheap and plentiful food, clothing, and material comforts while reducing the need for human labour, but also that human society itself was amenable to scientific improvement. Already in the 1840s, Auguste Comte had proposed that through observation it was possible to discover laws, akin to those of the natural world, that governed the functioning of human society and whose understanding would make possible the creation of a superior social system. Comte’s term “social physics” encapsulated the idea that the social world could be directly compared to the natural world. Following Comte, Marx and other pioneers of the modern “social sciences” would seek to discover laws illuminating the functioning of various human social systems. Perhaps no field more than economics promoted the idea that human relations were governed by scientific laws. If liberal economists embraced this premise, so too did many critics of capitalism. Friedrich Engels’s famous distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism, designed to bestow the imprimatur of science on Marxism alone, partook of what was in
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 13 fact a nearly universal insistence by utopian thinkers that their ideas rested on a firm scientific foundation. Hertzka too saw himself first and foremost as a scientist who had contributed new insights into the functioning of economic systems. His lengthy preface to Freiland laid out his vision’s theoretical basis, which began with an exploration of the social problem of poverty. If “jede Wissenschaft ihre Entstehung einem Problem verdankt,” he wrote, the problem of political economy could be posed as the question, “Warum werden wir nicht reicher nach Maßgabe unserer wachsenden Fähigkeit, Reichtum zu erzeugen?” Only through “jener mühevollen, umfassenderen Anstrengung, welche Voraussetzung der Wissenschaft ist” could this question be answered (xiv). By building on and correcting the work of his predecessors, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, and applying the “streng naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungsmethode auf das soziale Problem,” he came to the insights articulated in his 1886 Gesetze der sozialen Entwicklung, namely that the current social order was no longer the most efficient one, having arisen in a bygone epoch when “der einzelne Arbeiter zwar mehr erzeugen konnte, als zu tierischer Fristung seines Daseins unerläßlich war, aber nicht genug, um, gestützt auf diesen Eigenertrag der Arbeit, höhere Bedürfnisse zu befriedigen” (ix). This situation necessitated the majority’s exploitation so that some individuals could have the wealth and leisure indispensible for the advance of civilization. But once industry had developed to the level at which it could produce more than enough goods to provide for everyone’s wants as well as needs, the old economic organization of society had become obsolete. “Die ausbeuterische Gesellschaft produziert daher nicht jene Reichtümer, zu deren Hervorbringung sie der Fortschritt von Wissenschaft und Technik befähigen würde,” Hertzka argued. “Die Verwendbarkeit aller Eträge noch so hochergiebiger Arbeit ist also an das Entstehen einer neuen socialen Ordnung geknüpft, die jedem Arbeitenden den Genuß des vollen Ertrages der eigenen Arbeit sichert” (ix–x). For Hertzka, as for Marx, such a transformation of the social order to conform to new productive conditions must follow. Taking heed of “das von Darwin entdeckte natürliche Entwickelungsgesetz,” he concluded, “wenn wirklich die socialen Einrichtungen aufgehört haben, die relativ besten [...] zu sein, ihre Beseitigung nicht bloß möglich, sondern schlechthin unvermeidlich sein müsse; denn im Kampfe ums Dasein kann nicht nur, sondern muß das Überlebte dem Besseren, Zweckentsprechenderen weichen” (vii–viii). He proposed that this could be done by abolishing ownership of land and other capital, making it freely available to anyone who wished to start a business, on the condition that its value be repaid out of the enterprise’s profits. He shared with many liberal and socialist thinkers a fear that monopolization of capital, especially land, stifled the creative potential of individual competition in a free market. Many such reformers championed the cause of land ownership’s abolition or heavy taxation. In Hertzka’s system, one could increase one’s personal wealth relative to others through hard work, alertness to market demand, and
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innovation, but could not become an owner of the means of production for whom others would be forced to work owing to their lack of capital. The law of supply and demand would ensure the production of the goods people desired. He envisioned a central bank that would publish constant updates on the going prices of various commodities, so that people could efficiently respond to changes in the market. Overproduction of a single product would lower its price, encouraging people to shift their work to other sectors of the economy where demand was outstripping supply. Free competition among individuals would ensure innovation, though the benefits would not be long-lasting, since producers would not be allowed to retain trade secrets or patent inventions (161–68). Hertzka envisaged a frictionless economy in which no one could accumulate structural advantages, allowing liberal free-market principles to function undistorted, to the benefit of all. As in the theoretical manifesto that introduces the novel and the long didactic section that concludes it (the last quarter of the book consists of the minutes of a world summit on the Freeland system in which Hertzka’s ideas are elaborated through Socratic dialogue), scientism saturates the central narrative. Lengthy disquisitions regarding the geography and natural resources of East Africa and the economic workings of the Freeland colony dominate the text, whose main goal is to illustrate how the Freelanders repeatedly overcome obstacles through the application of a rational, scientific approach. He plunges into minutely detailed descriptions in the novel’s first pages, as his narrator exhaustively recounts everything about the makeup of the exploratory group (how many naturalists, physicians, engineers, and foresters are required) and its supplies (including the precise weight of the party’s provisions, and thus the number of beasts of burden needed). A typical passage runs as follows: Diese ansehnliche Last sollte auf 100 Saumpferde, 200 Esel und Maultiere und 80 Kamele verladen werden. Da wir außerdem 200 Pferde brauchten, um uns beritten zu machen und auch eine kleine Reserve zum Ersatze unterwegs eingehender Tiere wünschenswert war, so wurde beschlossen, in allem 320 Pferde, 210 Esel und 85 Kamele zu kaufen. (18–19)
The novel delineates the planned colony’s location with equal precision: “das Hochgebirge des Kenia, d. I. an das Land östlich vom Ukerewesee, zwischen dem 1. Grade südlicher bis zum 1. Grade nördlicher Breite und zwischen dem 34. bis 38. Grade östlicher Länge” (8). The stream of numbers and calculations never lets up, appearing on almost every page of the book. Assessing the colony’s early progress, the narrator recounts: Als das erste Jahr unseres Aufenthaltes am Kenia vergangen war, zählte Freiland 95000 Seelen, wovon 27000 arbeitsfähige Männer, die zu 218 Associationen vereinigt, 87 verschiedene Gewerbe betrieben. Die letzte Ernte [...] hatte von 14500 Hektaren angebauten Ackerlandes nahezu 2 Millionen Zentner Getreide getragen, die einen Wert von 300000 Pfd. Sterling
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 15 repräsentierten und den dabei beschäftigten 10800 Arbeitern im Durchschnitt nahe an 2½ Schilling Gewinn für jede darangewendete Arbeitsstunde ergaben. (183)
Matching the incessant lists of production output and lengths of transportation networks, prices for various goods, details of mining techniques, and sundry other aspects of the Freeland colony is a precise (though not necessarily accurate) rendition of Kenyan flora and fauna, as well as the native human populations with whom the Freelanders interact (including the Masai, Kamba, Duruma, Kikuyu, and Teita). In his preface Hertzka insists, rather than give free rein to his fantasy, “daß vielmehr die im folgenden gebotenen Schilderungen der wenig bekannten centralafrikanischen Alpen- und Seelandschaften in allen Stücken der nüchternen Wirklichkeit entsprechen” (xxviii). By employing so much detail, he sought to convey that his fiction was rooted in a careful application of economic, industrial, and geographical science. How much attention readers actually paid to these details in unknowable, but given their ubiquity, they must have been part of the book’s appeal. The same fascination with logistical detail manifested in the Freiland newspaper Hertzka published, which included in one issue, for instance, a three-page list of items the actual expedition would require (“Liste der Bedarfsartikel” 2–4). Hertzka’s success at having his novel taken seriously as a scientific text depended heavily on his status as a well-known political economist and journalist. From 1873 to 1880 he had served as economics editor of the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, during which time he published several works on economic questions – Währung und Handel (1876), Die österreichische Währungsfrage (1877), and Die Goldrechnung in Österreich (1879) – and cofounded the Society of Austrian National Economists. In 1880, dissatisfied with the Neue Freie Presse, he began a competing daily newspaper, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, which he edited through 1886, before starting yet another journalistic endeavour, the Zeitschrift für Staats- und Volkswirtschaft. In the same year, his Die Gesetze der sozialen Entwicklung set forth the critique of the current economic and social system that served as the inspiration for Freiland (Neubacher 7–8). He also participated as an expert consultant in government discussions on currency reform and trade issues throughout his career (Rosner 115). Hertzka’s credibility as an economic authority and his scientific approach helped validate Freiland as a serious proposal, as opposed to a fanciful “utopia,” in the eyes of its proponents. In language reminiscent of Marx and Engels, Arthur Ransom, the novel’s English translator, wrote in a pamphlet on the Freeland system that once Hertzka had discovered “the social problem was capable of solution in a scientific and practical way [...] the old Utopias with their pretty fancies and impracticable plans could at once be relegated to the region of amusing stories” (8). Alexander Horr praised Hertzka for having “raised the idea of colonization from a sheer Utopia to the firm basis of
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scientific certitude by invoking the aid of economics” (Freeland in a Nutshell 1). Ernest Udny, in one of a series of newspaper articles on Freeland, declared, “Dr. Hertzka, who has spent his life in studying and writing about economic subjects, approaches the social problem calmly and philosophically – without the heat of passion, but with the clear cold light of reason. He has considered the whole subject from the point of view of evolution” (17). Another British supporter noted in the same vein, “Dr. Hertzka, unlike most other social reformers, does not make dissatisfaction and injustice, or a mere desire for change, his starting-point, but approaches the subject as a scientific, philosophical thinker” (Gümpel 274–75), while a brochure from the British Freeland Association proclaimed, “He approached the subject not as an agitator or demagogue, but as a philosopher and social economist” (“A New Commonwealth” 1). All these endorsements indicate that Hertzka’s status as a learned economist, whose ideas flowed from a scientific analysis of the social problem, played a key role in making Freiland persuasive. Even those critical of his ideas nonetheless took his novel seriously as a work of social science rather than mere fantasy. Jeremiah Jenks’s critical review in Political Science Quarterly disparaged Hertzka’s literary skills and complained (with much justice) that the novel’s “spirit is the passionless, scientific one,” with “dissertations as long, dry and unpleasantly scientific to the unscientific novel reader, as is a work on political economy” (706). But Jenks accepted Hertzka’s status as a knowledgeable economist, taking issue only with his optimistic view of humans as fundamentally rational in their behaviour (708). If the novel’s credibility rested in large part upon its claims to scientific accuracy, in which it was hardly unique among utopian novels of the era, what was the specific appeal of the solution to the social question Hertzka laid out? Without personal memoirs or detailed membership lists, it is difficult to say precisely what attracted hundreds of thousands of readers and FreilandVereine members to his utopian vision. Yet one draw was almost certainly the prospect of a solution to the “social problem” that did not involve revolution. The era of excitement about Freeland also saw the massive growth of the German Social Democratic Party, whose moderate leaders increasingly embraced the idea that, as the Berliner Volksblatt put it in 1891, “the present society is growing into socialism” (qtd. in Lidtke, The Outlawed Party 298). Eduard Bernstein would soon openly challenge the Marxist idea of revolution in favour of “evolutionary socialism,” parallelling the reorientation in thinking Viktor Adler was bringing to the Austrian Social Democrats. The growing confidence in a triumph over social inequality and tensions through peaceful reform was likewise central to the message of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which, like Freiland, saw legions of enthusiasts come together to try to realize its precepts (Sadler). For both men, faith in peaceful social transformation was inseparable from the belief that science would furnish the tools to generate universal prosperity and overcome class conflict. The flavour of this optimism
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 17 is well captured in the words of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, recalling the Vienna of his youth: Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert war in seinem liberalistischen Idealismus ehrlich überzeugt, auf dem geraden und unfehlbaren Weg zur ‘besten aller Welten’ zu sein [...] dieser Glaube an den ununterbrochenen, unaufhaltsamen ‘Fortschritt’ hatte für jenes Zeitalter wahrhaftig die Kraft einer Religion; man glaubte an diesen ‘Fortschritt’ schon mehr als an die Bibel, und sein Evangelium schien unumstößlich bewiesen durch die täglich neuen Wunder der Wissenschaft und der Technik. (17)
As Zweig wrote, thanks to “die Wissenschaft [...] dieser Erzengel des Fortschritts,” even “das Problem der Probleme, die Armut der großen Massen, schien nicht mehr unüberwindlich. [...] Soziologen und Professoren wetteiferten, die Lebenshaltung des Proletariats gesünder und sogar glücklicher zu gestalten” (17–18). Zweig, born in 1881, described precisely the world Hertzka and his followers inhabited, the faith in progress they shared with so many of their contemporaries. Though scattered references to the kinds of people who joined Freeland associations suggest a degree of cross-class participation in the movement, the educated upper middle class, the group most likely to put its faith in scientific solutions to social problems, most reluctant to countenance revolution or large-scale appropriation of capital, and most committed to free-market liberalism, made up its core constituency. Hertzka’s biweekly Freiland paper and movement pamphlets periodically listed Freiland-Vereine heads in various cities and these were usually professionals or other men of means (“Die Freiland-Bewegung” 1; Freiländische Actions-Comité 63–64). Among the eighteen people invited to the Freeland Action Committee’s first conference, held in August 1891, were three businessmen (“Kaufmänner”), three bankers, two factory owners, a major industrialist (“Grossindustrieller”), a publishing house owner, a Reichsrat member, a judge, and an explorer of Africa. Four of the invitees held doctorates and five had aristocratic titles (“Die Conferenz des freiländischen Actions-Comités” 1). The Action Committee, claimed Horr, “numbered among its members some of the most distinguished names in the ranks of science, finance, politics and industry” (The Freeland Movement 1). Regarding the Freeland groups’ rank and file, we have much less evidence. Whereas Hertzka described the movement’s followers as drawn from diverse social classes, including workers, shopkeepers, and members of the upper middle class (Neubacher 24), most other authors underscored the latter’s predominance. Ransom emphasized the prevalence of “noblemen, merchants, bankers, men of letters, and others” (13; see also Glass 75–76, 266–67 n. 35), while the British Freeland Association numbered among Hertzka’s supporters “persons of title, gentlemen of independent means, bankers, lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, physicians, engineers, etc., as well as representatives of the
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working classes” (3). Evoking the rising tide of working-class dissatisfaction, including “strikes and lock-outs of unprecedented dimensions,” the anarchists’ “secret and violent war against the existing state of society,” and “May-Day labour meetings on a gigantic scale,” Freeland booster C. Godfrey Gümpel revealed the attraction for these men of the prosperous classes of a nonviolent solution to the “social question” (270). Dashed on the rocks of imperialist realpolitik, the Freeland vision quickly sank into obscurity, but in its heyday it thrived within a dense matrix of optimistic social reform movements that put their faith in science as a means of reordering the social world in ways that would ameliorate poverty and other social ills. A partial catalogue of Freeland’s associations with other utopian movements will illustrate these interconnections. Hertzka’s journalist colleague and fellow Viennese Jew Theodor Herzl took pains to distinguish his Zionist colonization vision from Freiland because his readers were likely familiar with it (Der Judenstaat 4; see also Briefe und Tagebücher 2: 246–47; Herman 236; Neubacher 55–57). Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, husband of the peace activist and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner (whose acclaimed novel Die Waffen Nieder was published a month after Freiland) joined the Vienna Freiland-Verein and was elected to its supervisory board (“Constituirende Generalversammlung” 1; Freiländische Actions-Comité 63). Gustav Lilienthal, brother and collaborator of aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, joined the Freeland group in Berlin and occasionally brought Otto to meetings as well (Oppenheimer, “Mein wissenschaftlicher Weg” 82). Champions of Esperanto, the artificial language invented in the 1880s by Polish-Russian Jew Ludovic Zamenhof to promote worldwide harmony and understanding, began placing ads in Hertzka’s Freiland newspaper in March 1892. Further afield, Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, wrote to Hertzka that he regarded the Freeland idea “with the greatest interest and approval” (Horr, The Freeland Movement 2). Although Wallace demurred from playing an active part in the Freeland Action Committee owing to his many other commitments, he agreed to take the title of vice president of the executive committee, lending his own status as an eminent scientist to help promote the Freeland cause (“Zur Freilandbewegung” 1; see also “Aufruf” 1; Horr, The Freeland Movement 2; Udny 20). Wallace was no stranger to social reform. In addition to backing women’s suffrage and monetary reform (converting to a pure paper money system without the backing of gold or silver), he was president of the British Land Nationalisation Society, an organization that was part of a broad European and American land reform movement that sought to do away with ground rent (Damaschke; George; Wallace). Though these land reformers disagreed strenuously, for instance over whether land should be nationalized or kept in private hands but taxed at a high rate to reduce its value, all shared the notion expressed in Freiland that capitalist land ownership distorted the economy’s proper functioning. Franz Oppenheimer, another land reformer and early follower of Hertzka, went on to participate in the vegetarian
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 19 Eden colony in Germany and to work with Herzl’s Zionist movement (Freiland in Deutschland; Neubacher 48–50). Both Hertzka’s novel and the Freeland movement also received attention, some positive and some negative, from the European and American leftist press, especially from non-Marxist socialists and anarchists also seeking peaceful solutions to the problems of modern capitalism. Even mainstream economists and other social scientists noticed Freiland, which was listed in the “recent publications” sections of the two English-language economics journals of the day (the American Quarterly Journal of Economics and the British Economic Journal) and reviewed in both economics and political science journals (Edgeworth 284–85; “Recent Periodicals” 623; “Recent Publications” 252). That many social observers took note of, and in many cases expressed support for, the Freeland movement did not betoken a deep commitment to Hertzka’s particular ideas but to his general aspirations. Emblematic was the frequent comparison of Hertzka and Bellamy, who both wrote utopian novels that inspired followers to try to put them into practice, but shared few common ideas about how the utopia’s economy would function. Bellamy imagined a powerful state-socialist organization of workers as part of a disciplined industrial army, which would do away with unnecessary and wasteful competition, whereas Hertzka envisioned a system that relied on the benefits of individual competition in a free-market economy and included only a minimalistic, regulatory state apparatus. Even Wallace, despite his positive view of Freiland, appears to have had only a superficial interest in the book’s details, writing to his daughter Violet, “It is very good – as good a story as ‘Looking Backward,’ but not quite so pleasantly written. [...] The results are much the same as in ‘Looking Backward’ but brought about in a different and very ingenious manner. It may be called ‘Individualistic Socialism’” (Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences 114). A similar level of nonspecific enthusiasm for the novel appeared in a letter from another of Violet Wallace’s correspondents. Emilie Michaelis, English translator of several works by the German education reformer and inventor of the concept of “kindergarten,” Friedrich Fröbel, wrote that she preferred Freiland to Looking Backward because it offered a more useful guide to moving toward “true socialism” than the latter, but provided no more specific analysis (2). Wallace and Michaelis were hardly unusual in seeing Bellamy and Hertzka as essentially similar. The latter was commonly referred to as the “Austrian Bellamy.” This conflation suggests that it was the broad elements their novels held in common – the depiction of a peaceful transition into a world that united socialistic solidarity and the dynamism of industrial capitalism to achieve universal prosperity – that interested most supporters, rather than the specifics of the authors’ economic visions, which were in fact very much at odds. While a handful of doctrinaire Hertzka-ites no doubt studied the intricacies of the Freeland system as closely as Marx’s acolytes pored over their master’s oracular utterances, most of the movement’s supporters and enthusiasts were
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attracted to Freiland because of its depiction of the realization of widelyshared utopian aspirations through the application of scientific law. If the context of Hertzka’s novel and the short-lived movement it generated remind us of the vibrancy and multidimensionality of the utopian impulse at the end of the nineteenth century, the novel’s content is noteworthy because it vividly illustrates the emancipatory potential of scientific utopianism, which could subvert as well as support ruthless imperialism. In Freiland, Hertzka sought to apply the logic of Darwinian natural selection to human society, but in a way that challenged the assumptions of biological racism so common at the time. As Hildegard Glass notes, “reference to Darwin as a means to establish scientific credibility for fictional projections of future worlds was a common phenomenon in the utopian literature of the late nineteenth century,” but this did not foreordain the contours of the vision Darwinianism might be pressed into service to support (77–78). Darwinian language infused the social projects of utopian thinkers, racist imperialists, Social Democrats, and of a variety of “practical” politicians and theorists looking to solve social problems of all sorts (Kelly). In Freiland, this language consistently underscores the importance of economic organization, rather than race or culture, to civilization’s progress. What followed from Hertzka’s emphasis on economic restructuring as the key to a better society was a rejection of the dominant narrative of imperialist expansionism prevalent in so much social theory, popular culture, and official government policy. However, in rejecting racial and cultural hierarchy, Hertzka’s scientific utopianism also devalued cultural and social diversity, which he depicted as giving way to a universal civilization arising from Freeland’s economic principles. Aspects of Hertzka’s novel, in particular his account of the Freelanders’ subjugation of nature, read like a typical imperial fantasy of the time. When the colonists arrive in the Kenya highlands, they decide to settle in a valley of enormous beauty complete with a “tiefblauer, klarer See,” “ein blumiges Park- und Wiesenland,” “zahllose Elefanten, Giraffen, Zebras, Antilopen,” and a soaring waterfall. This “Naturwunder sonder gleichen, dessen unsägliche Majestät und Schönheit Worte nicht schildern können,” dubbed Edenthal by the Freelanders (88–89), is promptly domesticated by its new inhabitants, who lay out a grid-patterned city, launch a “schonungsloser Vernichtungskrieg” (94) against monkeys, leopards, lions, and crocodiles, begin cutting down trees and mining the earth, and otherwise turn the idyllic valley into a site of large-scale industrial production (90–101; Glass 80–81). While European technology remakes the landscape, European zoological know-how domesticates the elephants, zebras, ostriches, giraffes, and buffaloes. That the colonists find this fertile, resource-rich region totally uninhabited likewise conforms to common European delusions about Africans’ failure to make use of their land. In reality, as the Austrian mapmaker-explorer Ludwig von Höhnel noted when asked his opinion of the Freeland expedition’s chances, “every square yard of this part
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 21 of Northeast Africa is densely populated wherever the land is productive and watered,” while the only uninhabited parts of the region were those “useless for cultivation” (“Poor Prospects”). Freiland’s conventional narrative of European technical prowess turning the wild, empty, and fecund African landscape into a site of orderly resource extraction stands in contrast to Hertzka’s portrayal of race relations. Here his utopian vision departs from typical European attitudes toward “natives.” While the novel at times promulgates the ideal of the “civilizing mission,” it highlights the possibility of peaceful coexistence and cooperation between Africans and Europeans, based on the Freelanders’ respect for the Africans’ independence and free will and a shared desire for mutually beneficial trade. When the colonists first encounter hostile Masai, they fire their weapons over their enemies’ heads, terrifying them into submission without seriously harming anyone. All they demand of the vanquished Africans is a peace treaty. Once both sides exchange gifts and enter into a mutually beneficial alliance, the leader of the party/narrator comments: Wir hatten nunmehr genügende Sicherheit, allmählich wachsende Kultur in diesen bisher von unaufhörlichen Fehden und Raubzügen heimgesuchten Gegenden einziehen zu sehen, stets brauchbarere Genossen unseres großen Werkes in den schwarzen und braunen Eingeborenen zu erziehen, und indem wir sie lehrten, Wohlstand und Überfluß für sich selber zu erzeugen, die Quellen unseres eigenen Wohlstandes zu vermehren. (111)
As they encounter other African groups, the Freelanders engage in a similar process of negotiation or mostly bloodless conflict, incorporating each new group into a Pax Freelandica. The end of incessant tribal fighting allows the Africans to bring under cultivation lands formerly threatened by hostile raiding parties, leading to growing wealth and “civilization” (60–63, 230–31, 236). While this fantasy partakes of the typical European belief that “natives” require an external civilizing force, it eschews the notion, found in such famous works as Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” that “new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half-child” must be forced into improvement against their will (359). In fact, though Hertzka shows Europeans bringing peace and prosperity to Africa, it is more specifically the ethos of Freeland, which is clearly contrasted to European values, that is the civilizing agent, and it is Africans who take the initiative in improving their economic situation without outside coercion. Much of the initial work of building the Freeland colony is done with the use of African labourers, who work voluntarily and are well paid with European goods. Though Africans are employed for unskilled jobs requiring brute force, the logic of the Freeland system depends on growing the wealth of workers so that they can consume the ever-expanding fruits of production. African workers have their own accounts at the colony’s central bank (278) and “Die Arbeitszeit war in Edenthal einstweilen für jedermann –
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ob Arbeitsvorsteher oder simpler Arbeiter, Weißer oder Neger – die gleiche” (122). Hertzka’s proposed model of African-European labour relations differed dramatically from the reality of European colonialism at the time in its lack of compulsion, formal equality of labour and pay conditions, and absence of hard racial distinctions. Furthermore, Hertzka anticipated the rapid assimilation of Africans into Freeland itself. As the story progresses, the Masai become ever more closely connected to the Freelanders, eventually adopting their economic and social principles. To facilitate trade, the Masai decide to build a road linking their own lands with Freeland. The narrator’s remark that “das Werk mit einer Energie förderten, die Niemand bei diesem noch vor kurzem so arbeitsscheuen Volke für möglich gehalten hätte” (229) shows Hertzka’s acceptance of the stereotype of African laziness, but also his faith in Freeland’s attractive power. Africans are not forcibly relocated or eliminated to make way for progress, nor even subjugated for their own good, but rather find the Freeland colony an example they wish to emulate. The Masai reorganize their society along Freeland’s lines because they want the kind of bounty the Freelanders enjoy, and having achieved this, they participate fully in Freeland civilization and bear no residual traces of savagery. Over time, all the African groups neighbouring the Freeland colony adopt its system, so that by the colony’s twenty-fifth year, sixteen million of the forty-two million people “unter freiländischem Einflusse” are native Africans (263; Ransom 12). These Africans are fully part of Freeland society, as Hertzka makes evident in the letters home of a young Italian diplomat by the name of Carlo Falieri. After expressing his amazement that “gewöhnliche Landleute, Ackerbauer und Gärtner” in Freeland behaved “mit einer vornehmen Sicherheit des Benehmens, die mich anfangs glauben ließ, daß sich hier die Spitzen der ortsansässigen Gesellschaft Stelldichein gegeben hätten,” Falieri continues, “Nicht minder überraschend war das Behaben der unter den Weißen zerstreut auftretenden und mit diesen unbefangen verkehrenden Neger,” who gave “den Eindruck durchaus civilisierter Menschen.” He reports that an African he met on a train (who spoke “ein fließendes, korrektes Englisch” and “hielt eine freiländische Zeitung”) was able to discourse about world affairs “in einer Weise, die von eben so viel Sachkenntnis als gesundem Urteil Zeugnis ablegte.” Falieri’s praise of the Africans’ civilization is tempered by his conclusion, “wie ich mich aus dem Gespräche [...] überzeugen konnte, stand ihre Bildung auf einer ziemlich hohen Stufe, jedenfalls auf einer weit höheren, als die der Landbevölkerung in den meisten Gegenden Europas” (290–91). While Hertzka portrays Africans and rural Europeans as less civilized than elite Europeans (Bach 57, 62), there is no racial dimension to this assessment, and it is not a condition the inferior are fated to bear. As Glass notes, though the novel peddles many culturally racist attitudes about Africans, their integration into the utopian society sets Freiland apart from “many racially biased visions of a perfected authoritarian colonial government” (83). Compare Hertzka’s
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 23 stance to that of the German explorer of Africa Karl Peters, whose assessment of the Freeland expedition an American newspaper article relayed: “he rejects the idea that they will civilize the Africans and utilize their labour. To overcome the savagery of the natives would be a hopeless task, and the whites will probably kill them off as they push their settlements into the interior” (“White Men in Africa”). Hertzka was no cultural relativist, but neither was his colonization fantasy predicated on Africans’ innate or long-lasting inferiority or cavalierly accepting of genocide along the lines of Peters, German general Lothar von Trotha, who directed the near annihilation of the Herero a decade later, King Leopold of Belgium, or other European imperialists. Though the above are certainly among the most notoriously callous imperialists, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and other Darwinian scientists and thinkers also accepted the inevitable (and for many desirable) extinction of “primitive” peoples (Bratlinger 164–88). Even Wallace, an anti-imperialist inclined at times to romanticize the cultures of non-Europeans, could also conclude, if regretfully, that they must die out “from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European are superior” (qtd. in Bratlinger 185–86). Hertzka’s Social Darwinist understanding of societal difference, by contrast, led him to see inevitable struggle, but among fit and unfit economic and social systems rather than fit and unfit races. In this competition, it is in fact not European culture, but the Freeland system, that is revealed as the pinnacle of civilization. Non-Freeland Europeans and Americans are also uplifted by Freeland’s civilizing influence, starting with criminal castoffs of Western society. Hertzka’s narrator explains: Wir hatten allerdings unbedingtes Vertrauen in die veredelnden, weil das treibende Motiv der meisten Laster beseitigenden Konsequenzen unserer socialen Reformen; wir waren vollkommen beruhigt darüber, daß Freiland keine Verbrecher erzeugen und selbst durch Elend und Unwissenheit da draußen zu Verbrechern Gewordene, wenn nur irgend möglich, dem Laster entreißen werde. (135–36)
The novel offers an illustration in the form of a short memoir by a one-time American grifter who had set out for Freeland as part of a group of criminals hoping to profit from what they believed to be the Freelanders’ gullibility (249–55). In the end, not only did they find it impossible to make off with the large sum of money they had planned to steal, but they discovered that with relatively little work they could live well in Freeland. In fact, “der Umgang gleich und gleich mit anständigen Menschen hat etwas Lockendes selbst für Spitzbuben, wie ich damals einer war,” the chief swindler recalls, “Und dann [...] begann ich mich meines Gaunertums zu schämen.” While in the old world, everyone “nur die Wahl hatte, zu jagen, oder gejagt zu werden,” in Freeland honest work received its just rewards, making knavery unconscionable
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(254–55). Like the “primitive” Africans, the Western criminals are civilized by the Freeland society. Though the conflation of the European underclass with “savage” Africans was not uncommon at the time (William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, structured his most influential text, In Darkest England, and the Way Out, around this equation), Hertzka’s belief in the possibility of universal equality was unusual and directly linked to his vision of economic science as the key to human improvement. Nor did Hertzka exempt the European social elite from his civilizing project, an idea the novel conveys through repeated references to Europeans’ status as savages compared to the Freelanders, who look upon the practices of the “sogenannten ‘Kulturnationen’” (267) with repugnance. The Italian diplomat Falieri writes home: Die Wahrheit ist, daß der an die Excentricitäten abendländischer Moden gewohnte Fremde in Freiland angelangt, die nach künstlerischen Grundsätzen zusammengestellte hiesige Frauentracht anfangs etwas zu einfach, dann aber die Rückkehr zu den abendländischen Zerrbildern schlechterdings unerträglich findet. Du wirst Dich erinnern, daß David [a Freelander] uns in Rom versicherte, die europäischen Moden machten ihm genau den nämlichen Eindruck, wie die der afrikanischen Wilden; nach kaum einwöchentlichem Aufenthalte hier beginne ich diese Auffassung zu teilen. (331–32)
When Falieri, a nobleman, falls in love with a Freeland woman named Bertha, his father offers to make her a princess in Europe. To convey her revulsion at the idea of living off the exploitation of the lower classes, she asks him: Bedenken Sie doch, wenn Sie eine Tochter hätten und man würde von ihr verlangen, unter die menschenfressenden Njam-Njam zu gehen, und dort Königin zu werden, und der Vater des Bräutigams würde ihr versprechen, es sollten ihr recht zahlreiche und fette Sklaven geschlachtet werden. [...] [U]ns flößt das allmähliche Aussaugen und Verzehren eines Nebenmenschen nicht minderes Entsetzen ein, als Ihnen das buchstäbliche Auffressen desselben, und so wenig Sie an den Mahlzeiten der Kannibalen Teil zu nehmen im Stande sind, so unmöglich ist es uns, von der Ausbeutung geknechteter Mitmenschen zu leben. (464–65)
By rhetorically linking European elites to “savages” and cannibals, Hertzka asserted the civilizational superiority of Freeland. Similarly, in an ironic inversion of a European imperialist dilemma, as the Freelanders spread across central Africa they begin to wonder “was denn geschehen werde, wenn freiländische Ansiedler irgendwo fremdes, einem abendländischen Volke gehöriges Gebiet betreten sollten. [...] Sollten wir, im Besitze der stärkeren Civilisationsform, vor der zurückgebliebenen zurückweichen?” (281). In the end, the potential conflict between civilized Freeland and primitive Europe is resolved, as are the other conflicts in the novel, with a minimum of disruption
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 25 and violence, as all the world’s governments attend a conference in Freeland to learn the wonders of the new system. In the long scene that makes up the novel’s last section, delegates representing sixty-eight nations and the entire political spectrum (520–21) are all converted to the Freeland principles. If all the world’s citizens are equally in need of civilizing, all are also equally capable of becoming civilized. As one of Hertzka’s mouthpieces declares to a visitor: was Du bisher bei uns wahrzunehmen Gelegenheit hattest, daß wir nämlich an Erfindungskraft und geistiger Regsamkeit den anderen Nationen voranschreiten, es ist kein zufälliges Ergebnis irgendwelcher vorübergehender Einflüsse, sondern die notwendige Konsequenz unserer Institutionen, und jedes Volk, welches dieser letzteren nachahmt, wird die gleichen Konsequenzen verspüren. (344)
All are homo economicus, amenable to a rational and scientific remaking of their social orders along superior lines. Africans and others whom Hertzka regards as initially more primitive than Europeans do not need to progress through a series of developmental stages, because civilization is immediately accessible through the application of the scientific insights that govern Freeland. According to Hertzka’s logic, the Masai are in fact civilized long before most Europeans. The novel takes for granted European superiority over nonEuropeans, but Hertzka’s belief that all could directly reach a universal civilization separated his vision profoundly from that of adherents of biological racism, who asserted either that the savage could never attain civilization or that it would require a long and agonizing journey under European tutelage. Malachi Haim Hacohen has persuasively argued that such universalism was characteristic of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish progressive movement, which, “to emancipate itself from its own ethnicity, needed to dissolve all ethnicity and recover universal humanity.” Jewish progressives thus “divested their utopias of any national attribute,” promoting the idea that “the requirements of a good social order were a matter of scientific management, not cultural difference” (126). The alternative for Habsburg Jews was, of course, the route taken by Hertzka’s onetime colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism. In the preface to Der Judenstaat, he wrote of Freiland, “Das ist eine sinnreiche Phantasterei, von einem durchaus modernen, national-ökonomisch gebildeten Geist erdacht, und so lebensfern, wie der Äquatorberg, auf dem dieser Traumstaat liegt. ‘Freiland’ ist eine complicirte Maschinerie mit vielen Zähnen und Rädern, die sogar ineinander greifen; aber nichts beweist mir, daß sie in Betrieb gesetzt werden könne.” For Herzl, the novel’s details and specificity in fact revealed it to be utopian, in contrast to his own vision, which was only loosely sketched out but had behind it as the “treibende Kraft [...] Die Judennoth” (4). If Herzl’s proved the more realizable project, the history of Zionist colonizers in Palestine suggests the potential
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costs attendant on a utopian vision rooted in exclusivist ethnoreligious identity. Whether Hertzka’s universalist, deracinated utopia that relied on an idea of civilization based in scientific economic understanding would have fared any better in practice is, of course, unknown. The novel Freiland and the movement it begat show the manifold linkages between scientific and utopian discourses in late nineteenth-century Europe. Natural and social science were widely believed to hold the keys to civilization’s progress toward a utopian future, both by providing the tools that would improve health, ease the burdens of labour, and increase production and by revealing how social institutions could be reengineered to foster happiness, justice, and equality. By articulating its vision in the language of science, the novel not only gained credibility by capitalizing on the prestige of science, but also tapped into broadly shared dreams in European society at the time that found expression in a diverse array of social reform projects. If these hopes had much in common, the eclecticism of the movements within this vast scientificutopian reformist milieu shows that faith in science did not proscribe a single way of understanding the world or its possible refashioning. Social Darwinism, for instance, played a central role in racist imperialism, but it also lay behind the novel’s vision of racial equality and universal civilization. Hertzka’s emphasis on economic reorganization as the key to civilization’s progress undercut the increasingly rigid discourse of scientific racism that justified European domination of non-European peoples. By divorcing European culture and biology from the idea of civilization, replaced by scientifically realized economic efficiency, Hertzka advanced a vision of potential universal human equality that denied the significance of class and race to the ability and right of individuals to prosperity and happiness. This universalizing element resisted the logic underlying European domination and justifying social and cultural inequality. At the same time, it rejected the value of cultural diversity by positing an ideal civilization that must perforce obliterate cultural distinctions. Though nothing prescribed by the Freeland economic system required cultural uniformity, Hertzka could see no alternative to the erasure of all human difference. Relatedly, he failed to address two potential problems in race and cultural relations: the reality that no superabundant and empty land existed in the Kenya highlands where a colony could be established or grow without taking the land from others, and the possibility that some people (European no less than African) might refuse to be assimilated into the superior Freeland society. Hertzka left unanswered the aforementioned query posed by a Freelander regarding “was denn geschehen werde, wenn freiländische Ansiedler irgendwo fremdes, einem abendländischen Volke gehöriges Gebiet betreten sollten. [...] Sollten wir, im Besitze der stärkeren Civilisationsform, vor der zurückgebliebenen zurückweichen?” (281). The totalizing drive of Hertzka’s vision of scientifically perfected society is alive and well in much contemporary free-market liberal utopianism, whose effects
Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 27 are certainly not universally celebrated. But if Hertzka’s project contained hints of a coercive potential, at least it did not begin with the exclusivist claims anchored in race or culture that influenced how most Europeans saw the nonEuropean peoples they encountered. Works Cited “Aufruf.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 3 Feb.1894: 1. Bach, Ulrich Ekkehard. “Faraway, So Close: The Tropics of Vienna in Austrian Colonial Utopias.” Diss. U of California at Los Angeles, 2004. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Toronto: Bryce, 1887. Bernstein, Eduard. Die Voraussetzung des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart: Dietz, 1899. Booth, William. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890. Bowman, Sylvia E. Edward Bellamy. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Bratlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourses on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. British Freeland Association. “A New Commonwealth: An Appeal by the Provisional Committee of the British Freeland Association.” 1892[?]. Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Call number NZ 893br. “Die Conferenz des freiländischen Actions-Comités.” Freiland: Organ der FreilandVereine 23 Aug. 1891: 1–3. “Constituirende Generalversammlung des Wiener Freiland-Vereines.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 17 Nov. 1891: 1. Damaschke, Adolf. Die Bodenreform: Grundsätzliches und Geschichtliches zur Erkenntnis und Uberwindung der sozialen Not. 1903. Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922. Edgeworth, F. Y. Rev. of Freiland: Ein soziales Zukunftsbild. The Economic Journal June 1893: 284–85. Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Trans. Edward Aveling. 1880. New York: International Publishers, 1935. “Die Freiland-Bewegung.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 2 Aug. 1891: 1. Freiländische Actions-Comité. “Freiland” und die Freilandbewegung. Dresden: E. Pierson, 1891. “Freiländische Nachrichten.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 21 Feb. 1894: 1. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; The Remedy. 1879. New York: D. Appleton, 1880. Glass, Hildegard. “Future Cities: Responses to the Urban Challenge in German Utopian Literature (1871–1914).” Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1992. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981. Gümpel, C. Godfrey. “A Possible Solution of the Social Question.” The Westminster Review 138.3 (1892): 270–85. Hacohen, Malachi Haim. “Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and ‘Central European Culture.’” Journal of Modern History 71.1 (1990): 105–49. Herman, David. “Zionism as Utopian Discourse.” CLIO 23.3 (1994): 235–46.
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Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland 29 “Recent Periodicals and New Books.” The Economic Journal Sept. 1891: 618–24. “Recent Publications Upon Economics.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics January 1892: 251–56. Rosner, Peter. “Theodor Hertzka and the Utopia of Freiland.” History of Economic Ideas 14.3 (2006): 113–37. Sadler, Elizabeth. “One Book’s Influence: Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward.’” The New England Quarterly 17.4 (1944): 530–55. Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Suttner, Bertha von. Die Waffen nieder. 2 vol. Dresden: Pierson, 1889. Udny, Ernest. The Freeland Colony. Philadelphia: Lineweaver and Wallace, 1894. Wagar, W. Warren. “Dreams of Reason: Bellamy, Wells, and the Positive Utopia.” Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Ed. Daphne Patai. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 106–25. Wallace, Alfred Russel. Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences. Ed. James Marchant. Vol. 2. London: Cassell and Company, 1916. ———. Land Nationalisation: Its Necessity and its Aims. London: Trübner, 1882. “White Men in Africa.” The Atlanta Constitution 17 Oct. 1893: 4. “Wiener Freilandverein.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 30 Sept. 1893: 1–4. “Zur Freilandbewegung.” Freiland: Organ der Freiland-Vereine 31 Aug. 1893: 1. Zweig, Stefan. Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers. 1943. Fischer, 2000.
