Who is capable of self-support? he demanded. There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system.Looking Backward couldn't be more logical in its arguments, and therefore demonstrates the most damning loophole in logical argument: if your axioms are false, you will deduct entire systems of logical truth that has no bearing on reality.
Bellamy sends a man of the late Nineteenth Century to the eve of the new millennium, Julian West is put to sleep by a hypnotist in May of 1887, his house burns down and everyone he knows thinks he's dead, but really he's just hypno-sleeping until the year 2000, when someone finds him and wakes him up.
The back of my copy actually had a pretty gripping description, if only because of its folly: It is the year 2000---and full employment, material abundance, and social harmony can be found everywhere.
Bellamy's novel is a detail-light exposition of his utopian vision for society. He spends the vast majority of the novel expounding how this perfect system works and a little bit about how it developed from what the novel considers to be the darkest era of humanity. Looking Backward lends itself to, not surprisingly, looking backward; Bellamy's vision of the future reveals something of his perception of reality in 1887.
As an author, perhaps his greatest feat is to capture in brief moments one generation's incredulity at the 'ethical barbarism' of a past generation. But otherwise, he continually forgets that the conceit of the book is that it is written by Nineteenth Century man in the year 2000 to a Twentieth Century audience. When he forgets this, his novel turns into a sermon and is not terribly pleasant to read.
Although Bellamy is pretty far off the mark as to what we are now, he did predict the invention of something that I never would have expected a man of the late-nineteenth century to predict: the credit card.
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