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      The Oneida Community and the utility of liberal capitalism

      research-article
      Radical Americas
      UCL Press
      utopian socialism, industrial capitalism, industrial revolution, communitarianism

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          Abstract

          Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry in communal life and especially the community’s theology, which equated economic prosperity with Christian virtue. This essay reframes our understanding of the political economy of the Oneida Community, with specific attention to their last decade, and the social tensions stoked by their reliance upon market capitalism and waged labour. While acknowledging the internal dissent that accompanied the structural demise of the commune, the present study asks how such discord arose from business-centred theology within the social environment of competition and a prolonged economic depression. The Community’s dependence upon the surrounding capitalist economy challenged their self-described ‘Bible communism’ and precipitated its demise.

          Most cited references68

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          The Investment Market, 1870–1914: The Evolution of a National Market

          It is necessary not only that capital be accumulated, but also that it be mobilized for productive use, if an economy is to benefit from an increase in capital per person. The classical model of resource allocation assumes that within any economy capital is perfectly mobile. It implies, therefore, that once allowance is made for uncertainty and risk, returns on investment are equal in all industries in all regions. Such a model, while logically consistent, is not very useful for analyzing the process of economic growth. In the early stages of development, because the uncertainty discounts are high, capital is not very mobile. As a result, rates of return vary widely between industries and between regions; and growth in high-interest regions is retarded. Development, in part then, takes the form of a reduction in uncertainty discounts—a reduction that makes it possible for capital to move more freely between regions and industries.
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            Skill Intensity and Rising Wage Dispersion in Nineteenth-Century American Manufacturing

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              Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                RA
                Radical Americas
                UCL Press
                2399-4606
                21 November 2019
                : 4
                : 1
                : 3
                Affiliations
                Independent Scholar, P.O. Box 7273, Lowell, MA 01852 USA; kevin.coffee@ 123456museplan.com
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3566-4280
                Article
                RA-4-3
                10.14324/111.444.ra.2019.v3.1.003
                9d1fe7d0-b53d-4274-864b-81f1e0d041e9
                © 2019, The Author •

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2019.v3.1.003.

                History
                : 25 December 2018
                : 13 September 2019
                Page count
                Pages: 21
                Categories
                Article
                Custom metadata
                Coffee, K. ‘The Oneida Community and the utility of liberal capitalism.’. Radical Americas, 2019, 4( 1): 3, pp. 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2019.v3.1.003.

                Sociology,Political science,Anglo-American studies,Americas,Cultural studies,History
                communitarianism,industrial revolution,industrial capitalism,utopian socialism

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