Self-Unfolding as Communitarian Vision: Brook Farm's Challenge to Contemporary Communities

DAN MCKANAN"The principles of the organization ... are cooperation in social matters, instead of competition or balance of interests; and of individual selfunfolding, in the faith that the whole soul of humanity is in each man and woman.'"Elizabeth Peabody, a close friend of the Transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, used these words to capture the paradox at the heart of that community's vision.Like nearly all communitarians.Brook Fanners envisioned a society in which cooperation would overcome the evils of competition and economic exploitation.Unlike many communitarians, however, they did not list individualism as one of the evils to be overcome.Indeed, they were themselves radical individualists who saw God in each person.The purpose of a community, for them, was to break down the artificialities of an authoritarian and class-based society so that women and men could "unfold" their true selves.For six years, from 1841 to 1847, they nurtured free individuals who would later make their marks in fields ranging from journalism to classical music to labor organizing.Their communitarian vision thus poses an important challenge both to contemporary communities that too readily demonize "individualism" and to modem societies that claim to value individuals while submerging them in mass market advertising and bureaucratic conformity.In this article I will discuss the ideological sources that informed Brook Farm's commitment to "self-unfolding," the practices that flowed from this communitarian vision, and the responses of Brook Farm's contemporaries.I will consider the successes and failures that may have stemmed from Brook Farm's unwavering commitment to self-unfolding.Finally, I will compare Brook Farm to the Catholic Worker and Camphill, two contemporary movements whose practices parallel those at Brook Farm.Even more than Brook Farm, these two movements suggest that it is possible for communities both to sustain themselves and to cultivate the fiiUest personal development of their members.