A Centenary Reconsideration of Bellamy's Looking Backward

Abstract. Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward, was a best seller in its time and is an American classic today. It launched a social movement, influenced Thorstein Veblen and a number of other social thinkers and raised questions of pertinence in our day. Looking Backward is outstanding in a genre that helps to develop social values, particularly regarding justice. It is a stinging critique of a status quo that still endures and it gives voice to felt opinions regarding change then and now. Bellamy's utopia involved centralization of power in a static economy and society (ideas from which our generation recoils) and, though not foreseen by Bellamy, the creation of a managerial class, not wholly different from the ruling classes of his day and ours, in capitalist America and State socialist Soviet Union. But he correctly noted the growth of concentrated power in American society As social criticism, Looking Backward is a contribution of the first rank to the effort to understand and improve mankind's society and condition. The advance of the social sciences has not made its contribution obsolete.