Disciplining Utopia: the Future of Cooperative Landholding

Abstract

Experimentation in communal land is an American tradition. From the colonial era onward, citizens have been inspired to build communities predicated on religious or economic ideas of property that would today be considered radical. Many historical American social movements, especially those tied to racial justice, explicitly imagined a communal relationship to land. Thus, while often held out internationally as the leading normative proponent of individual property rights, the United States has historically been seen as a destination for enacting experiments in cooperative landholding.