Customer Reviews

The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America (Phoenix Book)

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Looking for books that mention the commune scene of Placitas, New Mexico?
If so, check out this book.
It's got a good chapter on them, and good chapters on other communes elsewhere--in New York, Vermont, northern New Mexico, and elsewhere, with insightful essays that tie everything together.
The book is well enough written that it was nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, though it lost to John William's Roman epic "Augustus."
I recommend it.

Laurence Veysey is a Professor Emeritus from UC Santa Cruz. In this 1973 book (republished in 1978 with a new preface by the author), he studies a variety of "Anarchist and Mystical" communities in modern America. In the new Preface, Veysey observes, "The brief but spectacular resurgence of alternative communities in this country from about 1967 to 1973 furnished a superb opportunity to study them at firsthand. This book offers the fruits of such direct investigation, set against accounts of strikingly similar undertakings which existed several decades earlier."

The book includes chapters on "The Ferrer Colony and Modern School of Stelton," "Contemporary Anarchistic Communes," "Vedanta Monasteries," and "New Mexico, 1971: Inside a 'New Age' Social Order."

Veysey notes that the Ferrer School "For a long time ... ran the only progressive school in America which deliberately sought a working-class clientele."

He covers the Vedanta movement in some detail, and notes that "The Vedanta movement never attracted a mass American following. Federal religious census figures show only 340 members in 1906 ... Total membership rose to 628 in 1936, to around 1,000 in 1960, and perhaps 1,200 today." He also observes that "the early followers of Vedanta (were) disproportionately feminine, besides being well-to-do and cosmopolitan." and that "All the Vedanta swamis have depended upon gifts from the members of their congregations to survive."

Disappointingly, Veysey writes, "The record of counter-cultural movements seems to suggest that, even in the United States, the most heavily authoritarian and intensely charismatic of these social movements possess the greater internal elan."