Gazing Upward: Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Investment in Aristocratic Culture

In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy, though making an appeal to the middle class, also seeks to combine progressivism with an ethos of aristocratic cultural dominance as a way to civilize the masses and make socialism appealing to patricians. Eschewing a hereditary aristocracy, Bellamy endorses a cultural one, finding the imperative to do so in optimistic notions of American social mobility. Instead of portraying socialism as a threat to the elite, Bellamy invites the Brahmins of Boston and, by extension, of America to view socialism as a path to universal acceptance of upper-crust refinement. Read from this perspective, Looking Backward suggests unsettling realities: that America is essentially a class-conscious society; that its capitalist economy, though merit-based in theory, fosters the dynastic concentration and transfer of wealth; and that if the hereditary beneficiaries of industry cannot be persuaded that a nationalized economy is to their personal advantage, it is unlikely to happen.