Community-Building in the Wake of War and Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has provided the impetus to ‘build back better’. But it’s not the first world-changing incident to inspire radical ideas about what a better world could look like. The First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic similarly catalysed a dramatic shift in how people understood society. In the aftermath, a whole spate of communities sprang up all over the globe, formed with the intention of finding a better way to live.

In this paper I will briefly delineate the horrors of the war and pandemic, and then I will explore some of the communities of this time. These ranged from Dartington Hall – a lavishly endowed English country estate financed by an American heiress, where participants mixed chicken farming, open-air theatre, spiritual exploration and communal self-government – to Atarashiki Mura, a small collective of impecunious intellectuals who cultivated rice and strove for self-realisation through artistic pursuits in the remote mountains of southern Japan. As well as detailing the specifics of some of these communities, I will consider what it was that united the social experiments of this era and why.   

Drawing out from a close focus on the years after the First World War, I will consider the long-term fate of the communities started in the 1920s and 1930s. How long did they last? Were they successful in their aims? Did they influence wider society, and if so how? I will conclude more subjectively: reflecting on the qualities that, based on my research, seem to me make for a strong intentional community, and also on why it is that I think that small-scale experiments in living have considerable social importance.