BOOKS
and efficient materials; they may be designed by the ablest architects-
"integrated" and. "organic" as Wright assures us they will be; but all
these are perfectly consistent with physical and spiritual decay. Social
well-being is not simply an architectural problem. A prison may be a
work of art and a triumph of ingenuity. The economic conditions that
determine freedom and a decent living are largely ignored by Wright.
He foresees, in fact, the poverty of these new feudal settlements when he
provides that the worker set up his own factory-made house, part by part,
according to his means, beginning with a toilet and kitchen, and adding
other rooms as he earns the means by his labor in the factory. His indif-
ference to property relations and the state, his admission of private
industry and second-hand Fords in this idyllic world of amphibian labor,
betray its reactionary character. Already under the dictatorship of Napo-
leon III, the state farms, partly inspired by the old Utopias, were the
official solution of unemployment. The democratic Wright may attack
rent and profit and interest, but apart from some passing reference to
the single-tax he avoids the question of class and power.
The outlines of Wright's new society are left unclear; they are like
the content of his godless religion for which he specifies a church in
Broadacre City. After all, he is an architect telling you what a fine home
he can build you in the country; it is not his business to discuss economics
and class relations. But in the chapters by his collaborator, Brownell,
who has more to say about technology, economics and culture (although
the consequences are not faced in any field), the reactionary side of
this shabby, streamlined Utopia becomes more evident.
The core of his argument is the critique of bourgeois society made
over a hundred years ago by both the right and the
left
and repeated
since, that it destroys idyllic values, dehumanizes man, disperses his inter-
ests and activity and subjects him to the machine. But following the
right, he opposes to it the ideal of a self-sufficient agrarian culture on
the Borsodi plan, with its elaborate household industry. By converting
the middle class-the real subject of his anxiety-into a conservative
peasantry, he hopes to restore their "human integrity." There is little
direct reference to exploitation and war and the everyday brutalities of
class power; where he has to deal with the clash of interests, his thought
becomes blurred or allegorical. The historical movements of our time
are transposed into conflicts between shadowy principles. The great and
primary struggle is between "relativism" and "absolutism": an .inherent
tendency toward freedom and creativeness (relativity) meets an opposite
inherent tendency toward "absolutism." Beside this "primarily intellectual
conflict" there are three lesser ones: Urbanism vs. Agrarianism, Security
vs. Opportunity, Specialization vs. Integrity, the latter two being indivi-
dual, not social, problems. Ignorant of socialist theory, of which he has ac-
quired some elements of the vocabulary, he caricatures socialist ideas in a
half-baked manner. He is against socialism because it is necessarily cen-
tralized and urban, surrendering freedom for security, but also because it
is "essentially insecure, unstable, destructive of human values of life." He
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