Walden Two and 1984, both post-war utopias of opposing power logics, received opposite receptions.

Evidence

In the blood-soaked wake of World War II, both Skinner and the journalist and novelist George Orwell aimed curative, “utopian” novels at the mayhem of modernity’s diminished prospects produced by an incomprehensible scale of violence. Viewed from a distance, Skinner’s Walden Two, published in 1948, and Orwell’s 1984, released the following year, had much in common. Each elaborated a complete conception of a distinct logic of power, each imagined a society defined by the full flourishing of that power, and each was utopian from the point of view of the form of power that it described. However, their public reception could not have been more different: Walden Two was dismissed as a dystopian nightmare and ignored by the general public for more than a decade. Orwell’s 1984 was immediately canonized as a dystopian masterpiece and the distillation of the twentieth century’s worst nightmares. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1177

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s library: Orwell’s 1984 and the dystopian genre contrasted with behaviorist utopianism — resonates with the surveillance theme throughout Zuboff’s book and with contemporary rereadings of Walden Two as proto-behavioral-control fiction. — connects to: Walden Two and 1984 are precise opposites, not both totalitarian portraits. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1178

Broader Connections

• Walden Two and 1984 are precise opposites, not both totalitarian portraits. #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1178