Erewhon and Iron Heel Chapter

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Chapter Four
Erewhon
Introduction
As we saw in chapter one and in our discussion of Isle of Pines, dystopias have
special features that mark them off from other types of political literature. They are most
interested in identifying and extrapolating the effects of existing and harmful social,
economic and political conditions. They therefore raise a special set of questions dealing
with the human condition, including those that address the attainability of a better
society, the dilemma of irony, and the problems of power
The two works treated in this chapter address quite different problems within this
larger set of questions. The first, Erewhon, concerns itself with the attempt to create a
perfect society. The fictional society Samuel Butler (1835-1902) portrays is meant to
underscore the argument that human perversity inevitably mars the attempt to plan our
way to the good life. Here Butler raises important questions regarding utopia: Is it really
possible to eradicate human vices? Does the utopian project expose us to greater danger
than does the working of ordinary institutions? Does ambition open the way to the play of
vices? Will the good life for everyone ever be in our reach if we grab for it? What role
does “common sense” play in the lives of ordinary individuals? While it is true that
Butler also has his eyes on the problems of ordinary society and some of the story works
as a critique of contemporary England, his work argues more generally that radical
change will only serve to repackage those problems in more virulent forms. In this he,
like Neville, provides us with dystopia as a satire of utopia.
In contrast The Iron Heel extrapolates tragic contemporary trends to a different
purpose. The message Jack London (1876-1916) conveys is the opposite of Butler’s—
that without radical revolution the problems of the day will grow to such an extent that
we will be overwhelmed in a hellish world of unbridled authoritarian capitalism. He
therefore raises another set of questions: What is the source of the problems we now
experience? Does capitalism create such unequal power relations that a political and
economic tyranny will inevitably arise out of it? What is necessary to overthrow that
tyranny? How does power operate to estrange humans from the good life? Despite these
differences, however, there is nonetheless an ironic strain in London’s work that strongly
recalls Butler’s point. In the course of fighting the oligarchs, his socialist protagonists
adopt many of the same techniques and strategies as the dehumanized capitalists. His
work therefore also asks, will revolutionaries inevitably come to resemble those whom
they oppose? Will the burden of fighting for humanity make revolutionaries inhuman?
Like Utopia and Isle of Pines, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (published 1872) is an
ambiguous work. One reading sees it as a critique of British imperialism. The narrator is
here equated with the early explorers and later administrators who had found non-
European cultures deficient, and thus the book is read as a call for radical reform in the
way Europeans encounter the rest of the world. Supporters of this understanding may
point to the story’s end, where the narrator contemplates with enthusiasm the prospect of
profitably transporting the inhabitants of Erewhon to a European colony to live useful
lives as laborers while arguing that, aside from the material profits derived from the
enterprise, the souls of such laborers will doubtlessly benefit from the religious
instruction they will receive. One might argue that this dichotomy captures precisely the
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double-sided, schizophrenic attitude of the British to the outside world they were busy
colonizing. They were part religious missionary, part commercial mercenary.
A related reading sees this as a satire of domestic English society. Where the
description ostensibly is of Erewhon, everything portrayed—the penalties for sickness
and the rule of treating criminal behavior as a sickness, the schools of higher education,
banking and religious institutions—while seemingly strange and revolting are in fact but
caricatures of British practices and institutions. Like the first reading, which carries with
it radical implications that call for the reform of Britain rather than of the outside world,
this reading calls into question the institutions, judgments and customs of the British
world and at least implicitly calls for wholesale, radical, change.
I see Erewhon somewhat differently than either of these readings. As its title
implies, it is meant to be read as a backwards utopia, a utopia in which perverse practices
are celebrated and openly cultivated. I therefore believe Erewhon is written to resemble a
utopian story, but that its message turns the utopian project on its head. It satirizes the
attempt to find perfection in plans and comprehensive views of life at the same time it
levels a stinging critique of the status quo. The connection between conventional society
on the one hand and the institutions and practices of Erewhon on the other are meant to
be viewed through the lens of utopian thought and aspirations, as the problems that beset
the first will also, so the story alleges, even more intensely afflict the other because of its
utopian character.
This makes Erewhon a dystopian satire of utopia. By extending out and critiquing
trends of ordinary society and poking fun at the prospect of utopia, it embraces elements
of the first two possible readings described above, but with a different purpose. It is
therefore closer to The Isle of Pines than to The Iron Heel. Where Neville adopts a
conservative orientation by arguing that the attempt to create a perfect environment will
create undesirable results, Butler in Erewhon pushes this ironic orientation even further in
the direction of utopian understandings of human nature. To assume that humans are
capable of utopia, he argues, is a mistake, first because environments cannot act on
human nature in the way that utopians hold, and second because utopians are hopelessly
addled cranks. Utopians do not understand institutions, they do not understand the impact
of environments on humans, and they do not understand humans, in large part because
they put aside rationality and common sense in favor of dreams, visions, emotions, good
intentions and wishful thinking. It is also because human institutions and human nature is
complex and too difficult for anyone to grasp so completely as to be capable of
prescribing effective radical change. To act on the speculations of utopian theorists and
aim for perfection will only serve to make the human condition worse.
It appears that Butler is not averse to improvements in social and economic life,
but fears that the attempt to change society radically with the intent of creating a perfect
life will only serve to extend and entrench existing inequities. Utopia will not bring the
good life to everyone because a) any attempt at radical change outstrips our ability to
understand the world—it goes beyond common sense, and b) people will adapt to any
new circumstances created by utopian projects in purely utilitarian ways that, in
conjunction with the lack of common sense safeguards, will undercut any lofty moral
purpose. The attempt to arrange society with the intention of achieving the perfect life for
everyone will only result in making the rich and the unscrupulous better off while
reducing the scope for any real reform.
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The second theme is also important to this argument—that the attempt to find
utopia entails a kind of soft-headedness. Utopians misunderstand the world, Butler
argues, even though they put their propositions in a form that resembles a scientific
understanding. Their misunderstandings in turn create misguided, weird and
counterproductive solutions to problems. The fantastic practices of the Erewhonians here
are but the extensions of ridiculous utopian pretensions that exist in the minds of Butler’s
contemporaries. Thus Erewhon the story attempts to puncture the utopian projects that
Butler finds so tediously and tendentiously put forward by contemporaries. As Butler has
the narrator put it in discussing the experiment in vegetarianism on which Erewhon once
embarked:
The awakened conscious of an individual will often lead him to do things in haste
that he had better have left undone, but the conscience of a nation awakened by a
respectable old gentleman who has an unseen power up his sleeve will pave hell
with a vengeance.
Butler plays out these Burkean arguments regarding the paving of hell with good
intentions by constructing a backwards utopia in which all the problems that are said to
have been resolved in utopia—particularly injustices and the denial of a good life to
everyone—are present even more deeply and on a larger scale than in ordinary society.
To push forward with a utopian agenda is to create a place that only a favored few would
wish to inhabit. The problem here is not, as with Isle of Pines, in the environment but in
the ultimate imperfectibility of humans. Where Neville assumes that progress comes with
the overcoming of obstacles and thus bemoans the fact that the environment of Pines’
island does not force its inhabitants to develop discipline, Butler points to something like
a tragic flaw in humans that manifests itself most completely in those who have the
strongest will. While this overlaps with Isle of Pines in leveling a similar critique of
More’s idea that a perfect environment will lead to the good life for all, it throws doubt
even on Neville’s understanding of progress. There is no benign comparison here
between an ordinary society that embodies and is capable of progress and a dystopia that
shows how things can go wrong if progress is wrongly conceived. Rather, Erewhon
portrays problems as running much deeper in the human experience, making progress
itself a more difficult proposition than even Neville seems to assume.
The Contexts of Erewhon
Like Neville two centuries earlier, Butler is writing in the aftermath of an
extended period of political ferment. From the American Revolution of the 1770s through
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars to the aborted revolutions of 1848, the
previous 100 years have been fraught with political upheavals. Britain itself has changed,
moving from its closed representative system through several reforms to the awarding of
a much broader franchise by the later parts of the 19th century.
Accompanying this political upheaval was a comparable wealth of radical
political literature. This was represented not just by Rousseau anchoring the 18th century
and Marx holding down the radical cause in the 19th. In between and spilling over these
are a multitude of utopian philosophers, writers and experiments. Fourier, Saint-Simon,
the Oneida Colony, phalanxes, the Mormons and others all put forward radical proposals
meant to pioneer the way to the perfect life. Utopia is an ongoing and important trend in
both theory and practice.
Butler is skeptical of all these. He sees them as cranky attempts to impose on
humans artificial mores and structures that take no heed of human nature. To make these
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institutions stick, draconian measures will be needed. Moreover he believes that the lack
of understanding informing such measures will serve only to exacerbate problems rather
than solve them.
At the same time Butler is also uneasy with other trends in British life. He is not a
proponent of devoutly maintaining the status quo or an automatic defender of existing
society. He is evidently troubled by the privileges the upper classes enjoy and the easy
ways in which those in power pass judgments on others based on class, gender and
wealth. He appears unhappy with the state of education, the established church, courts,
judges and the financial system. He satirizes all these mercilessly. He wants them
reformed. In this he operates in the spirit of Edmund Burke in defending gradualism and
cautious, incremental improvement.
As a political act Erewhon is relatively democratic. Butler is writing a familiar
form. His book is a combination of “romance” and travelogue. Its vocabulary is familiar
and its form, at least on its surface, easily understandable. For the upper and middle
classes that were its audience, its satirical message should have been relatively easy to
understand. Of course its book form would make it inaccessible to the poor as well as to
those with insufficient education to read. Its message was also one not congenial to those
who dreamed of radical change, like the adherents of Marxism, though the former would
applaud his condemnation of romantic utopianism if not his incrementalism.
Synopsis and Characteristics of Erewhon
Synopsis
The story starts with the narrator relating the origins of his trip to Erewhon. An
employee of a sheep farmer in is probably New Zealand, he longs to explore the interior
of his colonial home to find unclaimed pastures or deposits of valuable minerals, as well
as to imitate the great explorers of the day in disclosing details of lands hitherto unseen
by Europeans. The first significant section of the book is taken up with the description of
this trip. This section simultaneously apes and satirizes both the long journeys to utopias
and the travel journals of contemporary explorers. The latter often consisted of multiple
volumes filled with detailed discussions of flora, fauna, rock formations, mineral deposits
and mountain ranges. The narrator self-consciously imitates this style by discussing in
great detail the physical characteristics of the land through which he travels, though he
leaves the exact geographical location of the land through which he passes vague. Thus
his trip, as with those described in Utopia and Isle of Pines does not start with the attempt
to find Utopia. Occupied by other matters, the narrator stumbles on this community.
The narrator finds Erewhon as the story’s subtitle puts it, “over the range”. Once
there, despite some legal problems, the narrator like previous explorers of utopias is
allowed to gather significant information about the place. What he finds seems initially to
be England or Europe of several hundred years before, though its inhabitants appear to be
Mediterranean (or Semitic, depending on his mood). It is a land of towns and villages and
private property. It is mostly agricultural. Its rural inhabitants are unfailingly attractive
and generally polite. While those in the countryside are not rich, they are well-kept and
the country filled with agrarian plenty. The inhabitants have weapons, but of a primitive
nature.
It is also, unlike England, aggressively anti-technological. It has rejected most
machinery based on the writings of a philosopher contained in a “Book of Machines”.
Buildings are of the type found in the Middle Ages. There are no mechanical
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conveyances, and locomotion is provided by animals or one’s own feet. It is a crime to

create or possess mechanical objects. It is also a crime to be ill or to suffer misfortune,
and to be convicted of such results in long terms in prison. On the other hand to engage in
what ordinary society considers crime (assault, embezzlement) is considered a
manifestation of sickness to be treated by a private moral physician (a “straightener”)
rather than publicly by courts and prisons. People superficially embrace these and other
strange and wonderful beliefs but often act privately in ways contrary to them. Erewhon
also possesses an official banking system that issues worthless currency and a system of
higher education that emphasize the importance of unreason. Thus in contrast to the
idyllic countryside that first confronts the narrator, urban and official Erewhon while
sophisticated is organized perversely.
Where the journey to Erewhon imitates those of utopian stories, it does not so
much signify the distance between Erewhon and conventional society as draw
connections between them and thus to question the attempt to create a perfect society.
The entity that connects ordinary society with “utopia” here is the narrator, and he is
meant as a vehicle for comparison rather than contrast. The journey is what establishes
his character. On the surface he is earnest, resourceful and adventurous, all virtues in
nineteenth-century eyes. As with many others who failed to find success in England, he is
pursuing a second chance by seeking his fortune in the colonies. His motivation for the
journey is self-improvement by way of seeking fame, fortune and knowledge. He pushes
on with his journey despite hardship because he is motivated to improve his lot in life. He
is outwardly pious and wishes to shed light on unknown parts of the world. He thinks he
has located the lost Ten Tribes of Israel and is fired by the desire to bring their existence
to the attention of civilized society.
Yet there is another, dominant and much less appetizing side to his character. His
pursuit of the good life is not admirable. He exemplifies many of the less desirable
attributes of the Englishman abroad. He is a racist denigrator of everything that does not
resemble English practice. He is deceitful and manipulative. Despite his pretensions he is
also quite ignorant, operating on the basis of stereotypes rather than understanding. The
mercenary instincts that lead him to try to profit from every situation are augmented by
an equally grating piety that allows him to justify his money-grubbing by referring to the
need to spread Christianity to benighted foreigners. He treats his indigenous companion
Chowbok abominably. His ostensibly Christianizing effort in converting the Erewhonians
is ultimately self-serving. He thinks it will place him with the apostles in terms of name
recognition. So too is his desire to shed light on unknown territories. He wishes to derive
large profits from his adventures, explicitly expressing the desire to “monopolize” the
pasture lands he glimpses on the other side of the mountains. In contrast to utopian
stories, wherein the narrator is at least intellectually transformed by his contact with a
perfect society, the narrator of Erewhon never changes. In this his whole journey is a
metaphor for utopia—outwardly it had good intentions regarding those people he
“discovers”, but in fact it will lead to disastrous results for them.
While the narrator is puzzled by Erewhonian practices and wishes to change them
through the auspices of kidnapping or religious conversion, he actually fits into
Erewhonian society. That society also appears benign, but is in fact perverse. The only
inhabitants who are really morally attractive are those who have little power, such as the
villagers who first find him and his jailer’s daughter Yram. The powerful in contrast
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operate on the basis of a system of ethics that penalizes everyone who is not ruthless,
powerful, in good health or blessed with good looks. There is of course a degree of
randomness here in that the system can victimize anyone if they are so unfortunate as to
be unfortunate, but on the whole those who benefit in Erewhon are those who from the
standpoint of any decent person appear to be those who least deserve to prosper. Thus the
narrator’s schemes for perfecting the lives of those he meets through his commercial cum
Christianizing enterprises mirror not only those of other English explorers but also every
ambitious operator in Erewhon.
Key Characteristics
ATTEMPTS TO MOLD PEOPLE: Erewhon imitates utopias in that the society depicted
attempts, through training and the manipulation of social and economic environments, to
mold people into better beings. This comes in the form of both laws and moral/religious
strictures. Rather than merely striving to keep order, these attempts attempt to eliminate
crime, make people respect all living beings, reflect critically upon technology, and take
responsibility for their actions. What results is most often the opposite, however.
STRANGENESS: While all utopias and even some dystopias introduce novel and
therefore strange practices to the reader, Butler emphasizes the weirdness of the place. As
the name implies, everything is backwards or upside down. This of course is a metaphor
for the unrealistic and backwards understanding of utopian writers.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE POWERFUL: Unlike those dystopians (like Neville) who want
to place blame on ordinary people for everyday problems and for the desire for utopia,
Butler shows hostility to those who are rich and powerful. It is they who make life
dysfunctional and miserable. In the hands of another writer, like London, this would lead
to a call for radical change. But Butler is different in arguing that the rich and powerful,
like the poor, will always be with us and therefore it is futile to attempt to get rid of them
or outwit them. It is better transparently to attempt to limit the harm they cause.
THE PERSISTENCE OF SELF-INTEREST: Butler shows how everyone in Erewhon
continues to operate, often by necessity but also often with a lack of scruples, on the basis
of self-interest. This leads them to appear to cooperate with all the crazy radical reforms
instituted at the insistence of utopian dreamers, but in reality to get around those reforms.
These reforms do not change people and only superficially change behavior.
THE REJECTION OF RATIONALITY: Importantly for Butler to be right means to be
rational. If there is anything in which Butler does have faith it is in the power of
rationality and common sense to provide us with the understanding that is available to us.
These are the best guides we have, and as guides they are reliable. The main problem for
Butler is that people wish to abandon them in favor of easier and more grandiose ways of
grappling with the world.
The Problems Erewhon Identifies
Butler is not comfortable with either conventional society or with ambitious
efforts to reform it. He is more comfortable with some elements of conventional society
insofar as they partake of the good parts of human nature (by employing common sense,
for example). Both the status quo and radical attempts to reform it bear the brunt of his
displeasure, though one gets the impression that he thinks the status quo is probably
better than the results of woolly-headed utopianism.
Irrationality
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Above all, Erwhon and those practices and people whom it satirizes are irrational.
They aim at good things with techniques that will never achieve their goal. Utopians and
radical reformers wish to bend the world to their way of thinking when the world is very,
very resistant to physical meddling and impervious to pious wishes to remake it by
rethinking it. To paraphrase Marx (a most dangerous utopian in this view), the goal is not
to rethink the world or change it. It is to understand it and in understanding it recognize
that good, useful change comes about only through a long, hard, arduous, tedious and
limited attempt to modify existing institutions and practices so as not to lose sight of
common sense and our dearly acquired knowledge of human nature. The world does not
ultimately take kindly to the efforts of well-intentioned old men with wild fantasies up
their sleeves and the fire of righteousness indignation in their eyes. It wreaks its
vengeance on their misunderstandings by perverting their efforts. One does better by
recognizing the resistance of the world to change than by trying to blow up what already
exists, imperfect as it may be.
Hubris
To have hubris is to have an overweening pride in oneself. In classical literature
the punishment for hubris was disaster. The same is true here. Erewhon is an illustration
of what happens when humans put too much credence in their ability to understand and
control their world. It is the ultimate in planning, individual reform, social engineering,
governmental organization and good intentions. That it is also the ultimate in injustice,
greed and immorality shows the failure of such socially ambitious approaches to creating
the good life. Erewhon, as with every other utopia and attempt at radical change,
disastrously overshoots the mark of cautious and useful social and political reform in
Buter’s view. In trying to do too much it not only doesn’t succeed in achieving its ends; it
makes conditions much worse for the ordinary, otherwise decent citizen. It turns the
clock back to a less moral and more brutal existence even as it erects the façade of
progress, sophistication and cultural achievement.
Here Butler importantly qualifies his emphasis on rationality. While he has faith
that rationality is better than mysticism or fantasy, he does not place the kind of faith in it
that a Bellamy or a Skinner or even a More has. Rationality does not hold the key to the
universe. Acting rationally does not give one sufficient insight to control what is a very
complex world. Butler would probably agree that acting rationally entails understanding
the limits of rationality. So he rejects any prospect for comprehensive and radical reform,
even if it were to be put forward by a scientist or other person employing rational
techniques.
Injustice
Butler appears to be concerned by the ubiquity of injustice. Erewhon as both
mirror of England as prediction of a future England is characterized by injustice. No one
truly gets what he or she deserves. The sick are left to die, the poor to starve and the
ravished to suffer in silence. Those who commit harm, meanwhile, are treated with
solicitude and prosper. Those who steal pay token penalties in the form of private
treatment and go about doing the same thing again and again.
Here the point is not that we should do nothing about injustice, but that injustice is
a problem that should tended to be seriously and rationally. Injustice is importantly a
problem of self-interest and power relations, so understanding these basics is fundamental
to providing everyone with as much justice as is possible. Erewhon does not understand
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these basics and therefore replicates the problems of injustice, in inflated form, found in
ordinary society.
Greed and Immorality
Erewhon is marked importantly by greed. Everyone who has ambition wants
material goods above all else. The narrator’s jailor wishes to charge handsomely for
exhibiting him. The king is intrigued by the notion that the narrator can turn ordinary
materials into gold. Nosnibar not only attempts to profit by defrauding a widow of her
savings; he also pushes forward with his usual business (whose concealed shadiness is
hinted) in gathering yet more wealth. The narrator himself plans to make a killing by
exploiting his “discovery” of the place. Erewhon in this sense is a perfect home for greed.
It is publicly denounced but secretly encouraged, and anyone who is blessed with an
absence of scruples finds himself in a particularly salubrious environment.
Erewhon is also deeply immoral. No one in Erewhon believes they have real
obligations to anyone else. To make the best for oneself, to get ahead at the expense of
anyone and everyone else is the norm. Government institutions and social practices
ultimately reinforce this attitude. As such Erewhon is, at bottom, merely a collection of
individuals, each going their own way underneath a canopy of moral platitudes.
Deeply Flawed Institutions
Insofar as Erewhon exists as a critical reflection on contemporary England, it
appears that Butler believes that some existing institutions are at best ineffective and at
worst purveyors of harmful attitudes and practices. Those that are targeted are the banks,
the Church of England, and the Universities. He accuses the banks of putting out
worthless money and forcing people to go underground to find useful currency. He
portrays the Church of England as musty and out of touch with ordinary citizens, acting
mostly as a source of sinecures for the upper middle class. The Universities he portrays as
either the scene of a confidence trick (people are paid to do nothing) or the site where
young adults are indoctrinated with perverse, irrational and generally useless ways of
encountering the world.
It does not appear that Butler wishes to condemn all contemporary institutions. It
is rather these that he takes on. The characteristic that seems to link the three is their
pretensions. The banks pretend to control the economic universe. The Church claims to
hold all religious truths and to command the allegiance of all Englanders. The
Universities claim to understand the world and to push ways of thinking far beyond the
limits of ordinary people’s common sense to comprehend. Therefore all of them partake
of the hubris that marks a utopian frame of mind.
Thinking About the Problems Erewhon Identifies
Butler presents us with two types of problems. The first are those that afflict
ordinary society and are rooted in one set of human characteristics. People in ordinary
society are hypocritical, many institutions dysfunctional, and what we are promised is
often not what we are given in terms of justice and morality. The other set of problems
are those that afflict radical attempts to change existing institutions. These are founded on
the first set of problematic human characteristics plus a further set. Radical change
reveals what is worst in humans. If you don’t like conventional society, Butler says, just
wait until you see the “improved” utopian version.
To accept Butler’s view is to accept that problems are pervasive. They infect
current institutions and anything we could find to replace them. We cannot shut our eyes
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to current conditions and their glaring inadequacies, but we cannot allow ourselves to be
blinded by the brilliance of proposed changes. This means accepting problems and
attempting to deal with their consequences rather than attempting to attack them at their
roots.
Butler would likely point to the problems we currently experience and argue that
this reinforces his point. Do we not see instances of rampant irrationality, with people
believing on fantastic story after another? After a century of progressive reform, have we
perfected our institutions? Do we not have even worse problems with greed and
injustice? To think these problems will not always be with us is to have foolish hopes.
One argument against accepting Butler’s position is that we risk falling into cynicism or
quietism. If current structures are not admirable and attempts to improve them make
things worse, what is there to believe in? Where can we turn for hope? If problems are in
some sense “natural,” why even attempt to deal with their consequences? Butler only
offers us thin gruel for hope, counseling us to eat the offerings of reformers. But is that
enough to rescue us from a chronic disbelief in everything, being starved of hope for real
change?
Human Nature
Butler portrays humans as stubbornly resistant to fundamental change. It is very
difficult to get people to alter their behavior, and impossible to eliminate human
characteristics. Humans are what they are and will be what they have been so long as
they continue to be human. Thus attempts to get around hardwiring, elicit different
behaviors by changing the environment, or attempting to program them is largely useless.
One can only work around the edges by the use of common sense that appeals to a kind
of natural understanding of functionality.
Humans are Deeply Hardwired
Butler’s understanding of human nature is different from what have encountered
thus far. In his understanding innate characteristics are more stubborn and more
determining of human action than is the case for More or Neville. People have lots of
hardwiring. This is true both of innate virtues and of inherent vices. People will always
be self-interested and ambitious, no matter their environment. They will also be, to some
degree, rational and pragmatic. No amount of training can radically change the way they
behave.
Thus the important question for thinking about the human condition for Butler
does not involve speculating about how to build the perfect environment or the best
training program, but to contemplate deeply human nature and to think about how current
environments can be gradually reformed such that that humans may operate more
ethically and comfortably within them. In other words, the way to a better life isn’t
through the attempt to change radically the way humans behave by manipulating their
environments and training them to act artificially, but rather to adjust environments in
ways that allow people to use their common sense to the best of their abilities, all the
while knowing that vices will emerge and make themselves felt. One changes
environments incrementally so as to accord better with human nature.
What are the innate and negative characteristics Butler identifies? Any list of
traits found in Erewhon would include greed, deceit, hypocrisy, selfishness, jealousy,
gluttony, hatred of outsiders, ungratefulness, and a lack of empathy or pity. These, Butler
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suggests, along with self-interest and ambition fill a great deal of the human character
and do so in an unattractive and unpromising fashion.
Humans are Often at the Mercy of Circumstances that Their Innate
Characteristics Create
From his discussion of Erewhonian mythology, which mocks the belief that the
unborn barge their way into the realm of the living and therefore are solely responsible
for their lives and bodies, Butler appears to hold that humans do not bear individual
responsibility in their wills for their condition. They may be born in an unhealthy
condition or uncongenial families. But his argument goes further than attributing the
human condition to random environmental effects. The fact that humans are born into
particular circumstances is not a random event from the standpoint of humans as a
collective actor. He seems to hold that humans create their own society and by their
actions mold physical conditions that make it either more easy or more difficult to use
rationality and common sense and to deal with innate vices. Erewhonians have created
their society and their physical environment through their actions; therefore Erewhonians
in a large sense are responsible for their condition in which, for example, the poor are
penalized and the wealthy purveyors of crime escape meaningful punishment.
The Importance of Self-Interest
The fact that changing environments will not result in utopia Butler attributes to a
particular part of human hardwiring. At bottom the most important part and
simultaneously the hardest of human hardwiring is self-interest. No matter what humans
do individually or collectively, self-interest will emerge as the most important factor in
determining human action. Because of this, there will always exist the urge to place
oneself before the common good and therefore to create conditions wherein everyone
cannot enjoy the good life. Humans willingly collect in societies and families, yet the
bonds they create by living together are not stronger than self-interest. Communities will
attempt to regulate their members through moral and religious systems in the attempt to
make them pay attention to the common good, but large numbers of individuals will
always find ways around the strictures those systems create. No matter what societies do
to create conditions for a universal good life, those who are sufficiently intelligent will
always seek to go around laws or take advantage of them selfishly to gather good things
for their exclusive use. Thus perfect equity, justice and the good life for everyone is
unattainable. The way forward is to recognize this and always to take our self-interest,
and thus our radically social imperfection, into account.
Ambition is the Gateway to Other Evils
There are also other factors that explain the failure of utopia in Butler’ eyes.
Ambition is one. The utopian project has at its center the quest, and therefore the
ambition to create the perfect life for everyone. But for Butler, ambition, as we see all the
way from the actions of the narrator to the consequences of the Erewhonian plan, leads to
morally bankrupt and irrational actions.
Ambition performs this function in several ways. First it acts as a supercharger to
self-interest. By establishing a superior way of life, whether individual or social, as the
most important object of action and subordinating all else to that goal, it operates in the
same way the Orwell describes fanaticism—it clears conventional morality out of the
way. Utopians argue we must do away with conventions to reach perfection.
Conventionality only poses barriers to what we want. But once one removes conventions,
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including conventional morality and the, albeit weak and imperfect, controls they
exercise on humans, what is left as a guide to action is self-interest alone. Second it
likewise discards common sense. Ambition’s roots in a supreme dissatisfaction with the
status quo causes the mind to question all that is has been accepted before as insights into
how the world works and how we can profitably live in that world.. Wisdom must lie in
esoteric and neglected ways of understanding the world. So everything that is taken as
knowledge, including our hard won knowledge of human nature and institutional
functionality, is thrown out. To follow this path is to arrive at absurd conclusions, such as
fears of living machines and arguments that ill health is a criminal offense.
Of course ambition can also be a social attribute. Here the analogue to ambition in
individuals is radical political programs in societies. To attempt to move forward too
quickly, to change too comprehensively, and to create perfection is to overshoot the mark
of good social policymaking, resulting in the intensification of problems rather than the
creation of solutions. Small changes and modest goals appear to be the way forward in
Butler’s view.
The Importance of Common Sense
Butler sees common sense as an antidote for utopian aspirations, though it cannot
necessarily disentangle itself from self-interest. It is therefore not a moral cure, but a
practical remedy for the excesses of utopianism. It places humans in closest contact with
the information which a practical understanding of one’s immediate environment
provides.
Butler therefore does not only equate common sense with an accepted, received or
general wisdom, though accepted general wisdom may in fact incorporate insights
derived from common sense and therefore should not be discarded. Rather he also sees it
as an ineradicable ability to reason through a situation to create an immediate, pragmatic
response to circumstances meant to further one’s self-interest. It is operational in
Erewhon whenever people attempt to find ways around Erewhonian laws and customs.
The suspicious suicides of animals during the times when Erewhon forbade the killing of
animals for food is one such instance.
Thinking About Human Nature in Erewhon
As we have noted before, there are consequences to thinking that people are
deeply hardwired. It means foremost that the usual utopian technique of hoping to change
behavior by changing environments is at best more difficult than if humans are moldable.
Couple that trait with a deep attachment to self interest and you are left with humans that
will work to defeat any scheme that calls for any impingement on the self in the interest
of the greater good.
If we were adopt this model of humans as thoroughly selfish beings we would
have to throw away any belief in philanthropy, charity or self-sacrifice. We would have
to rely upon compulsion or some appeal to self-interest to ensure that people in fact do
what they need to do to support the general good.
Butler would argue that in many ways we already use this model of human nature.
We rely on markets to aggregate individual pursuits of particular interest into a larger
synthesis of a general interest. We use material incentives such as tax cuts and subsidies
to encourage desired behavior. We also have a large array of coercive penalties for
people who do not engage in desirable behavior. While we ostensibly have been a
country of volunteers, this characteristic has withered away in the past half-century. A
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response may point to the prevalence of charitable and philanthropic activities. It is not
clear that people are only self-interested. If they are not, then treating people as if they are
only self-interested is likely to encourage only self-interested behavior.
Themes
The themes Butler incorporates in Erewhon underscore utopia’s mixed up
priorities and strange policies. These are meant to reveal the problems that arise when
common sense and rationality are abandoned in favor of dreams, hopes and fantasies.
Perverse Understandings of Human Responsibility
The most important facets of Erewhon are Butler’s exaggerated depictions of
what he sees as the backwards understanding of responsibility exhibited among most
utopians. For all utopians the prospect of perfection carries with it the requirement that
one explain disorder and evil. This is the reason why More places so much emphasis on
environmental causes of disorder. If environment is the most important cause of
problems, then manipulating environments and instituting training can result in a more, if
not completely, perfect life.
Butler satirizes this view by having Erewhon’s law code criminalize sickness and
poverty and treat crimes like a sickness. The first part is the attitude taken elsewhere, if in
less exaggerated form, in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere. In those works as
well as Walden Two, it is not humans but other factors that explain evil. Butler pushes
this position to its logical conclusion. If crime really is a manifestation of some outer
influence that is akin to sickness or other condition that relieves the perpetrator of
responsibility (“the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune”), why shouldn’t it
be treated on par with a cold or other physical ailment? Why shut someone up in a prison
when treatment by a doctor is all that may be necessary? Moreover, if the commission of
crime afflicts people no matter their will or moral code, shouldn’t it be treated as a
random event that carries with it no sense of personal responsibility whatsoever?
The second part of this doctrine, the condemnation of misfortune, gets at the
abdication of responsibility on the part of the government for the care of the unfortunate.
Rather than helping those who have become ill or have few prospects given the rigging of
the economic system in favor of the fortunate few, the government punishes them for a
condition that is outside of their ability to control.
There is something more than perversity or ridicule of English trends that
connects these upside-down judgments. Mr. Nosnibor gets away with his transgressions
because he is a position to carry them out on a grand scale. The narrator is rescued
because of the interest his appearance creates. The ill prisoners laboring in the cells next
to the narrator, in contrast, are so poor as to lose their health. Their poverty likewise rules
out the possibility of having powerful connections. Those who are punished are without
power; those who are treated sympathetically are those who are otherwise wealthy and
well-connected. What is behind these perversions of equity and human treatment is in
fact power and thus they serve to push home the point that utopia does no more than
intensify problems that power relations create in ordinary society because it does nothing
to temper and control the real sources of evil.
The Ubiquity and Tenacity of Human Vices
The environment intentionally created in Erewhon has not led to the erasure of
vices. To the contrary, they flourish and have take root even while people and the country
itself appear outwardly beautiful and well-ordered. Erewhonians are notorious for the
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desire to squeeze advantage out of any situation, just as is the narrator. Yram’s father, the
jailer, charges “handsome fees” for the privilege of allowing townspeople to view his
prisoner. Mr. Nosnibor engages in larceny. The faculty of the colleges are lazy and self-
absorbed.
In other words there is nowhere where human vices cannot be found. No
environment can wipe them out and no belief system can remove their foundation. Vices
are ineradicably in human nature. All society can do is attempt to limit their presence and
effects. To create a society in which it is assumed that vices have been eliminated does
nothing more than give them greater scope for growth and influence.
The Error of Seeing Morality as Relative and Social Mores as Flexible
While sometimes used to point up the narrator’s narrow view of the world, the
upside-down customs of Erewhon are not meant primarily to teach tolerance for other
cultures. Butler expects us to agree with the narrator’s initial view that Erewhon’s
treatment of the ill and unfortunate is perverse. It is when the narrator starts musing on
the meaning of responsibility and the capacity of societies to mold themselves in any way
they please that we are to diverge from his understanding and reach the opposite
conclusions. Butler does not see much play in the kinds of rules societies must institute in
order for life to prosper. There is only one kind of morality, that which restrains ambition
and dispenses equity on the basis of a conventional understanding of responsibility, social
obligation and guilt. This is because human nature is itself impervious to change. To
think mores flexible and social structures amenable to any construction that a group
wishes to impose is wrong-headed and foolish. This, as we saw above, is directly
contrary to More’s understanding and as well as Skinners some seventy years in the
future.
The Fruitlessness of Applying Comprehensive Solutions to Human Problems
It is easy to misinterpret important parts of Erewhonian society and practice. It is
tempting but mistaken, for example, to interpret the book as an anti-Luddite polemic.
Butler does see anti-machinery fanatics as wingnuts. But the anti-technological aspect of
Erewhon is not in itself meant as praise of technology. Butler is not necessarily saying
that progress must be made by embracing machinery. His point rather is broader—that
the attempt to resolve human problems comprehensively by reducing our understanding
of problems to facilely conceived causes and easily produced solutions is wrong-headed.
Technology here is merely an example. Butler could just as easily have picked something
else, such as the control of sexuality (as with the Oneida community) or the
communization of property as an overblown and overhyped utopian fetish to ridicule. His
point is that the problem of evil is not a simple one nor is it amenable to a single radical
blow.
The satirical treatment of Erewhonian attitudes towards technology as unhelpfully
nutty is also part of related point that Butler wishes to make. It is not at all clear that by
eliminating machines that Erewhon is any better off than had it used machines
judiciously. This attempt, as with all others, to create the good life by insisting
dogmatically on a set of views rather than pragmatically feeling the way forward is
counterproductive. Rather than being more prosperous, happy and autonomous by
eliminating machines, most citizens are left poorer and ultimately open to the kinds of
“help” (entailing their removal as laborers at gunpoint) that the narrator proposes to
supply.
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Thus the hallmark of Erewhon is that insofar as its grand plans for creating the
good life for everyone are operational, they tend to have little effect on behavior or have
the opposite effect. Those who are touched most deeply by the utopian plans are those
who live the most morally bankrupt lives and are most open to accepting and exploiting
the randomness of the system. They inhabit a world of hypocrisy, deceit, and polite
manners overlaying unscrupulous behavior.
Yet it is also the case that some appear happy and at peace with themselves. We
find these people mostly in the opening passages of the narrator’s description of
Erewhon. While these passages serve to set up the reader for a description of a typical
utopia, an expectation that is quickly disappointed, it is also the case that they encapsulate
most of what Butler wishes to say about the place. In that description the narrator notes
that most of the people living in the rural areas on the fringes of the mountain range are
poor, but handsome, healthy and joyful. It is important to note that the poverty of the
people is the responsibility of the government, in that it has rigged rules to favor the few.
Thus in this sense it has failed to bring the good life if that life is measured in terms of
prosperity, which Erewhon does in part. Yet these people are beautiful and happy. Why?
It appears because they are marginal. Being poor and relatively neglected, these people
are much happier and well-adjusted than the “fortunate” ones who live in the larger towns
and cities because they escape most of the impact of Erewhonian plans. That those who
occupy the margins of this utopia, outside of the intentional effects of the plans for
utopia, are those who live the best lives is an important lesson Butler wishes to impart.
Customs and Laws that Deviate from Common Sense and Individual
Interests are Unproductive
Butler sees common sense in league with self-interest as more powerful than laws
and customs. Whenever these clash, people will initially pretend to obey social mores but
do whatever necessary secretly to protect themselves and further their interests. The
result of not adjusting laws to the force of common sense is not just the bringing of
morality into disrepute, the robbing of laws of their force, and the growth of hypocrisy,
but the inevitable undermining of the laws or customs in question. The only way in which
these can be kept in place is by draconian coercion or the linkage of such laws with
disasters, but even here public resistance will be such that eventually they will be
discarded.
This is where Butler’s argument that neither environments nor training can bring
perfection is brought fully into the open. It will never be the case that environments can
ever be so constructed that people will act contrary to their interests. It is never the case
that people will be so deeply trained that they will lose completely their common sense
and a relatively clear understanding of their own, individual, material interests. At bottom
people are self-interested pragmatists and will react pragmatically to any set of laws and
conditions that society creates, even if the result of their short term reasoning is that
society as a whole is worse off. In this sense people cannot be manipulated into doing
good—laws and customs must clearly lay out the consequences of behaving badly and
reward those who do good and understand that not everyone will conform, given their
inherent ambition.
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The Attempt to Preserve Unnatural Laws and Customs Results in the

Distortion of Rationality
The only way in which the upside-down laws and customs of Erewhon survive,
aside from coercion, is through the propagation of irrationality. This is somewhat
different from hypocrisy in Butler’s account. Hypocrisy is the mouthing of a concept
coupled with action that follows a different understanding. The distortion of rationality
entails interference in the reasoning process such that the flow of ordinary reasoning is
diverted from its usual path. The result is the holding of illogical or incoherent beliefs,
such as accepting a concept and its opposite simultaneously as true. The teaching of
unreason in the colleges wherein students are taught that one should supplement rational
thinking with irrational speculation is the epitome of such activities. But the narrator’s
argument that people as a matter of course believe and don’t believe in particular
doctrines simultaneously is another, more ubiquitous example, one that foreshadows
Orwell’s discussion of doublethink some seventy years later. Yet here the result of this
process is different than in Orwell’s description. For Orwell the result of doublethink is
the subordination of the individual to the state and ultimately his conversion into a
fanatic. For Butler the result is the individual’s resistance to society and the preservation
of the space in which the individual pursues, often at the expense of others, his own
narrow self-interest.
The Fetish of Physical Beauty
The narrator is at great pains to emphasize the beauty of the people of Erewhon.
This in fact reflects the attitude of the Erewhonians themselves and extends to the judicial
system. To be handsome is to be fortunate; to be ugly is to be unfortunate and therefore
open to prosecution. This position is taken further by the partiality of Erewhonians to
blond hair and blue eyes, attributes that allow people to escape punishment for otherwise
serious offenses.
Here Butler is transparently lampooning the use of physical appearance as a
marker of the success of society. It is of course found in Utopia and News from Nowhere
and to some degree in Looking Backward. The point seems to be that utopians have the
wrong priorities. In focusing on beauty they neglect the moral ugliness they would create.
The good life is not just about outward appearances but also the reality of political and
economic practices and moral codes.
The emphasis placed on blond hair and blues eyes may have another edge to it—
that of race and racial justice. The fuss the narrator makes of trying to place the
Erewhonians in terms of their ethnicity, at one time speculating on their Latin
appearance, at another insisting on their Hebrew ancestry, points to the importance of
such matters at the time. Here again the point is not just to identify color consciousness,
but also to argue that such behavior will be emphasized rather than eliminated by
attempts to manipulate human environments. Here “utopia” is not a post-racist society
where everyone is treated justly and equitably. Rather it is one in which racial hierarchies
are firmly embedded in social and political structures.
Thinking About the Themes of Erewhon
For Butler, Erewhon doesn’t work from a conventional point of view in large part
because it abandons convention. That observation may seem either trite or circular, but it
is nonetheless helpful. Utopias can and must be judged importantly on the basis of
conventional criteria because utopians argue they meet and exceed conventional
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standards. No matter their plans, utopias still are meant to bring justice and the good life
to people. Butler argues that while conventional thinking and institutions do not
necessarily provide those goods as well as we would like, they certainly do so better than
would dreamlands that forget about self-interest, abandon common sense, and cultivate
ways of thinking that are irrational. We cannot fantasize our way to a better life.
Dreamlands are in practice nightmares.
Adopting these views means clinging closely to rationality and our understanding
of common sense. It means viewing large changes with deep skepticism, not because they
threaten entrenched interests but because they are likely to make problems worse. We
should view conventional institutions and ways of thinking as the accumulations of
centuries of experience and rational thinking, not to be thrown away lightly on the
promise of the good life offered by baseless speculation.
Butler would argue that adopting this way of thinking about politics and society
would offer a necessary damper to rampant speculation. We would be better off with
sober appreciations of our life and with deeper appreciation of accepted ways of thinking
and of rationality in general. We should guard ourselves against the irrationality that is so
much on display now from the right and left. Even so-called conservatives are calling for
revolution in the hopes that their pet schemes will bring about a wonderful new world.
One might reply that our problems do stem largely from the failures of our existing
institutions and the power of entrenched interests. It may take a fundamental rethinking
of politics to make life appreciably better. Such a rethinking, even if it does depart from
conventional wisdom, need not be irrational. It is a mistake to equate conventional
wisdom and what is taken to be common sense as exhaustive of rationality. Indeed
common sense as it is understood now may be irrational. A rational appreciation of the
world is more elastic and more fruitful of a variety of useful conclusions than Butler
depicts and we would be mistaken to confine it to traditional understandings. After all,
how did we arrive at our present set of conventions except through changes in the way
people think?
The Dystopian Life in Erewhon
Erewhon’s institutions are meant to excite ridicule in the eyes of the reader.
Politics, economics and justice in the nation are extended jokes through which Butler
pokes serious fun at both conventional society and the extension of ridiculous trends in
utopia.
The narrator draws the parallel between England’s health care system and
important parts of the Erewhon’s justice system. That is, manifestations of disorder and
moral turpitude are dealt with privately through the ministrations of a straightener (a kind
of moral physician). Thus moral matters are matters of personal attention. In treating
them in this way, the unscrupulous are able to inoculate themselves against censor by
pretending concern for the state of their moral selves. When Mr. Nosnibor bilks an
elderly client of her savings he hires the most famous straightener in the nation and
proceeds with the “cure”. What he receives is sympathy from outsiders and a course of
atonement from his moral physician. All is made well, in other words, by an expenditure
of money on the straightener, a fine to the state, a self-administered punishment, and a
healthy dose of public sympathy. There was nothing in this course that permanently
affects Nosnibor’s economic condition nor serves to compensate his victim. Despite the
prescription of a fine to the state for twice what was embezzled, the narrator holds that he
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“largely increased his already great possessions” during the short period during which the
former was in residence at Nosnibor’s house.
Correspondingly, physical matters and those dealing with misfortune are
considered communal affairs and are dealt with by the institutions of justice. The widow
whom Nosnibor robs, had she not soon died, would have received the sharp end of the
state’s attention because she has been so misfortunate as to trust an embezzler. Rather
than sympathy (which Mr. Nosnibor garners) the victims of crime are subject to
prosecution.
Like England, Erewhon also has a system of colleges set in a mostly rustic setting
at a short distance from the capital. One part of Butler’s amusing description of this
system is a transparent satire on Oxford and Cambridge and the uselessness of the
classical education they provide to the modern person. Here his extended description of
the infatuation with a long dead language is particularly appropriate for the times. But
equally on target are his descriptions of the parts of the study of “unreason”, which
include such topics as inconsistency and evasion. Higher education in ordinary society
creates amoral creatures who are a danger to their follow citizens; the logical end of such
a system is found in this “utopia”.
The other side of Butler’s discussion of the Colleges of Unreason is a partner with
his description of Erewhonian myths. Both have as their primary objects the
wrongheadedness, because irrationality, of radically utopian thinking. Butler’s opposition
to utopianism as unreasonable is revealed here, for he seems to equate an inability to
reason clearly with utopianism. Utopians, while they pretend to rationality and
practicality, lack both reasoning skills and common sense. This is revealed most clearly
in the discussion of “hypothetics” as a systematic way of thinking about the world. This
discussion serves as a double-edged satire. The first edge is the ridicule of academic
institutions as out of touch with the real world and real needs. As with the study of
languages that are no longer spoken in ordinary life, the study of hypothetics is a dead
end. Unable to marshal the intellectual forces needed to address pragmatically real world
problems, academics retreat to quibbling over useless matters. In “hypothetics,”
rationality and understanding are balanced by an excursion into speculation as to what
might happen or what might exist even if it does not. Hypothetics is the “science” of hope
or wishful thinking. It encapsulates Butler’s characterization of all the attempts to
construct an intellectual way to a perfect situation. It is based on ignoring what exists and
what one observes, understands and can coherently explain. What one does instead is
build a hypothetical system, copied from “nowhere,” that will never be constructed and
would not work even if it was.
The other edge uses this anti-intellectualism to cut against what Butler holds is the
hopelessly optimistic nature of utopian thought. Here in rejecting reason as the only way
of thinking about the world and insisting on “unreason” as a necessary part of a wholistic
way of understanding things, the faculty of the colleges embodies the attitude of utopians
in their rejection of what common sense and conventional wisdom tells them is the limit
of what is possible to achieve with human material. As with the faculty of these
institutions, Butler paints utopians as dangerous obscurantists with sheepskins. They
arrogantly dismiss practical objections to perfectionist schemes as small minded
quibbling. They produce bigger, “higher” ideas, though in fact those ideas can never be
credibly defended.
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Finally, Butler portrays the irony of utopian thought in his discussion of the
attitude of the faculty of these colleges to reformist ideas. Though founded on
unreasonable radicalism and dedicated to the hypothetical, utopia ultimately propagates
conformity. To achieve perfection everyone must think and act alike. The very pluralism
of ordinary society that allows radical thought to flourish is not allowed in utopia.
Perfection has no room for dissent and nonconformity. The way to a better life is through
systematic pursuit of improvements, but utopia cannot encompass the concept of further
progress. Erewhon in particular has no patience for originality and pluralism, as the
venerable professors of the colleges inform the narrator when he mistakenly praises
genius and inquires about the foundations for progress.
Butler expands on his discussion of religious institutions when he treats
Erewhonian religion. Here he ridicules both the conventional understandings embodied in
orthodox Christianity as well as various unorthodox understandings such as Deism and
civic religions in the mold of those created during the French Revolution. As in other
matters, Erewhonian spirituality is a satire on and extension of religious trends both
conservative and radical in conventional society. In its radical form, Butler points to the
unreasonableness of elevating human virtues to supernatural heights. To worship justice
and charity is on par with revering people and beings as gods—there is no basis in either
reason or function to do so. To base a perfect society on such a premise is merely to
recapitulate the mistakes of conventional society; indeed it is to deepen such missteps
such that utopian society is even less moral and more hypocritical than conventional
society.
Butler underlines this conclusion by dwelling on the metaphysical understanding
that undergirds the legal penalties for disease and misfortune. As this mythical
understanding points to the pre-existence of people before birth and attributes conception
to the unborn nagging the living to give birth, responsibility for everything that occurs in
one’s life when it comes to physical health and luck are shifted onto the individual. This
leaves families and society free of blame for anything that should occur, and establishes,
through the signing of the “Birth Formula” that acknowledges this, the right of society to
hold individuals solely accountable. Thus what is generally the case in England officially
becomes the case in utopia.
Thus life in Erewhon is an exaggerated version of life in England. The
exaggeration comes in the form of the attempt to perfect life. The result of course is not
perfection but the raising of the problems of conventional society to new heights.
While Butler, as seen above, accepts that people do not shape their own lives, he
does not extend this understanding to the understanding that environments determine
actions. Because he sees hardwiring in human nature as having a large hand in
determining their actions, the role of environment is therefore indeterminate. His
understanding of the effects of environments on humans if anything is ironic, but in a
way different from Neville’s. While the latter’s view holds that paradise does not lead to
happiness but to degeneration because it leads to morally flabby and uncivilized humans,
Butler’s understanding is that the attempt to improve the lot of humans can never escape
the particularistic interests of humans. Butler seems to hold that there is no disinterested
standpoint that allows anyone with the power to remake society to do so in an equitable
fashion. The process will inevitably be manipulated so that those who are powerful
before will continue to enjoy an asymmetrical position within society. Moreover, those
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who have superior abilities and a clearer understanding of their self-interests will always
be able to manipulate any system, no matter how equitable or well thought out it may be.
No community will ever be extraordinary and therefore utopian because we can never rid
ourselves of the problems that afflict us in ordinary life.
Indeed Butler argues that the tendencies that mitigate against that the good life in
ordinary society are magnified in the utopian scenario due to the artificial nature of
utopian schemes. To manipulate an environment to find perfection inevitably means
organizing it such that self-interest is removed. But that, Butler holds, is impossible. All
one does is to mask self-interest, drive it underground, and associate it with the narrowest
rather than the broadest of subjects. This gives those with superior abilities and a clearer
understanding of their interests a freer hand to operate.
Perversity, in the sense of finding the opposite of what one may expect, is
therefore the hallmark of Erewhon as a supposed utopia. Instead of a society in which the
problems and promise of technology have been explored and settled, we find one that has
turned its back on all machines. Instead of finding an exquisitely refined system of justice
in which all are treated with perfect equity, we find a system that is the hallmark of
inequity. Where in Erewhon crime like embezzlement is seen as an event that occurs
outside the control of one’s will, Butler has Erewhonians consider that misfortune does
carry with it personal responsibility. To be sick is to commit a punishable crime. To be
well educated is to embrace irrationality.
Butler is suggesting here that the difference between Erewhon and contemporary
society is in the degree and explicitness of the Erewhonian’s condemnation of the poor
and the unfortunate. The creation of utopia will lead to the ultimate rigging of the system
to benefit the strong, rich and powerful. In Erewhon as elsewhere, those who have
influence or sufficient funds can escape the consequences of their actions and dodge the
problems laws create for most persons. Indeed they find themselves in a better position to
take advantage of their situation. Rather than eliminating the problems of injustice and
power inequities found in conventional society, all utopia does is reinforce them.
Hypocrisy is likewise pervasive. The narrator goes so far as to allege that people
in Erewhon “very often do not believe or mean things which they profess to regard as
indisputable”. Part of this is the humbuggery that accompanies the need to fit in with
convention. To admit to sickness is open oneself up to legal sanction, whereas moral
lapses are seen as private matters. Therefore many physical ailments are put down to
immoral habits. But hypocrisy goes further to reveal the inescapable fact of self-interest.
To lie to escape punishment is not just a conformist action; it is an act of self-defense that
has physical or fiscal preservation as its end. Thus people do not pretend to believe in one
thing and do another for the abstract pleasure of doing so or because they are so social
that they wish to conform no matter the price. They do so either to protect themselves or
to advance their fortunes
In this regard life in Erewhon, as with other dystopias, is highly stressful. The
need to juggle internal and external beliefs is one source of such stress. Another is the
constant fear of the double penalty—the one natural, the other human—of experiencing
misfortune. As with later dystopias, the source of this stress is government and society.
While Butler is clearly amused by positing the destruction of machines in this
dystopia, he is not as much concerned by the material impact of that decision on the
Erewhonian standard of living than on its symbolism. It is on par with other backwards
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parts of its economic situation meant either to satirize utopian policies or existing
practices. It is probable that the Erewhonian taxation system, wherein if one makes a very
large amount of money one is exempt from taxation, while families with children who do
not earn money are subjected to extra taxation, partakes of both. It is therefore mainly in
the distribution of goods rather than in the creation of value that Erewhon is backwards.
Thinking About Erewhon
One conclusion to be drawn from this story is that if the good life is only available
through utopian means, it is not available at all. This is because alongside common sense
and rationality, ambition and irrationality inevitably compete to inform self-interest.
Where Neville is comfortable with ambition so long as it is tempered by self-discipline,
Butler links ambition to too many problematic characteristics for him to place any faith in
it and provides no hope that those problematic characteristics can be eliminated or muted.
The narrator is Butler’s example of human nature. He is nothing but ambitious and
consequently betrays symptoms of the irrationality and immorality that Butler most fears.
Erewhonian society, in trying to attain perfection by means of faddish projects, is the
author on a larger scale and thus English society on steroids. If the attempt to attain the
good life for all is predicated on ambition and inevitably is informed by faddish ideas, the
project is bound to fail.
While this is transparently a satire and therefore not meant to be taken as a true
portrait of what a future society would resemble, its implausibility should give us pause.
Should we take this seriously as a warning? Is not the economic necessity of building
trust a bulwark against the totally immoral system that Erewhon represents? If it is not
possible for a society to function if it treated crime as a private moral matter and thus
akin to a disease, should we not then treat this warning as overblown and hysterical? Isn’t
the hypocrisy and “doublethink” Butler locates in Erewhon a sign that common sense and
rationality will do enough to guard us against such a society and make the writing of this
story superfluous?
One response to this point is to think about matters of degree. To what extent
could an elite rig a system such that moral outrages are treated in this manner? Should
the differential treatment of the rich in the nineteenth century, when relatively few
criminal members of the upper class were imprisoned (as opposed to secured in their
houses or lodged in private and comfortable institutions for the disturbed) lead us to
believe it is possible? Should the parallel treatment of the rich in contemporary America,
where the well off are able to escape punishment or at least the full measure of
punishment, by hiring high priced legal advisors and, if incarcerated lodged in “Club
Fed”, make us think of Erewhon? What of the relatively painless rehabilitation of
celebrities like Martha Stewart? What of those associated with political scandals, like
Charles Colson and Oliver North, who have found fame and fortune with relative ease?
Another consideration is Butler’s wholesale dismissal of utopians. He obviously
sees them as hopelessly out of touch, dangerous to the public at large, and enemies of true
progress. His satire of utopian reason, contained in the “Book of Machines,” imputes to
them a fancifulness that crosses over to the realm of science fiction. While this may
appear such an exaggerated characterization that one may dismiss it out of hand, the
current movement of utopian thought into the realm of science fiction shows that Butler
may have been prescient in this regard. Of course one’s attitude towards such a
movement depends on one’s orientation towards science fiction as a way of thinking
70
about the present and the future. It is, in his terms, an exercise in the “hypothetical”. Is it
useful or dangerous? Does speculation about a perfect future really distract us from
thinking about more pragmatic attempts at improvements, as Butler alleges? And what of
his discussions of attempts by Erewhonians to defend the rights of animals, meant equally
as a satire on the ridiculousness of utopian thought but now taken seriously by a
significant portion of our population?
One may also think about this in terms of the increasingly irrational, hysterical
and downright nutty turn of politics in the US and in parts of Europe. People are
increasingly supporting political aspirants who think the US is involved in vast
conspiracies against the Constitution, gun owners, and Christianity. There are those who
believe in UFOs. An increasing number insist that everyone accept a literal Biblical
understanding of the origins of humans. Some create tales of office holders out of whole
cloth and refuse to believe contrary evidence. Like the utopians Butler lampoons, these
people appear to be beyond the pale of rational society. But increasingly people are
attracted to them. Why? Is it because, as Butler alleges, many people are seeking easy
answers to complex problems? Is it that they are too hopeful or too ambitious in what
they seek to obtain from institutions and are disappointed with current attempts to muddle
through? Butler appears to have an explanation that makes some sense.
Several other important observations generated by Erewhon are relevant to the
contemporary world. The first is the persistence of self-interest. If Butler is correct, how
do we take this insight, as a condemnation of those who place their faith in the workings
of self-interest through markets to create the best possible outcomes, or as a rebuke to
those who think we can do away with manifestations of self-interest and remove
markets? It appears that Butler would agree with neither. He does not see self-interest as
generating policies conducive to the common good anymore than he foresees the
elimination of self-interest and thus the need to deal with it. He would probably argue we
need to continue to build institutions that confine and discipline self-interest while
accepting its continued existence.
The other observation has to do with the earlier reference to muddling through. If
we should not, in Butler’s estimation, opt for utopianism given out disappointment with
existing institutions (a disappointment he at least partly shares with regard to 19th century
England), what does that mean besides avoiding utopianism? It clearly does not mean
accepting things as they are. We must engage in incremental and pragmatic changes
using the tenets of common sense. But aside from the haziness of such a prescription
(what is common sense anyway? Is there general agreement on what it means? What
differentiates incremental change from radical change?) there are problems with the
nature of change. In short, incremental change is not exciting, and it is difficult to gather
the energy, momentum and frankly the moral courage on the part of officeholders to
engage in activities that will probably not benefit them in the short term and have only
marginal effect in the long term. How can we engage in such activity time after time
given not only our experience with our own political system, but Butler’s not very
attractive understanding of human nature?
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Chapter Five
The Iron Heel
Introduction
As with Erewhon, one may quarrel with the characterization of The Iron Heel
(published 1908) as a dystopia. Like Erewhon the book’s ultimate meaning is ambiguous.
On the one hand London sets out to describe the ambitions and accomplishments of
capitalism in the harshest possible terms. The “Iron Heel” was, in his view, a very
possible outcome of contemporary developments in a context dominated by industrial
capitalism. It is clear that London also wants to point the way forward. The “Brotherhood
of Man” that is the ultimate goal of the socialist project is important to London. It is just
as much his dream as his perception of capitalism run amok is a nightmare. Without
fundamental, radical change in politics and economics, the lives of most people will
degenerate to the level of beasts.
Yet there is more to this book than praise of revolutionary politics and
condemnation of capitalism. While Jack London’s description of the revolutionaries is
heroic, even commentators who paint the protagonist of the work as a kind of depiction
of London himself concede that Everhard’s heroism is tainted by the same disregard for
decency and the same reversion to the language of power as the defenders of the status
quo.1 Keeping in mind London’s socialist aspirations, we cannot conclude that he is
attempting to discredit the socialist and revolutionary approach to attaining the good life.
In this The Iron Heel is different from We, which critiques by satirizing our desire for
civilized comfort and thus questions the importance of civilization in general.
So what is the message? Perhaps this work can be read as a defense of the hard
realities of progress. In this understanding London would be arguing that the way
forward, in the form of both capitalism and socialism, requires us to leave behind
conventional understandings of moral behavior in our quest for the ultimate good life and
society. Historical reality is not romantic nor conventional. There is a steep price to be
paid for utopia in the form of violent revolution.
But I read it somewhat differently, as not so different in some ways from
Nineteen Eight-Four. Orwell, too, was a socialist and advocated major changes in
English life, including the jettisoning of the empire. But he was also deeply concerned
with the corrupting influence of the quest for certainty, the dehumanizing effect of
violence, and the control of thought processes, language and history. I believe London
was interested in many of the same issues. In pointing to the stubbornness of these
problems and projecting a future in which problems pervade the actions of every person
of action, London pioneers Orwell’s approach. There is a way forward and a better life
can be had and the path to that better life is full of obstacles, particularly those that arise
in the context of the modern, industrial, capitalist state. But most important is the point
that if we lose track of the humanism that is at the center of its socialist vision, the
Brotherhood of Man will escape our grasp. Where London differs from Orwell is in his
increased emphasis on the necessity, despite its dangers, of revolutionary change.
London therefore gives us a double message. First, radical change is necessary
and the later it occurs the more difficult it will be to attain. Second, radical change in the
1
See, for example, Jonathan Auerbach’s “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of The Iron Heel (New
York: Penguin Classics, 2006), p. viii.
72
context of late capitalism is difficult not only because of the strength of the capitalist
class and the capitalist state but also because of the dehumanizing environment of late
capitalism, which even affects those who struggle against it. Struggle in that environment
is both necessary and can subvert the humanist core of socialism itself.
Thus despite his socialist sympathies, I argue that London gives us a dystopia
that is fed by the response of our nature to a certain environment, that of fully realized
capitalism, that not only controls but has fully developed the powers of the state. If this
version of the future is everything that we do not want, it is not because particular people
are corrupted. Corruption is not part of London’s vocabulary, both because it is a
moralistic concept and because he sees human nature as too thin and empty for such a
concept to make sense. It is rather because London detects in contemporary early 20th
century society trends that he sees working themselves out in ways that it will be difficult
to escape. The capitalists who control the state will stop at nothing to crush any
opposition. In the same fashion London’s description of the icy determination of the
revolutionaries in their willingness to sacrifice ordinary people for their cause reveals
within the socialist camp the same dehumanizing traits that make the Iron Heel so
detestable. It is no coincidence that the hero’s name—Everhard—brings to mind the same
unyielding qualities explicitly referenced in the Iron Heel.2 It is also no mistake that his
wife describes him as Nietzsche’s blond beast, the superman who has jettisoned all
conventional morality in preference for his own code. Just as More argues that creating a
particular environment will lead to the blunting of certain human responses and the
development of others, so does London, but this time for the worse rather than the better.
Despite some ingrained qualities, both capitalists and revolutionaries revert to the mores
of beasts in the atmosphere of advanced capitalism. We are nearing the cusp of such an
environment, London argues, as we approach the maturity of the capitalist state.
Revolution is necessary to forestall this, but time is growing short and the abilities of the
state to resist the forces of history change are growing. If change is left too late the future
will not necessarily be full of promise and the promise it does hold out may not find its
fulfillment for hundreds of years.
The Contexts of The Iron Heel
By the late nineteenth, in the prime of London’s writing career, the revolutionary
response to industrial capitalism was well established. Varieties of Marxism, anarchism,
syndicalism and other radical agendas were marshalling their forces against the status
quo. Yet despite their efforts disappointments were rife. The events of 1848 had failed to
spark a European revolution. France’s defeat in 1871 had equally failed to bring about
fundamental change there. England, despite Dickensian conditions, had not experienced a
truly radical upheaval since the Chartist marches of the 1830s. For all the radical thought
deployed (satirized perhaps in Everhard’s criticism of metaphysics), the capitalist
remains and remains strong.
The failure of these movements was due in part to responses from capitalists. The
state in many industrialized countries had moved to modify the laissez-faire landscape in
favor of more state regulation. Bismark’s Germany had even pioneered the way (to be
followed in part by Theodore Roosevelt) in quieting the working class by co-opting the
2
And indeed a rather spooky premonition of Stalin, whose name literally means “man of steel”. Stalin of
course had already adopted this name as one of his many underground pseudonyms, but he would have
been unknown to anyone outside a very small circle of Russian revolutionaries, much less to London.
73
political agenda of socialist parties, providing pensions and subsidized foodstuffs and in
America by ostensibly regulating industries to break monopolies and curb industrial
violence.
London discards these developments in terms of their potential to bring about true
socialism, or at the least confines them to a fictional Europe that has edged towards
socialism. His target is the less trammeled capitalism that persists in the US and what he
perceives as the possible buy off of the highly skilled segment of the working class. In
that context he is skeptical of all state efforts to regulate businesses or working
conditions. He sees none of them as legitimate attempts to ameliorate the condition of
workers in general or to rein in the power of capitalists, but rather parts of a strategy to
hide the power of capitalists, to divide the working class, and to blunt the radical
tendencies of all who do not exercise power. For him the growth of the American state
does nothing to weaken the strength of capitalists. To incorporate economic regulation
into the state’s arsenal is just another stage in the development of capitalist power, for it
helps consolidate and coordinate the power that was wielded by individual corporations
during the laissez-faire era. Where an individual capitalist enterprise has marginally less
power to set its own prices or wages, it receives in return not only labor acquiescence but
the might of corporate unity. The difference is coordination and the cloak of justice.
Where before the nakedly harsh actions of industrialists served to unite workers by
making clear to even the most dense that they were oppressed, the operations of the state
now unite industrialists, split the working class and more fully cloak the iron heel in
velvet slippers. Tyranny, he argues, is garbed with principles of justice, the mirage of
equity and the illusion of paternalism. It is now more palatable because lawful and
ostensibly benevolent.
London wishes to expose these developments and illustrate what is in store for
humanity once the capitalist state has developed fully. When that occurs all but the few
will live lives of poverty and desperation. There is no recourse. What appear to be neutral
institutions of the state will transparently act on behalf of capitalists. To consult the
police, the courts, the church is to consult the arms of the capitalist class itself.
But London, as noted above, goes further than this. He holds that the environment
of the developed capitalist state will shape how people must act to promote change. If all
conventional avenues are closed, the only recourse is brute violence. Thus in his view not
only will the state dehumanize, by stealth, everyone in its charge, but the very attempt to
reveal its machinations will necessarily do the same. The violence committed in the name
of the future by Russian nihilists and American anarchists were not only the price to be
paid for revolution; London appears ready to accept this to at least some degree. The
larger problem he identifies is that the ideal of socialism and the humanism that informs
it may recede so far into the background that political and revolutionary goals will crowd
them out entirely. London is afraid that the time may come when the leaders of
revolution, hardened in battles with equally tough capitalist leaders, can not help but
replicate in any new society the militaristic sense of discipline, authority and disregard
for life that were necessary revolutionary tools. Thus the fear that it will matter little if
the capitalists or revolutionaries win—the results would be the same. Moreover, he
appears to say that adopting the violent tactics of the Iron Heel to overthrow it does not
work. Everhard and his successors who live the life of violent revolution fail to deliver
the socialist revolution. If one must resort to such subhuman tactics, it is already too late.
74
Thus his political message, sent to both revolutionaries and to ordinary readers,
has several parts. First he appears to caution radicals to reevaluate not only their tactics
and strategies, but their very mindsets. Even if tough measures are necessary, humanistic
goals must not be abandoned. Here the rise of the Russian nihilists in opposition to the
brutality of the Russian government in it use of vigilantes (London expressly references
the Black Hundreds) may be a model. The second message is a bit more subtle and in
tension with the first. If London is arguing that the fully developed capitalist state will
push to its full extent humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, then it must be overthrown and
overthrown quickly before that full potential has been reached. To allow the capitalist
state to reach its maturity is to close out alternatives not only because of the hardiness of
that state but also due to its poisoning of the well of human possibilities. But that, of
course, requires not only radical but also violent action. While London appears to doubt
both the efficacy and the humanity of Everhard’s violence, it is not clear that any other
strategies would work either. For example, one could hardly foresee the success of a
Gandhian-style non-violent campaign succeeding against the Iron Heel.
Synopsis and Characteristics of The Iron Heel
Synopsis
The book opens with an introduction that purports to look backward to the story.
But unlike either Looking Backward or News from Nowhere the tone is not triumphant.
Rather it is cautionary, both in the sense of casting some doubt on the story itself and in
the sense of warning us of the difficulties of attaining the good life. The story is allegedly
that contained in a long-lost manuscript written during the times of revolutionary struggle
in the early 20th century. This revolution failed and even though the socialist cause is said
eventually to triumph the content of the story conveys the difficulties that spurred the
revolt and the problems of overcoming those difficulties.
The story unfolds as the narrative of Avis Everhard’s life with her husband, the
revolutionary Ernest Everhard. Avis is the middle class daughter of an academic scientist
who meets Ernest in California in the early 1900s. The narrative breaks off in the early
1930’s after Ernest’s execution on the eve of what will be another in a series of
unsuccessful rebellions. As it sweeps through the intervening decades the story
documents the political, social and economic conditions of the time from the perspective
of people dissatisfied with the status quo. It contains encounters with people from all
parts of society; descriptions of living and working conditions, accounts of political and
economic maneuvers and plans for revolution.3 While Ernest at one point describes the
revolutionaries as living “in the light” so to speak, the picture most often is one of gloom
outside Avis’s idealized description of her personal life with Ernest. For every uplifting
story, such as the conversion of Bishop Morehouse to a life of practical charity, there is a
disheartening ending, encapsulated in the latter’s confinement in an insane asylum.
Thus like the more unambiguously dystopian pieces examined here, The Iron
Heel is concerned with identifying problematic trends, this time in the last decades of the
19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries. These include the seductive power of
power, the class nature of the state, the control of all aspects of society by the state, and
the increasingly grim lot of ordinary people. These are illustrated in a variety of ways.
Sometimes Avis Everhard, the author of the manuscript, reports on conditions she has
3
Much of this, as Baskett notes, is drawn for contemporary news accounts. See S. Baskett, “A Source of
The Iron Heel,” American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2. (May, 1955), pp. 268-270
75
witnessed or endured. At other times Ernest delivers information in speeches or other

conversational exchanges. In all, this is a dissection of a developing dystopian society
from the inside. The Everhards are not strangers to this society, though they are estranged
from it.
Here the argument focuses on the need for change. In direct contrast with
Erewhon, The Iron Heel is importantly about the need for a radical approach to the
problems capitalist industrialization creates. It is only by removing capitalists from power
and changing economic structures that a decent life, much less the good life, can be
obtained. One cannot go backwards to a time before industrialism or before the big trusts.
One cannot embrace capitalism but hope to change capitalists or change the system while
they are in charge. Small changes, reform and comforting words are only the tools of
capitalists in their quest to retain power. Petty reforms are meant to divert attention and
energy from the fundamental problem of capitalist rule. Expose that rule and the beast
within emerges from the shadows into the light.
The Iron Heel also does not limit the problems identified with the forces of the
old. Revolutionaries are afflicted by the problems in the same ways as defenders of the
unjust status quo. The problem, as noted above, is the confluence of environment (the
control of the state by a small group coupled with the state’s ever expansive reach) and
human nature (the corrupting effects of power, the blindness created by self-
righteousness and the animating force of material self-interest). The narrative is built
around the purpose of exploring these problems.
Thus the story of The Iron Heel is set as a series of journeys, both intellectual and
physical, in a developing dystopia. On one front is the intellectual journey of Avis
Everhard from blindness to several types of enlightenment. She comes understand that
the capitalist status quo is unjust. Another type of enlightenment, only dimly realized at
the end, is Avis’ realization of the difficulties of changing the status quo due to the
thinness of human hardwiring. There is little in humans intrinsically that will allow them
to transcend uncongenial environments and recreate the world in utopian form. The third
type of enlightenment, experienced by the reader rather than Avis or the alleged editor of
the manuscript, is the realization of the problematic nature of the hero of the text, Ernest.
Here Avis retains her blindness, while the editor does little more than attempt to diminish
Ernest’s stature as an important revolutionary. But the reader can see the callousness with
which Ernest goes about the grim business of making a revolution.
Structurally these journeys of realization are mapped onto another type, that of
physical journeys. These journeys are the inverse of journeys in utopian literature. In the
latter, journeys most often take one from a familiar place to strange places where a better
way of life is revealed. Here by going from West to East, from city life to the
countryside, from middle class solon to worker’s hovel, the state of the world is revealed
as the same in all its facets. Avis never travels to strange places in terms of experiences
and enjoyment of the good life. Everywhere she goes she confronts the same problems.
There is no escape from either the institutions of oppression or the human nature that
fosters oppression. Utopia really is no-where in this near future.
Characteristics of The Iron Heel

THE POWER AND PARTIALITY OF THE STATE: London accepts the Marxian argument
that the state is not and never can be impartial among persons so long as classes exist. It
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will be used by one class in its own interest to despoil other classes. As the capitalist
system reaches its maturity, the state matures along with it, increasing its power and
reach.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-INTEREST: Like Butler, London paints humans as
irretrievably self-interested. Capitalists, middle class shop owners, skilled workers and
unskilled workers all defend tenaciously their material interests. The exceptions, such as
Bishop Morehous, are treating both by the characters in the story and London as in some
way unhinged.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: While the story of necessity focuses on individual actors,
in reality London points to the larger forces of history as the real actors. People only play
the parts assigned to them given the state of economic development and their place within
the economic structures of the time. Shuffle personalities and put them in different roles
and they will act the same as their predecessors. History is not made by individual
choices, but by classes and the sweep of economic development.
THE VICIOUSNESS OF HUMANS IN DEFENDING THEIR INTERESTS: London does not
sugarcoat his view of humans. At bottom they are beasts, willing to tear, injure and kill to
get what they want. Civilization is just a veneer placed over these beastly characteristics,
and no religious or moral code will restrain people from engaging in whatever activities
are necessary to defend and advance their self-interest.
Problems
London describes life under advanced capitalism as highly unequal, characterized
by deprivation, squalor, hopelessness and endless work for the lower classes and power,
ease, luxury and arrogance for the upper classes. Thus problems are equal parts material
and psychological. People who are shafted in this society feel the effects of injustice with
both their bodies and their psyches.
Poverty
London argues that the result of unfettered capitalism is the impoverishment of
the majority of people. He rehearses and underlines the data previously provided by
Marx, Dickens and others—the low wages paid to workers; the prevalence of child labor;
the horrible living conditions; the lack of educational opportunities experienced by
workers, and most importantly the danger of industrial work to the physical and
psychological well-being of the working class.
This is not because capitalism is a dysfunctional economic system in terms of
producing wealth, or because industrialization is necessarily bad. London appears an
orthodox Marxist in lauding the productive power of capitalism and welcoming
industrialization as the basis for a better society. The problem is in the management of the
system. Everhard makes this point by arguing that the capitalists are incompetent
managers, as they preside over the most productive economic forces humanity has ever
seen yet people continue to be as poor and as overworked as in earlier times. Yet this is
really misleading. London’s indictment of capitalism is lies not so much in its failure to
manage well, but to treat all humans in a human fashion. Capitalists act like beasts rather
than humans. The wealth industrial society produces is distributed inequitably and
capitalists use the resources they gather through this distribution to squeeze workers,
tying them to machines, controlling the press and religion, hiring armies and subverting
the institutions of justice. Thus as Marx would put it, the value that workers create is
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turned against them. The more they produce the poorer and the more powerless they
become as society’s wealth is invested in instruments of oppression.
Concentrations of Wealth and Power
London emphasizes the unequal distribution of wealth in capitalist societies. As
with orthodox Marxists, he predicts that such inequalities will increase over time, such
that wealth will become the privilege of increasingly small numbers of people. It is not
just those who traditionally had only their labor to sell who are impoverished. Wealth
will gravitate from the middle class to the upper class with the consolidation of
businesses into large conglomerates. Capitalism proceeds on a path such that small and
medium-sized businesses will fall to the increasing efficiency and capital resources of
larger businesses. Gradually all that will be left are plutocrats, some privileged managers
and skilled workers, and a vast army of slavish, disposable manual laborers.
Here London takes on orthodox champions of market economics. For the former,
the capacity of small firms to make their way in the world is assured by the many
complexities of the market. It is not true in their way of thinking that sheer accumulations
of capital will give unbreakable advantages to trusts. There will always be ways in which
the superior knowledge or service or nimbleness of smaller entities will enable them to
keep their place in the economy. London depicts economic realities quite differently than
does this optimistic understanding.
London also rejects the arguments of those who wish to preserve capitalism by
means of trust-busting. For London the problem isn’t the concentration of capital;
concentrated capital produces greater efficiency, therefore making possible the creation
of more wealth and the possibility of the good life for all. Rather the problem is the
control of that concentration in the hands of the few. Thus much like Bellamy in Looking
Backward and unlike Morris in News from Nowhere, London adopts an orthodox Marxist
view on this question. We don’t break the machine; we take over the machine from those
who now control it. Where he differs from Bellamy is in his belief that capitalists will be
loathe to give up their wealth and power. Where Bellamy holds that capitalist will reach
an intellectual epiphany and realize that socialism is morally superior to capitalism,
London reverts to his understanding that people are ultimately self-interested and rejects
the possibility of such an epiphany.
Warfare
The world of advanced capitalism is also the world of warfare. London argues
that this is the case for several reasons. First competing oligarchies will clash over
resources and markets. As surpluses build up at home, access to outside markets is at a
premium and national oligarchies will go to war to secure it. Second, wars act as
convenient ways of destroying the growing surplus of goods that the proletariat cannot
buy as they are continually pressed by low wages and unemployment when economies
crash as the result of capitalist accumulations of surplus value. People as well as goods
are destroyed, which also relieves the oligarchies of surplus populations.
There is also internal warfare, the warfare of revolutionaries against the state. This
is the only way in which the spirit of socialism and a better world is kept alive and the
prospect of the overthrow of the Oligarchy pursued. Here seeking for the good life means
living a secret existence in a cell of fighters who visit violence and terror on the
leadership and instruments of the Iron Heel. In all its phases, life is militarized.
The Total Reach of the State as the Instrument of Tyranny
78
As with all socialist authors of the time, London portrays the state as the creature
of capitalists. There is no such thing as neutrality in politics. Courts, police, executives,
legislatures, all are on the side of capitalists. Differences between political parties and
government ministers are minor. Administrations rise and fall and nothing fundamental
changes. Every decision that is made is one that, in some way or other, favors those who
control the state. In the modern industrial setting those in control are members of the
capitalist class.
Where London differs from others who make this argument is in his emphasis on
the state and in his development of the argument that the state’s reach extends to all areas
of life. Marx and Engels had made this point about the transformational power of
capitalism. Capitalism determines and determines everything. Schools, the family and the
churches are conditioned by the environment capitalism develops. London goes further to
concentrate his attention on how the state, as the instrument of capitalists, participates in
furthering the capitalist agenda by direct or indirect action. He is institution-centered, and
thus pays somewhat less attention to economic structures and to the fine distinctions of
economic interest that so fascinated Marx and Engels. Instead he wishes to explore how
the state develops and deploys particular tactics for the control of the population and the
frustration of fundamental change. For example not only does London argue that
religious teachings are in line with capitalist interests because the interests of the
churchmen fall on the same side as capital, but he also has the state play an active role in
keeping the church in line. State officials interfere with church hierarchy and imprison or
forcibly hospitalize dissident priests to ensure that ecclesiastical influences are kept in
line with capitalist interests. The state not only controls political and economic processes
—through it oligarchs control the very definition of sanity. Thus London is making an
additional point to the one made by orthodox Marxists, one that will be picked up by later
theorists of fascism as well as by later dystopian authors. The orthodox Marxist argument
is that economic interests and structures condition the world; London’s argument is that
an economic oligarchy makes use of all structures, but primarily political institutions,
forcibly to control all aspects of life.
Thus a major point of emphasis in the book is that with control of capital comes
control over state institutions, the press and religion. Again more than was Marx, London
is concerned with the mechanics of power. He explores endlessly the ways in which the
monopoly capitalists exercise and consolidate their power. Thus he is interested in the
manipulation of markets, the emasculation of courts, the use of laws and constitutions,
the bribing of important groups of workers, and the use of provocateurs meant
prematurely to spark revolts. Oligarchs and capitalists are not stupid in this
understanding, even if Everhard accuses them of incompetence. They are immensely
skilled, well versed in real politik, and able to learn lessons from prior setbacks. They
will only give up power if forced to do so by extreme violence and it is by means of this
skill and the tools the modern state provides that capitalists may potentially defeat the
socialist revolution and defy the forces of history.
Increased Acceptance of Violence

In The Iron Heel, violence is everywhere. The government employs violence.
Revolutionaries both invite and use violence. Workers are violently treated not just by
79
their employees, but also by the machines they employ. The modern capitalist state is
both founded on and challenged by violence.
Violence has not just become institutionalized in this world. It has not just been
accepted. It is not just routine. It is the way in which people operate. To act is to commit
violence. Tactics involve violence, as does strategy. To hold power is to act violently, just
as to resist power involves violence. The good life implies violence, as Avis Everhard
notes in the first page of the first chapter of the book:
In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see… all the marring
and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with
violence from proud bodies and hurled to God. Thus do we poor human
attain our ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring
lasting peace and happiness upon earth.
London paints this as a reversion to atavism—primal human instincts that are
activated by the extreme conditions that developed capitalism creates. This description is
reinforced by a variety of other recurring themes that are often the subject of literary
analyses of the book, namely the emphasis on virility and the image of the boot stamping
on a human face (an image that Orwell will take over as the primary image of dystopia).
Democratic, Liberal Institutions and Rights are Hollow
London begins by demonstrating, through Avis’s investigations, that the judicial
system is a sham. Courts do not operate to serve justice, but rather to serve the interests
of the capitalist class. Avis is most concerned at the beginning of her journey of
enlightenment with a worker who has lost his arm in an industrial accident. He serves as
an example for all who turn to liberal institutions, exercise liberal rights and demand
liberal justice. Instead of being treated equally and granted due process he is denied
compensation by means of collusion, witness tampering and judicial misconduct.
The rest of the book expands on this theme. The police are in the pocket of
capitalists. The army is not a national force, but a class enforcer. Elections are
manipulated or nullified. The system of checks and balances among the branches of
government turns out to be window dressing. If one is a worker, one cannot obtain the
good life by depending on the institutions of the liberal state, for the liberal state is just a
cloak for the capitalist state.
Thus London wishes not just to demonstrate the physical facts of capitalism, but
expose as well the psychology that props up the state. He has Everhard argue that people
will not act in ways they believe are wrong. No one will admit to being wrong. They will
either justify their actions by referring to the rules of the game they must play, or they
will refer to philosophical justifications of their actions. The latter, he argues, is the real
purpose of liberal ideology. It provides a justification for the dictatorship of the wealthy.
It provides psychological comfort and moral certitude for people who enjoy the fruits of
the system. Otherwise they may come to understand the system’s immorality and cease to
support it. They are therefore as captured by the ideology of rights and freedoms as they
are to the material interests which the ideology supports.
Thinking About the Problems The Iron Heel Identifies

For London, the problems modern humans face are those created by modern
economics and civilization. These are classical problems in new form. Indeed one may
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also argue that their hidden quality is also conventional—all unjust regimes claim to be
just, for example. London follows conventional socialists in denouncing the inhumane
characteristics of capitalism and arguing that the state is no more than a cloak for class
oppression. His dissection of that oppression is impressive in its scope and depth, as is his
discerning understanding of the effects of violent revolution. In London’s judgment there
is very little good about advanced capitalism except its technological potential for
producing lots of material goods.
Accepting London’s account means accepting the judgment that capitalism brings
far more misery than good, and indeed is the way ultimately to barbarism. Injustice isn’t
a matter of mistakes, bad fortune, or the incorrect applications of laws; injustice is bred
into the system we accept. Poverty too must be accepted as an inescapable product of
capitalism. We would also have to discard the liberal tradition as nothing but a
philosophical cloak over the naked aggressiveness of capitalism and capitalists.
London would argue that much of what he condemned early in the century is still
typical of contemporary society. The passage of time has done little to redeem
capitalism’s promise of a good life for everyone and liberalism’s pledge to treat everyone
equitably. Why are there still street people, citizens being ripped off by banks and
corporations, old people being swindled, young people remaining unemployed if liberal
capitalism is the way forward? Why is it that corporations are given the rights of persons
but none of the responsibilities of citizenship? Why is it that their profits are still
regarded as private, but when the risks they run to make profits end with huge losses,
society as a whole must pay the price for rescuing them? One might reply that there has
been much improvement since London’s time. Everyone generally enjoys a higher
standard of living. Everyone in some fashion benefits from the technological innovations
of the last century. The courts have moved to protect individual rights both of individuals
and workers. We aren’t a fascist nation yet. So why would we condemn the current
system if changing it will run the risk of creating something even London fears is
similar?
Views of Human Nature
London’s views on human nature are complex, not the least in terms of his
discussion of humans as beasts who eventually are capable of creating a socialist
paradise. More fundamentally he sees people as being guided by hardwiring, but does not
see much hardwiring in humans. His humans are somewhat empty except for their self-
interest, which is extremely important.
Human Hardwiring is More Important than Programming
London sees people as having a series of innate characteristics that interact
directly with environments. He puts little stock in culture, training or ideology as the
means by which such hardwiring can be influenced or modified. In this the hardwiring he
identifies is not itself productive of any humanist sense or larger goal. Humans at bottom
are material beings wired to survive. They are therefore very sensitive to those parts of
their environment—material, political and social—that affect their chances of survival
and will act in accordance to this hardwiring in response to the presences of threats and
dangers.
This initially presents a quandary for London. If the revolution can be successful
only if revolutionaries keep humanistic goals in mind, and such goals are not immediately
derivable from human nature, from where can they come and why would they have an
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impact? The answer appears to lie in part of the hardwiring London identifies, described
below—human self-righteousness. If this wiring can be informed by the right values, then
all might be well. But as we shall see, this is not a given, and the wiring in question can
be productive of tremendous problems. Thus it is not morality that will be the final
bringer of the good life as the brotherhood of man—it will be the disintegration of the
ruling class in the face of unfathomable plenty.
Humans are Intensely Self-Interested
It appears that Everhard speaks for London on the question of self-interest.
London has Everhard argue that everyone is self-interested and that this creates class
conflict, as those with different relationships to the means of production will fight over
the division of the value created by the combination of capital and labor. This also
includes divisions within classes. Particular relationships will lead to different interests
that can be manipulated, as the Oligarchy manipulates the interests of the skilled portions
of the working class against the unskilled, giving the former high wages that are paid by
grinding the latter even more heavily into poverty and toil.
But more, this position informs the intensity of the quarrel between capitalists and
the working class in the larger scheme of things. Capitalists will not relinquish their
control of capital, as it is not in their immediate interest to do so. The same is true of the
laborers’ quest to wrest that control away from capitalists—they will not acquiesce to the
present economic arrangement because it is not in their interest to do so. Amicable
agreement to share the material goods produced by industrialization is not possible when
the starting point is the concept of private property. Once the point is conceded that
something belongs exclusively to one person or one class, everyone will act to maximize
his own exclusive share at the expense of everyone else.
Thus there is no voluntary self-control when it comes to material goods. Greed, as
it were, is unshakable. It cannot be eliminated, sidetracked or suppressed. It can only be
satisfied.
Humans are Self-Righteous
London argues that humans are hardwired to make moral judgments. This
hardwiring compels them to view the world in terms of right and wrong, good and bad,
the defensible and the indefensible. They will inevitably attempt to place themselves on
the right/good/defensible sides of those pairings. The psychological state of self-
righteousness is natural—no one is really a cynic, and even Everhard in his pragmatism is
animated by the larger understanding that everything he does is for the larger, greater
good. In other words, even if he has to lie, cheat, steal, torture and murder, he is doing it
for a good cause.
The problem, London argues, is this tendency towards moral judgments is
unconnected with any strong sense of empathy or moral curiosity. It can be satisfied with
the elaboration or invocation of reasons that do nothing more than convert material
interest into moral language. It can therefore be the source of the most harmful actions, in
that it can justify structures and policies that are highly immoral. London identifies this at
work in both the liberal state and the dictatorship of the Oligarchy. In capitalist society,
he argues, we find a plethora of moral positions that are admirable so long as they are “up
in the air,” as Everhard puts it, but have no purchase when set on the ground. They can be
evaded, twisted and gutted with ease. London likewise paints the Oligarchs as believing
they are pursuing the greater good. Not only are they the defenders of civilization against
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the unwashed, violent masses, but they are right in their defense of the Iron Heel in terms
of its intrinsic moral worth.
The other side of this is the romanticism of revolution. Here London subtly
undermines the messianic atmosphere of contemporary socialism. If capitalism is sordid,
the followers of revolutionary movements see nothing but light, glory and moral uplift in
the fight against mammon. Revolutionaries are noble, selfless, and heroic in the eyes of
Everhard. But in reality those eyes are equally blinded by self-interest and the quest for
power, for the practices of Everhard and his companions mirror the violence and
amorality of their opponents, just as they place a similar misguided faith in their own
righteousness.
To underline this, London has Everhard impute moral mistakes only to people
with narrow experience, in this case businessmen. If one were a scientist, Everhard avers,
then a real morality is in reach. But this is another manifestation of Everhard’s
philosophical crudeness and his capture by revolutionary romanticism. His faith in
science and facts to lead humans to a blessed union of utility and morality is misplaced.
He will be led as far adrift in his understanding of humanism as the most hardened
capitalist despite his concern for the poor. London, in drawing Everhard in this way,
reaffirms the absolute position.
The only way out of this appears to be the orthodox Marxist solution of creating
an environment in which everyone has the same interests. How this will work itself out in
light of the persistence of self-interest and the moral sense in humans is hard to
understand, for such highly unequal structures as that embedded in the Iron Heel are the
subject of devoted moral attachment. That is one reason why London has the editor assert
that the real revolution took so long to triumph and is the cause of concern to both
metaphysicians and materialists alike, for the righteousness of the Oligarchs (and that of
the revolutionaries) held back “the mighty tide of human progress” for centuries. It
appears that only when productive power was so great that everyone could literally have
anything one wished materially that the Oligarchy imploded from within.
Power Kills Civilization
Alongside interest London places power. But where he sees self-interest as a
natural part of humans, he sees power as something outside of humans. The desire for
power is not innate. It is a tool for the defense and furtherment of interest. But where the
defense of interest is a necessary part of survival, London paints power as superfluous.
Interest leads to progress; power leads to death.
London defines power morally. It is not just the ability to attain something but the
capacity to wrest something away from someone else. Power is coercion, the assertion of
superiority over another, whether it be physical, legal, social or economic.
As such London sees power as connected with violence. Violence is not power;
rather, violence is the ultimate tool of power. In possessing power one is able to inflict
violence, and as one accumulates more power, violence appears increasingly attractive as
a cheap way of attaining ends. Violence is an expression of power that leads to the
ultimate end of power—the imposition of one’s will over another. Thus to seek power
one ultimately must end with violence.
Violence Kills Civilization
In arguing that the developed capitalist state pits humans against one another in
the most basic ways, London also asserts a point of conventional morality that most
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socialists often discard—that violence does little to advance civilization or morality. It is

true that early socialists had dwelt upon the effects of ordinary society upon humans,
arguing that normal society caused people to act violently and therefore to resemble
animals rather than humans. But many casuistically separated violence done for the sake
of defending a tyrannical regime from violence perpetrated for a righteous cause. The
goal of attaining the good life for everyone would preserve the humanity of those who
kill for its sake.
London appears to distance himself from this position. The willingness to kill or
to sacrifice others by exposing them to certain death, he implies, is not only the antithesis
of what the “Brotherhood of Man” is to bring, but it makes achieving that Brotherhood
impossible. How can a universal brotherhood exist when to achieve it is necessary to
view other humans as disposable? Moreover, human nature being thin, the only thing that
separates humans from animals is civilization, and correctly understood civilization for
London has no place for violence. Thus violence makes people uncivilized.
Thinking About Human Nature in The Iron Heel
London leaves us little to work with in terms of human nature. It cannot be
changed and it is not very attractive. The combination of self-interest with the corrupting
influence of power and violence makes it difficult to see how it is possible for us to be
civilized at all. London would agree, holding that in the conditions of advanced
capitalism we are in fact not very civilized; we just pretend to be the things that are self-
righteousness tells us we are. Intellectually we can see what a good society would
resemble; materially we are incapable of realizing such a society until such a time as the
need for justice and the need for moral distributions of power and goods disappears. Even
then it is not clear that people would in fact be better persons; they may just inhabit
circumstances where there harmful hardwiring is not expressed, just as in More’s utopia
people’s greed is never expressed.
As such, to adopt London’s view of humans would seem to rob us of any but the
most forlorn hope for the future. We would need to see the worst in people but have little
faith that institutions would do anything to protect us from them, given that they must use
power to keep order. We cannot look inside ourselves for the answers to our problems,
and externally material conditions must change before civilization can help.
London would argue that we should not reject his view of humans if that picture
is accurate just because we don’t care for the consequences of holding that view. Are not
people self-interested? Don’t we see much of the behavior he describes? Doesn’t power
and violence make us barbaric? One could reply that we also see important instances of
philanthropy and self-sacrifice. People in fact may be more capable of real morality than
London wishes us to think. And in adopting his view, wouldn’t we merely reinforce the
hypocrisy he denounces and ultimately turn people who are capable of morality into
cynics? Isn’t the way forward illuminated at least in part by the belief that humans can,
absent perfect circumstances, still act in morally responsible and civilized ways?
Themes in The Iron Heel
The themes London supply us underline the nature of, and the conditions that
characterize, the contemporary stage of economic development. While production is
more efficient and there are more material goods than ever, the control of production is
falling into the hands of fewer and fewer people and the living conditions of the bulk of
the population are reverting to that of an much earlier stage of human development.
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Capital is the Ultimate Source of Power

The Oligarchy is powerful in London’s understanding not because it wins
elections, or controls the army and newspapers, but because it controls the means of
production. With that control it is able to gather all other means of exercising power,
because power over the means of production is the power over survival. By controlling
capital, the Oligarchy is able to force newspapers to print what it wishes, to force coal
workers into virtual slavery, to break the power of organized labor by bribing the unions
of the skilled workers, and to pay and equip the army. Power stems from material sources
and the most basic of those sources is capital.
Thus revolutionary change can only come about by wresting the control of capital
away from the oligarchy. Once capital is controlled by the population as a whole,
everything will change because power will finally be democratized. People will be
autonomous in the large sense of having a say over their life’s destiny.
Humans are Slaves to the Capitalist Machines
In a fully developed capitalist society, people are no longer free agents. The
capitalist system controls them by its control of their material interests. Thus people
cannot do what they want to do, or do what they think is right or moral. They must do
what the system demands in order to survive.
London is again engaging in a process of unmasking. He seeks to demonstrate,
through the use of various reports and incidents, the proposition that the capitalist system
does not deliver what it promises. In this theme the promise is freedom. People are
supposedly free to work for whom they wish and to live how they wish. There is no
longer a set of town or village elders to hold them to a set of customary behaviors. People
are treated equally as individuals under the law, and the law and the government are
limited by constitutions and legal principles. Yet that is not the case, for there is
something deeper than constitutional principles. The capitalist system of production
trumps everything. And so everyone—workers, foremen, lawyers, college professors,
newspaper editors-- are tied to the capitalist system and must obey it to survive. Even
capitalists themselves must do what is necessary to preserve their place in society, lest
like Avis’s father and Bishop Morehouse they lose everything and sink to the depths of
poverty.
Change Must be Revolutionary
London wishes to underscore the argument that the capitalist state cannot be
reformed. At bottom people are motivated by material interests and will not cede
willingly the advantages they have in pursuing those interests.
Butler of course shares this understanding, but his prescription is different.
Because self-interest is hardwired, radical change is useless. For London the tenacity of
material interest leads us inevitably to revolution as the motor of change. Revolution
means forceful, radical change. London argues that is only through fundamental changes
in the economy and politics (since it is these that confer advantages on capitalists) that
the conditions of the majority of citizens will change such that a decent and good life is
possible. Capital can no longer be privately controlled. The market must be abolished.
Classes must be liquidated so that everyone is positioned in the same way with regard to
the means and of production and thereby given the same material interests.
Radical change implies force and violence for London as well. Capitalists will
not give up their power voluntarily, nor will they agree to share the products of
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industrialization. Voting will not do the trick—capitalists will manipulate elections or

void votes that they lose. Capitalists will only yield to overwhelming force and they will
forcibly resist. Yet violence is also the enemy of civilization and revolutionaries risk the
loss of their civilized existence even as they attempt to redeem humans from an inhuman
situation.
Both Revolution and Capitalist Defense Are Shaped by the Same Forces
London ultimately argues that environments have powerful effects on humans. I
do not think that he strictly follows orthodox Marxism in this understanding. For the
latter economic environments determine human action in the large sense because human
nature is exhausted by a single attribute: humans are productive beings. Consult
economic interests and one can deduce understandings and actions. London, as we shall
see, seems to have a more complex understanding of human nature. In his understanding
it is not just economic interests but other variables, including the desire for power and the
quest for moral certainty, that animate humans and accounts for actions. But more, he
suggests that environments can affect different kinds of people in similar ways not
because they have the same economic interests but because they inhabit the same
environment in which their elemental instincts are forced to come into play.
In the dystopian world London describes, the environment created by the
development of the capitalist state pits humans against one another in the most basic
ways. There are no intermediaries, either man-made or natural between adversaries
representing the state and the revolution. Thus defenders of the state and revolutionary
leaders act in the same ways, use the same tactics, employ the same assumptions and
deploy the same philosophical equipment. While they see themselves acting justly, they
really have no regard for abstract understandings of justice. They are impatient with any
conventional ethics, dismissing them as sentimental. They use humans as tools and
organize them in ways that are best suited to the exercise of power. They regard violence
not just as a weapon but a way of life.
We get a good idea of the ways in which the environment of developed capitalism
molds leaders by referring to descriptions of Ernest Everhard. Despite references to his
“disciplined mind” and Avis’s “intuition” that he is sensitive (when in fact she is attracted
to his primal vitality) he is really intellectually and morally crude. His arguments are
filled with clichés and his understanding of the world based on the most simple
conceptions of socialism. In his quest to control the state as the means for gaining the
socialist promised land, Everhard has stripped himself of almost everything but
practicality and brute force. As he puts it in his debate with the clergy described at the
beginning of the book, he is ruthlessly pragmatic. His only test of worth is usefulness.
The destruction of everything is worth the effort if it is useful to the cause. There is
nothing intrinsically worthwhile in anything else that hitherto has been prized: neither
family, nation, civilization, peace nor human lives. Indeed one suspects Ernest’s
relationship with Avis is governed by this standard. She is simply useful to him as a
support for his revolutionary life.
There is nothing in this understanding of socialism that is uplifting. Just because
one fights for the brotherhood of man does not mean that one will abide by that ideal.
One goal is the same as another when one looks at the effects of its pursuit. As Avis puts
it when confronting the lawyer Colonel Ingram, “when one surrenders his personal
feelings to his professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of spiritual
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mayhem?” Except of course, this applies not only to the servants of the capitalist machine
but also to the revolutionary opponents of the machine.
Thinking About the Themes in The Iron Heel
London spells out the inevitability of tyranny and violence. Unless revolution
comes quickly we are fated to descend to the level of beasts given where economic
development has taken us. Capitalism, while an efficient producer of goods, is in reality a
brutal user of people. Its remorseless logic, produced by the functional necessities of its
productive system and the understandings of humans that accompany it, strips people of
all other regarding understandings and sets them to stand alone with their self-interest.
Any arguments to the contrary are merely naïve or window dressings. Political
institutions, checks and balances, constitutional rights and freedoms, courts, laws and
lawyers as well as religions are nothing but facades behind which the real business of
self-interested production takes place.
To accept this of course means accepting that liberal democracy is a sham and
that we are really controlled by capitalists. It also means that we can look forward to
nothing but increasing concentrations of power, a continued spiral in the standard of
living for most people, increasing levels of violence, increasingly transparent acts of
injustice, and finally a dictatorship not unlike that of fascist Germany.
London would hold that there is no argument to be had. One does not argue with
history. Either this will happen or it won’t—it is not really up to us unless we can
somehow engineer conditions such that we can achieve a revolution. But it is probable
that he thinks the time for such a revolution is past by well over seventy-five years. The
state has grown too strong, capitalism is too entrenched, and even workers are
indoctrinated in the belief that capitalism and free markets are the best and most moral of
human inventions. One might of course quarrel with this characterization. It is not clear
that capitalists really are in charge and the divisions within the business community are
not fundamental. We really are more pluralistic than London depicts us. We might also
argue that ordinary people have more power than London has it. Non-capitalists do win
in court; they do prevail in political contests and they do sometimes win in policy battles.
The liberal state is more effective at protecting the rights of everyone than London
argues, and as such its constitution, rights and courts, as well as its elections, are more
than just shams.
Dystopian Life in The Iron Heel
The book starts with a liberal, democratic capitalist society and ends with an
authoritarian, oligarchic capitalist society. London not only wants to emphasize the
institutions of the second; he also wants to draw a close connection between the second
and the first.
The most important institutions are the trusts. These are conglomerations of
industries, developing first in sectors (oil, railways, banking) then crossing sector lines to
join in megalithic combines. Next is the state. The state here is the tool of trusts. It uses
legislatures, law enforcers, the courts, and the military to impose the will of the trusts on
the populace. Those at the top of this combination of economic and political power are
the oligarchs. These are a subset of the monopoly capitalists, being the “brains” of the
group, able to reach beyond the lines of business to run all aspects of society.
All other institutions in society are controlled in way or another by the
monopolists and ultimately the oligarchs. There is no free press or unencumbered
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religious institutions. Colleges are controlled by the state or through the necessity of
soliciting financing from the wealth. Financial institutions are of course under the control
of capitalists. Railways, stores, telegraphs, storage facilities and all other aspects of the
economy are likewise under control.
London’s dystopian institutions also contain other, familiar entities. There is a
secret police that ferrets out revolutionaries and other malcontents. There is a powerful
army that gobbles up huge amounts of resources. Unions are the tools of the state, used to
divide and cow workers. There are also slave labor camps, prisons, and propaganda
outfits on the one hand, and state-run schools, private shops and lavish homes for the
privileged on the other.
Thus dystopia is a place completely controlled by an oligarchy. There is no limit
to their power. There are only those limits placed on the state which the oligarchy wishes
to be placed. Constitutions at the state or local level mean nothing, as they can be
interpreted by the courts at the whim of oligarchs. It is a place of little privacy and radical
inequalities of wealth and power organized through institutions that bloodily defend the
right of a privileged few to live a special kind of life.
Still London describes life under the Iron Heel as a dynamic process. Conditions
at the end of the book are not those at the beginning, but the roots of the change are
evident from the start. His description begins with the liberal democratic life. He argues
that its reality is masked. Liberal democracy promises prosperity, freedom and autonomy
for all; what it delivers is something different. Those in the middle and upper classes are
relatively well off financially, but the further one goes down in the hierarchy of society,
the more the economic stress, until one reaches the bottom and those who are homeless,
unemployed and discarded. Those in the middle have no knowledge of the life of those
on the bottom, and while those at the top know, they rationalize their position by recourse
to ideology and charity.
Life in a liberal democracy is a lie because its provision of freedom and choice is
a charade. Everyone is tied to the machinery of capitalism, not just the workers who are
at its mercy in factories. It is not possible for one to make choices that endanger either the
image or the functioning of capitalism. As time goes on the lie of liberal democracy slips
away to be replaced by various forms of overt intimidation under the “Iron Heel”. Life in
this phase is witness to a series of overt violations of liberal tenets in the guise of
protecting freedom and law and order. The organs of dissent such as newspapers and
presses are silenced by means of court rulings, laws and mobs. Elections are rigged,
voters beaten and votes invalidated or destroyed. Individuals are intimidated or silenced
by the loss of their livelihoods and savings and by physical brutality.
It is during this time that the destruction of value begins. London follows Marx in
holding that capitalism is doomed by its excessive accumulation of surplus value. Since
workers are not given the full value of what they create, they cannot buy and consume all
the products they produce. Once overseas markets are saturated, capitalists are left with
unsellable products. These must be destroyed in order for new products to be made and
new profits generated, or they must be used elsewhere (thus the creation of the wonder
cities in the future as ways of soaking up surplus value). At least part of the violence that
accompanies the demise of liberal democracy, London argues, is not directed towards
intimidating workers, but in ridding society of this “unusable” merchandise.
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From this seemingly illogical situation, the final phase begins. It starts with the
creation of castes, not only of the capitalists but also of skilled workers necessary for
keeping the economy running. As these have sold out ordinary workers and are resented
by them, they are given special places to live and work, shop and recreate. Thus there is a
differentiation in ordinary life that is the opposite of democratic existence. Democratic
existence features the mingling of different kinds of people promiscuously in public
places, which constitute a large portion of existing space. Under the final phase of
monopoly capitalism there is strict segregation among different groups of people, marked
by different levels of privileges, state protection, economic well-being and power.
This phase ushers in the open dictatorship of the oligarchy. Here all freedoms are
abolished and control is transparent. More, control is total. This inevitably drives the
opposition to equal extremes of violence and manipulation. The culmination is a series of
riots and revolts in which organized bands of resisters attempt to seize power. The
oligarchy strikes back by the use of police and the army. Both sides use violence
indiscriminately. Neither side values openness, truth or life. People are but the means for
seizing or defending positions of power. The result is a continuing nightmare of
dictatorship and bloodshed.
Thus London paints life under the Iron Heel as a reversion in civilization wrought
by the advance of industrialization and economic technology. The future of monopoly
capitalism is forecast by Everhard as a recapitulation of ancient Egyptian society, with a
slim layer of rulers, a slice of privileged workers, and a mass of exploited slaves. Avis
continues the description by documenting life as she knows it. The country has outbreaks
of messianic religion as people seek solace in spiritual fantasies in which heaven is closed
to exploiters. The rulers alternately manipulate and terrorize the population to keep it
under control. People disappear, with their families and comrades unsure of whether they
have been executed or imprisoned.
The opposition to the Oligarchy lives an underground existence in which working
for the revolution, the brotherhood of man and the good life for everyone involves
dedicating oneself to the infliction of clandestine violence on traitors and other
instruments of the Oligarchy. They must, literally, become different persons in order to
survive as opponents, changing the way they look, dress, speak and think. By
dissimulating who they are, they are able to act as spy and saboteurs, living in the very
organs of the Oligarchy while planning its downfall. They do not live ordinary lives.
They give up their families and the chance for peace and tranquility in exchange for the
chance to work for a revolution by duplicating the callous disregard for human life that
marks the system they seek to overthrow.
Thinking About The Iron Heel
An interesting part of this book is the departure London takes from orthodox
socialist thought of the time. Whereas London follows ordinary socialists in documenting
the abuses of capitalism, dissecting the origins of those abuses, and foretelling the end of
capitalist structures, he deviates from them in his conception of what follows. For the
latter the demise of ordinary capitalism may throw up a spasm of monopolistic
dictatorship, but it cannot last. The strength of the working class and the forces of history
point to socialism, not capitalist oligarchy. Capitalism will wither away in the same way
as did the feudal system.
89
London holds otherwise. He has Everhard ridicule socialists who believe in the
inevitability of social and economic evolution. Everhard, like Lenin, believes that a
violent revolution, led by a small group of educated people, will be necessary to sweep
capitalism into the dustbin of history. But London also undermines Everhard’s position.
Everhard believes that the socialist revolution, though bloody, must be successful.
London’s narrative documents the failure of Everhard’s revolution as well as several
subsequent attempts to throw off the Iron Heel. London puts off the eventual triumph of
socialism, if that is what it is, for three hundred years. There is nothing inevitable or
necessarily quick about the coming of the socialist golden age in his understanding of
history.
This position raises interesting questions. One is the possibility of a socialist
utopia given London’s understanding of human nature. Is it possible given the thinness of
his conception of humans? If one puts London’s humans in More’s utopia, would the
good life be the result? It appears they would not be satisfied with sufficiency, and the
material security that More argues will eliminate greed will not satisfy their desires. They
obviously would not be content in Morris’s craftsman economy, as they will not be
fulfilled by labor (here another important departure on the part of London from orthodox
Marxism). Thus how is it that the socialist utopia of the future came about? The editor of
the book points to a breakdown of the Iron Heel through political means, but the more
persuasive argument would have to be that it would be the result of economic evolution.
Economic machinery would have to progress to such an extent that an unlimited supply
of goods would be available for all. Only in that environment, foretold in the “Land of
Cockaigne” stories, would people be willing to give up their exclusive self-interest and
live in utopia.
Another set of questions involves London’s capacity to foresee the future. A
hundred years after London published this story, where do we find ourselves? Are we
still in the “liberal democracy” phase of development? Are we past that stage and verging
on the emergence of the Oligarchy and Iron Heel? Does capital control our lives? Is
liberal democracy a sham? Does contemporary life resemble that which London foretold,
or does his description only apply to the fascist regimes that emerged in the 1920s and
1930s?
On the one hand one can argue that London’s view of what an advanced capitalist
society would resemble is overblown. It was not the case that the worst abuses of Gilded
Age and monopoly capitalism continued. Whether changes were made in response to
popular pressure on the government or whether powerful people moved to ameliorate
conditions in fear of what may happen if changes weren’t made is open. The reality is
that London’s vision in all its brutishness hasn’t materialized in the US (though some
would argue that it has in places where the US exercises control, such as the prisons at
Guantanamo Bay). Whether it was realized in the fascist countries of the 1930s is another
question. But in the US and in post-World War II Europe there are workplace protections,
social security for old age and a host of other social structures that provide a kind of
safety net for everyone. There is also a market for books condemning the present system
and calling for fundamental change. People who promote a radical agenda regularly run
for office, though their success rate is pitiable.
This being the case, then the more important task suggested by reading this book
is to explore the nature and tendencies of the trends that London portrays. It is still the
90
case that disparities of wealth are huge. It is still the case that large corporations control
much of the productive capacity of the nation. It is still the case that traditional media is
dominated by a few people. It is still the case that we experience boom and bust cycles,
with large corporations profiting obscenely during booms and enjoying government
bailouts during busts. It is still the case that we have a huge military and seemed to be
engaged in endless wars against terrorists. Given this situation, should we worry? If
these trends are serious, what can be done? Can we go backwards, or is the only avenue,
as London and Everhard would have it, to go forward to some different political and
economic system that preserves the industrial might of the present with a different group
of people in the controlling seat? Or should we continue to depend upon the emergence
of new forms of communication and production to undermine concentrations of power?
The other side of the coin is also important, for London not only condemned
capitalism but also reflected pessimistically upon the quality of a revolution that would
arise in the environment of developed capitalism. If one misses the boat, as we have, in
getting rid of capitalism early, we are doomed to experience increasingly harmful
conditions for hundreds of years.
Further, is there any question that had Everhard (who represents all those who
believe that violent revolution is necessary) prevailed he would have presided over a
regime as pitilessly cold-blooded as his name implies? London casts doubt on the
proposition that revolution at this stage of the human game necessarily implies progress
and instead suggests a revolutionary regime would mirror the characteristics of the
Oligarchy and the Iron Heel. If one reads backwards from We and Nineteen Eight-Four to
The Iron Heel, one finds in the all-knowing, ruthless and inversely snobbish Ernest
Everhard a progenitor of The Benefactor and Big Brother. This raises an important
question which all contemporary revolutionaries must face: Are Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao
normative for the revolutionary species that arises in such conditions, or are they
aberrations? Should we take the examples of the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North
Vietnam and Communist China as the inevitable results of the savage struggles in which
revolutionaries must engage?
We are also left with questions regarding London’s description of human nature.
His argument that we are hardwired to follow moral precepts but naturally follow those
that satisfy our material interests is intensely disturbing. It suggests not only that most of
us at bottom are hypocrites but also that moral practices (though not moral
understandings) are not the way forward. Is this the case? Is moral behavior only possible
for those who give up everything, devote themselves wholly to the poor, and do nothing
to resist evil? Is morality ultimately toothless? Can we be redeemed only in conditions of
an ultimate cornucopia? Are we so thin as humans that only our self-interest and sham
morality are left to us?
Equally disturbing is his depiction of humans in the developed stages of
capitalism. There the basic desire to defend and further material interests is at its most
brutal, as people revert to their primal understandings of self-preservation. In this London
resembles Hobbes, though with important differences. Where the former likens the “state
of nature” (where there is no political state) as a condition characterized by the war of all
against all and hence hell, here London largely imputes this situation to the most
developed political condition. As economic development progresses historically, humans
91
are revealed more clearly in their brutal nature. Like Hobbes, London sees humans as
much less than exemplary creatures.
This leaves us puzzled in the same way we are by Hobbes. Just as one is at a loss
to understand why Hobbes would have us acquiesce to an all powerful state if people
really are beasts, we are equally at sea in understanding how London’s socialist
Brotherhood of Man could ever arise or how we would ever have faith in it should it do
so. Given the urgency of the other strand of his message, that the revolution must be done
quickly before the capitalists perfect the state as a weapon, we are left in a hopeless
situation given that we have not yet reached a point where everyone’s every material
wish can be easily satisfied. If indeed the environment of radical capitalism does taint all
actions, why should we place our faith in some future Everhard? If all people act alike in
these situations, what hope can we have in a better future? If civilization comes around in
a circle to reinvent barbarism, what is the use in going forward? If we have already
missed the boat of revolutionary effectiveness, why should we set sail on an ultimately
hopeless and bitterly violent voyage of attempted radical change?
Thinking About Erewhon and The Iron Heel
While Erewhon and The Iron Heel are both dystopias, their messages are quite
different and the ways they communicate their messages also vary considerably. One is
set far away, the other near by. One preaches the necessity of revolution while the other
cautions us against the results of radical changes. One sees problems as the result of
human nature and an environment caused by economic evolution, while the other lays
blame solely at the feet of human nature. But both depict possible societies that turn our
understanding of the good life upside-down and ultimately lead us to question the
possibility of attaining the good life for all.
There are also other interesting overlaps between the two. Both argue for the
centrality of self-interest to humans. Both highlight the ubiquity of hypocrisy. Both are
intent on unmasking problematic practices that we otherwise take for granted as right and
good. Both shine a light on perversities and the upside-down nature of many accepted
understandings of morality. And both argue for clear-sighted common sense as the
illumination we need.
Yet Butler rejects the proposition that reason supports a radical remaking of
existing society. While he satirizes existing practices, he thinks they can only be brought
back in line by conventional thinking; it is only insofar as he sees those practices as
founded on radical understandings will he reject the reasoning that underpins
conventional society. Thus for Butler, to think radically politically or morally is to think
outside the bounds not just of conventionality but of the bedrock of common sense that is
most in touch with how the world really works. His critique of both conventional society
and Erewhon through the use of conventional morality embodies this underlying
conservatism. He thinks we do have some semblance of civilization and doesn’t want
utopians to eliminate it.
One should, of course, question Butler’s position. Is radical reform always
misguided? Is radical thinking always cranky and the results of radical action always
ironic? One might concede that one would not wish to follow all radicals. One could also
agree that the idea of permanent revolution is frightening. One could also agree,
emphatically, that radical change itself often brings with it disorder, violence, and
injustice. But is it the case that radical reform is always unjustified? Haven’t at least some
92
radical reformers possessed insight into the nature of things that escaped conventional
wisdom and were able to create a society that supported a better vision of the good life?
Haven’t some revolutions brought good? Isn’t it sometimes good, necessary and even just
to engage in radical reform rather than hope that incrementalism will solve our pressing
problems?
In contrast to Butler, while London also employs elements of conventional
morality and common sense he thinks such conventionalities must be pushed further and
deeper than usually is the case. Conventional morality must be understood radically in
order for us correctly to see the world and thus recognize the direction that advanced
capitalism’s Iron Heel will take. This accounts for his sympathetic treatment of primitive
Christianity as well as the Christian images he employs. Common sense must likewise be
opened to encompass a wider field of vision and to revisit traditional truths that are
supported by custom rather than rationality. For London we must embrace revolution by
rejecting flaccid versions of conventional views in the face of the radical evil capitalism
unleashes. There is very little civilization now to preserve, and it is increasing eroding
under the pressures of advanced capitalist society.
The questions we pose to London are the flip side of those we press upon Butler.
Will radical reform bring about the good life that developed capitalism denies us? For
London it seems that such conditions are so bad that they demand revolution; no other
alternatives are left even if revolution itself may create monsters of its own. Is that the
case? Even in the late 19th century, were there no alternatives? Are there no alternatives
now? If the answer is yes, then one could persuasively argue that the costs and uncertain
outcomes of revolution should lead us to reject it.
Further, we should contrast London with Butler on questions of contemporary and
current institutions and press the latter hard. Butler sees the institutions of what will
become a liberal democracy as flawed, often ridiculous, but ultimately defensible in the
face of calls for radical change. They can be reformed, at least in part by being exposed
to ridicule. For London there is no such hope. Contemporary institutions are and cannot
help but be hopelessly corrupt and unjust. But are they? Are liberal democracies merely
shams, facades erected to trick everyone that they are getting just deal when really they
are being ripped off? Or are they, as Butler holds, the outcome of considered attempts to
apply constraints to a corrupt human nature that would be even further unleashed by
revolution? More basically, are the poor better off now than they would be in some
future revolutionary state? Are workers oppressed? Are we oppressed? It is clear that the
rich get a different brand of justice than the poor. But does that mean the rich are never
punished and workers are always shafted? If we tried to do better, would our attempts at
perfection come at the expense of the gains we have made so far?
The same holds true for elections and control of the government in general. Do
we live in a democracy or a plutocratic oligarchy? Again we must ask difficult questions.
What does it signify when running for office costs hundreds of thousands, if not millions
of dollars? What does it mean when corporations have easier entrée to policymakers than
ordinary citizens? How should we interpret the fact that government deems large
business too large and important to fail, but leaves ordinary citizens to live without health
insurance and sometimes without homes or jobs? Is this the best we can do, or can we do
better? And if we can do better, when? At what price? Through what methods? And by
creating what kinds of institutions? Again Butler and London leave us with different
93
answers and deeper puzzles. Butler says cautiously preserve what we have and see if it
can be improved on a bit. London says press forward vigorously, but be aware that it
might already be too late. But how will cautious movement forward get us anywhere
worthwhile? And if it is already too late, why try?
On a deeper level the contrast between Butler and London leaves us with an
obvious question—which is the key to a better life that avoids the traumas of dystopia, a
gradual reform underpinned by a sharpened uses of common sense and conventional
morality or a revolutionary approach that is supported by a radical interpretation and use
of those intellectual resources? In support of the former, Butler provides us a world in
which radicalism in some ways turns the world upside down, in other ways magnifies
existing problems. London responds by showing us a world in which the complacent use
of common sense and morality leads to a world in which everyone descends to the level
of beasts and hope itself seems banished to some far off time.
Some Additional Readings

Erewhon
Butler, S. Erewhon Revisited (BiblioLife, 2008)
Canaan, G. Samuel Butler: A Critical Study (Kessinger Publishing Co., 2008)
Cole, G. Samuel Butler (Kessinger Publishing Co., 2007)
Holt, L., “Samuel Butler and his Victorian Critics,” ELH, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jun.,
1941), pp. 146-159.
Jeffers, T. Samuel Butler Revalued (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982)
Jones, J. Cradle of Erewhon: Samuel Butler in New Zealand (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1959).
Zemka, S. “‘Erewhon’ and the End of Utopian Humanism,” ELH, Vol. 69, No. 2
(Summer, 2002), pp. 439-472.
The Iron Heel

Baskett, S. “A Source of The Iron Heel,” American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2.
(May, 1955), pp. 268-270.
Mills, G. “Jack London's Quest for Salvation,” American Quarterly, Vol. 7, No.
1. (Spring, 1955), pp. 3-14.
Raskin, H. “The Iron Heel at 100: Jack London — The Artist as ‘Antenna of the
Race,’” Monthly Review, March 2008.
Trott, S. “Jack London’s The Iron Heel,” The Socialist Standard, March 2008, pp.
8-9.
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conveyances, and locomotion is provided by animals or one’s own feet. It is a crime to

The Attempt to Preserve Unnatural Laws and Customs Results in the

witnessed or endured. At other times Ernest delivers information in speeches or other

Characteristics of The Iron Heel

Increased Acceptance of Violence

Thinking About the Problems The Iron Heel Identifies

socialists often discard—that violence does little to advance civilization or morality. It is

Capital is the Ultimate Source of Power

industrialization. Voting will not do the trick—capitalists will manipulate elections or

Some Additional Readings

The Iron Heel

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