The aspiration to design a better society is one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent endeavors. From the ordered hierarchies of Plato’s Republic to the egalitarian blueprints of 19th-century socialists, the human imagination has consistently returned to the question of how we might live together differently, and better. This impulse is not merely an intellectual exercise; it has manifested in countless real-world attempts to build new social orders from the ground up, creating living laboratories for alternative ways of being. These efforts, scattered across history and geography, represent a vast, informal project of social research and development. While often highly coordinated internally—through monastic orders, letters, or conferences—these movements frequently hit ceilings of scalability, struggling to translate their specific successes into broader societal change. They are driven by a rejection of perceived injustices in the dominant society, a desire to live according to deeply held spiritual or political values, or simply the hope of creating a more humane and sustainable world.
Today, as societies grapple with challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity—from climate change and economic inequality to political polarization and social fragmentation—the need for new models of living, governing, and collaborating has never been more acute. Yet, our methods for developing and testing these new models remain largely ad-hoc, isolated, and disconnected from a systematic process of learning. Individual pilots rise and fall, their successes celebrated within niche circles and their failures often buried, the valuable learning they generate lost to the wider world. We are rich in social theories but poor in validated social technologies.
This chapter proposes that the time has come to move beyond this fragmented history. It argues for the development of a more deliberate, empirical, and supported process of social innovation. The central proposition is that just as science uses laboratories to test hypotheses and the technology sector uses startups to trial new business models in controlled, iterative environments, society needs a dedicated infrastructure—a social learning and prototyping environment—to pilot, assess, and learn from new cultural and political structures within a clear legal context. This is not a search for a single, monolithic utopia, a final answer to the question of the ideal society. Rather, it is a call to build the capacity for pluralistic discovery—a methodology for safely conducting a portfolio of pilots, gathering robust data on their outcomes, and integrating the lessons learned into the fabric of our evolving world. The following sections build the historical, theoretical, and practical case for such an infrastructure, exploring the legacy of past initiatives, the legal and political frameworks that could enable new ones, and a concrete blueprint for what this ecosystem for social innovation might look like.
The practice of intentionally designing and inhabiting alternative social structures is not a modern invention but a recurring pattern in human history. For millennia, these intentional communities have served as the primary, albeit informal, venues for social prototyping. They represent tangible efforts to enact a different vision of society, providing a rich and complex legacy of both cautionary tales and enduring models.
The roots of intentional community run deep, predating the modern nation-state by centuries. The earliest known examples include Ashrams in India, founded around 1500 BCE as spiritual and productive communities, and the Buddhist monasteries that appeared a thousand years later. In the West, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras established a vegetarian commune in southern Italy around 525 BCE, organized around principles of intellectualism, mysticism, and gender equality. These early forms were followed by the establishment of the first Christian monastic communities in the 4th century CE, which created self-sufficient enclaves dedicated to a life of shared property, labor, and spiritual devotion. During the Middle Ages, this communal impulse spread beyond the monastery walls to lay religious groups like the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
The Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Anabaptist movement in the 16th century gave rise to groups that would become some of the most enduring communal societies in the modern world. The Hutterites, founded in 1527, and the Mennonites, both tracing their origins to this period, established communities based on a strict interpretation of the Bible, pacifism, and communal ownership. These groups, fleeing persecution in Europe, found fertile ground for their social pilots in the relative religious freedom of North America, where Hutterite colonies continue to operate as largely self-sufficient agricultural communities to this day.
While religious conviction was the primary driver for many early communities, the intellectual and social upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries sparked new waves of secular and political initiatives. In the United States, in particular, a confluence of religious revivalism, Enlightenment ideals, and anxieties about the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution created a fervent period of community-building. The sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter identified three major historical waves of American communitarianism, each with distinct motivations.
The first wave, from the early years of the United States until about 1845, was predominantly religious. Groups like the Shakers, founded by "Mother" Ann Lee, established dozens of communities dedicated to celibacy, gender equality, simplicity, and communal ownership of property. Their disciplined labor and elegant, unadorned furniture and architecture became hallmarks of a life dedicated to spiritual perfection. German Pietist groups, such as the Harmony Society and the Amana Colonies, also established successful, long-running communities based on shared faith and economic cooperation.
The second wave, which began around 1820 and peaked in the 1840s, placed a greater emphasis on economic and political reform. The Welsh industrialist Robert Owen, troubled by the harsh conditions of factory life, founded New Harmony in Indiana in 1825 as a trial in non-religious communal living, hoping to demonstrate that modern technology could support a humane social order through common property and the abolition of traditional religion and marriage. The ideas of the French theorist Charles Fourier inspired some 40 "phalanxes" across the country, organized cooperative communities designed to eliminate poverty and offer equal pay and participation for women. Though most were short-lived, these trials placed questions of economic justice and social organization at the center of the utopian project.
The third wave emerged after World War II and crested in the late 1960s and 1970s, driven by psychosocial motivations. Reacting against what they saw as the alienation, consumerism, and bureaucracy of modern life, thousands of back‑to‑the‑land communes were founded by young people associated with the counterculture and anti‑war movements. Groups like The Farm in Tennessee and Twin Oaks in Virginia explored everything from collective child‑rearing and income‑sharing to environmental sustainability and non‑hierarchical governance, seeking a more authentic and connected way of life.
The sheer diversity of these communities makes a single definition difficult. The landscape includes everything from collective households, cohousing communities, and ecovillages to monasteries, kibbutzim, and housing cooperatives. They can be urban or rural, secular or spiritual, politically radical or focused on simple mutual support. Despite this variety, many of the more radical efforts, often called communes, share a set of core principles. The scholar Bill Metcalf identified these as an emphasis on the group over the nuclear family, a common purse or shared economy, a collective household, and group decision‑making in both general and intimate affairs.
At their heart, these communities are venues for testing social relations. They trial alternative family structures, as seen in the "complex marriage" of the Oneida Community or the collective child‑rearing of the kibbutzim. They examine different economic models, from the complete income‑sharing of the Hutterites to the mixed economies of modern ecovillages. And they are crucibles for new forms of governance, spiritual practice, and ecological living.
Perhaps the most critical and consistent area of prototyping within these communities is governance. How does a group of people make decisions, allocate resources, and resolve conflicts without resorting to the hierarchical structures of the dominant society? The most common answer has been some form of democracy, with 64 percent of communities using consensus decision‑making or voting. Consensus, in particular, which requires the agreement of the whole group, is a popular mode of decision‑making, aiming to ensure that every voice is heard and that choices reflect the collective will.
However, this commitment to egalitarianism is a source of profound and persistent challenges. The sociologist Benjamin Zablocki found that a quarter of the communities that had disbanded cited issues related to the exercise of power and authority—conflicts between founders and newcomers, men and women, or charismatic leaders and their followers—as a primary reason for their failure.[1] The tension between individual autonomy and group cohesion, and between the need for effective action and the desire for inclusive deliberation, is a constant struggle. In response, more sophisticated governance models have emerged, such as Sociocracy (or Dynamic Governance), which uses a system of interconnected, semi‑autonomous committees to distribute decision‑making power while maintaining organizational coherence.