Utopia and community: two communitary life projects at the beginning of the 20th Century in Chile

Abstract

This paper researches the development of two anarchist communities that were constituted between 1903 and 1905 near Santiago de Chile. These communities were known as “Colonia Tolstoyana” and “Colonia de Pio Nono”. This paper studies both “Colonia Tolstoyana” and “Colonia Pio Nono” as cultural objects that aid in the understanding of some historical aspects of the Chilean society of the early 1900s. The article proposes that these communities depict a period of social and cultural crisis, while the 20th century’s social and political movements were just emerging. With this in mind, this paper intends to show how the new ideas developed by different European thinkers of critical tendency were adopted by these communities and adapted to the local context.