| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rod Janzen. The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in cooperation with The Center for American Places, Sante Fe, N. Mex. and Harrisonburg. 2001. Pp. ix, 300. $34.95.

This study of the communal society that Betty Dederich characterized as a rehabilitative institution, "built in the spirit of Revolution" (p. 1), provides a much-needed critical overview of the history of Synanon from its inception in 1958 to its disintegration in 1991. No earlier work on the community considered its entire history, nor did any approach the balanced assessment that Rod Janzen provides here. Like the contemporary literature on other utopian communities, but in a more concentrated form, earlier accounts of Synanon emerged at a specific point in its history and were largely tendentious. All were published between 1980 and 1982, considered the community primarily during the 1970s, and fell within two categories familiar to students of American communitarianism: the exposé undertaken by outsiders who view the community as a minatory threat to fundamental social mores and moral values (journalists David and Cathy Mitchell and sociologist Richard Ofshe's The Light on Synanon [1980]), or community apostates (William Olin's Escape From Utopia [1980], and David Gerstell's Paradise, Incorporated: Synanon [1982]). Janzen provides a more judicious and balanced assessment of the community in the context of modern communitarian scholarship. . . .

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