Sidney Armor Reeve: Engineer, Inventor, Progressive, and Underappreciated Utopian

Abstract

Sidney Armor Reeve, professional engineer and amateur historian, economist, and sociologist, writing during what has been described as the Progressive Era, attacked the very foundations of the existing economic and social orders. He explicitly criticized the dominant commercialism of the capitalist society as being a cancer, a major cause of inequality and unemployment, offering instead a program of reform that, while some reviewers characterized it as consistent with the program of the socialists, presented something of an alternative vision, one recognizing the primacy of the Ultimate Consumer. His remedy, favoring as it did the central control of the economy, shared at least commonalities with the reforms advocated by the socialist writers of the period, even as he himself rejected the label, unequivocally stressing points of fundamental disagreement.