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To W. A. S. and G. B. S.
Copyright © 1948, 1976 by B. F. Skinner Reprinted 2005, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved Printed in tllc United States of America
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Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P. O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skinner, Burrhus Frederic, (date) Walden Two. I. Title PZ3. S62825Wa5 [PS3537. K527] 813’. 5’4 41339 ISBN 0-87220-779-X ISBN 0-87220-778-1 pbk.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-779-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-778-3 (pbk. )
PRC ISBN: 978-1-60384-110-8
Contents
Walden Two Revisited
Walden Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
WALDEN TWO REVISITED
THE EARLY summer of 1945, when I wrote Walden Two, was not a bad time for Western Civilization.
Hitler was dead, and one of the most barbaric regimes in history was coming to an end. The Depression of the thirties had been forgotten. Communism was no longer a threat, for Russia was a trusted ally. It would be another month or two before Hiroshima would be the testing ground for a horrible new weapon. A few cities had a touch of smog but no one worried about the environment as a whole. There were wartime shortages, but industry would soon turn again to devoting unlimited resources to the fulfillment of unlimited desires. The industrial revolution was said to have stilled the voice of Thomas Robert Malthus.
The dissatisfactions which led me to write Walden Two were personal. I had seen my wife and her friends struggling to save themselves from domesticity, wincing as they printed “housewife” in those blanks asking for occupation. Our older daughter had just finished first grade, and there is nothing like a first child’s first year in school to turn one’s thoughts to education. We were soon to leave Minnesota and move to Indiana and I had been in search of housing. I would be leaving a group of talented young string players who had put up with my inadequacies at the piano and I was not sure I could ever replace them. I had just finished a productive year on a Guggenheim Fellowship, but I had accepted the chairmanship of a department at Indiana and was not sure when I would again have time for science or scholarship. Was there not something to be done about problems of that sort? Was there not by any chance something a science of behavior could do?
It was probably a good thing that these were small provincial problems, because I might not have had the courage to tackle bigger ones. In Behavior of Organisms, published seven years earlier, I had refused to apply my results outside the laboratory. “Let him extrapolate who will,” I had said. But, of course, I had speculated about the technology that a science of behavior implied and about the differences it could make. I had recently been taking the implications seriously because I had been meeting once a month with a group of philosophers and critics (among them Herbert Feigl, Alburey Castell, and Robert Penn Warren) where the control of human behavior had emerged as a central topic.
