Final answer:
Artists, critics, and various reformers championed alternative visions for the economy and society, creating experimental communities and proposing socialist ideals. Critics of the industrial age also voiced their concerns.
Step-by-step explanation:
A number of artists and critics, including agrarians, utopians, socialists, and advocates of the Social Gospel, championed alternative visions for the economy and U.S. society. In the early nineteenth century, reformers created experimental communities based on utopian socialism, which focused on perfecting society. These communities sought to completely alter society and often advocated innovations like communal housing, free love, and women's rights. Socialist thinkers proposed societal organization that would challenge the market economy and address the problem of inequality of property or wealth through social ownership of the means of production and government intervention. Critics of the industrial age also spread critiques of the emerging social shifts during that time.