Walden Two is more than a book about behaviorism. It is to the behaviorist movement in psychology what Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are to objectivism. Instead of being a manifesto of beliefs and foundational principles, it instead demonstrates those principles by means of their fictional application. In this respect it feels more like a Socratic dialogues to which Skinner has appended various settings and expositions.
The story takes place in an idyllic post-World War II America untainted by collective guilt (Walden Two was written shortly before Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Some former students of a professor give him news of a start-up utopian community — Walden Two — being run by one of his old grad school friends, Frazier. One thing leads to another and the two are off gallavanting through the picturesque countryside of the new Walden.
The new community uses the principles of behavior science to solve virtually every aspect of modern life, as one might expect of a utopia. Much like a few of the dialogues of ancient Greece, however, many of the discussions are little more than the continual battering of straw men. The principal interrogant, Castle, shifts violently from a sort of Lockean social contract view of politics all the way to outright Marxism with little consistency. With some frequency Frazier will point out Castle's flip-flopping, so I can't help but wonder if Skinner intended it for characterisation.
As a work of fiction, Walden Two is too preachy and repetitive. As a work in the philosophy of psychology, it lacks critical analysis and serious reflection. As an afternoon's diversion, it is sufficient. Of course, it ends with everyone living together in harmonious bliss, but that was hardly a spoiler, now, is it? | 
