how to start an essay about utopian society

By Rutger Bregman

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues in that we have realized this Cockaigne that our ancestors would have considered a utopia reserved for their fantasies, but that the dream is starting to go stale. We find ourselves in a historical moment where, once again, we need another Cockaigne: new horizons on which humanity can set its sights. A historical track record gives us reason to believe that dreaming of a better future is not naïve, but the path history has taken time and again. Bregman submits that it’s time to start dreaming again, and he gives us some ideas that could serve as ambitious guideposts to aim for.

Read on for key insights from .

To modern ears, this sounds much more dystopic than utopic—even on paper without any attempts at implementing it. Experiences with Nazi fascism, Stalinist Russia, and punitive theocracies in recent history have rightly taught us to be skeptical and concerned when societal plans get too grandiose or granular.

There are a couple ways to approach utopia as a concept: One is the “blueprint model,” like what Tommaso Campanella and others have used. It plans things out with a chilling degree of specificity, but thanks to Hannah Arendt and many other scholars who debunked the totalitarian mindset, looking for blueprints to perfect society is a quest that most have abandoned.

Thankfully, there is another way to think about utopia, even if it’s been virtually forgotten. The model involves asking probing, illuminating questions more than answering questions with unsettling specificity. Asking exploratory questions can help us create a rough sketch or outline of what the future could be like. It gives us signposts to move toward rather than a definitive map to get there.

We need dreamers to think up ideas that our generation considers crazy. Democracy, cars, cell phones, air travel, and vaccines would not exist without people who pushed at the liminal spaces between the known and the unknown. We need people who take bold and passionate stances, but, just as critically, who also know how to laugh at themselves and their personal beliefs.

There’s no question that history has its share of would-be utopias gone frighteningly sideways. But just as it would be shortsighted to reject an entire religion based on the behavior of one violent fringe radical, it would be irresponsible to stop hoping for a better world because some dreamers’ ideas calcified into something ugly. It is possible to stay an idealist without turning into an ideologue.

These homeless men were each given £3,000. No trick questions. No hoops to jump through. No strings attached. Each was simply asked, “What do think you need?” If you’re skeptical, so were the social workers who helped facilitate the experiment. But to their surprise, those given money only spent £800 over the course of the year, on average. One of the subjects had been a heroin addict for two decades, but he began to take gardening classes, sobered up, and learned to take care of himself. In an interview, he described the experience as things clicking for the first time in his life.

In under two years, seven of the 13 homeless individuals had found places to stay, two others were about to move into flats, and all had taken meaningful steps toward putting their lives back together. Some of the steps included attending classes for practical skills, checking into rehab, reconnecting with family, and giving thought to the future.

Not only did this experiment help these homeless individuals tremendously, it actually reduced expenses for the city and aid organizations. Including social worker’s pay, the effort cost £50,000. Compare that to the millions of pounds spent coddling, strong-arming, arresting, and guiding these men through a bureaucratic maze, and it’s not hard to conclude which option is preferable.

Experiments like this have repeated throughout the Global South, from Mexico to India, with similarly impressive results. One man named Bernard Omondi made two dollars a day at a west Kenyan quarry before he woke up to $500 dropped in his bank account—almost a year’s earnings for him. The money came from GiveDirectly, an organization that has realized the power of no-strings-attached funding to empower the poor. Just a few months later, when reporters went to Bernard’s village to follow up, they found that not only had Bernard’s income almost quadrupled, but his entire village was swimming in cash. Businesses were opening and buildings were finally getting repaired. Far from drinking away his funds as a cynic might expect, he’d made himself and his village far wealthier by purchasing a motorcycle to taxi people around and putting cash into his village’s economy.

This does grate against our intuitions that the poor are lazy, that they can’t handle the responsibility of money, that they’ll blow any surplus capital on booze. But the statistics upend these intuitions. A World Bank study found that, around the world, when the poor get no-strings-attached money, tobacco use and alcohol use go down in 82 percent of cases. More and more, aid organizations are realizing that these “unconditional cash disbursements” are far more useful to the poor, and that they eliminate loads of wasteful bureaucracy. Additionally, they are linked with lower rates of crime, infant mortality, malnutrition, and teenage pregnancy, and with higher test scores and economic growth in impoverished areas.

It turns out the ones who best know what the poor need are the poor themselves. Being poor doesn’t mean you’re stupid; it means, fundamentally, that you don’t have cash. As one economist has quipped, “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have any bootstraps.” These streamlined, direct disbursements for the poor give them bootstraps to pull up on.

At that same time, Seattle and Denver were facilitating pilot programs for guaranteed basic income, and researchers found that crime went down, health care costs went down, and children performed better in the classroom. There was precedent that justified expanding these efforts to something pan-national.

Despite the heartening developments and a large majority of the American people’s confidence in guaranteed basic income, Nixon lost the plot thanks to a misunderstood case study from England in the 1800s. One of Nixon’s advisors, Martin Anderson, gave Nixon a six-page summary of the Speenhamland experiment. The rural English town of Speenhamland was the setting of a radical experiment begun in 1795. At that time, the French Revolution was well underway and the discontent was fomenting and spreading to other countries. Speenhamland’s leadership decided to alter drastically the way they helped the poor. They guaranteed a basic, subsistence-level income for anyone who was needy, and they effectively removed the line between what is often called the “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor.” They tied the basic income to the price of bread and offered disbursements relative to the size of the family.

More than three decades later, there was a riot among agricultural workers in Speenhamland that led to arrests of thousands and even executions. The British government decided to investigate what this Speenhamland experiment had been about. To sum up the 13,000-page report to the British government, Speenhamland had been an unmitigated failure that had made the poor lazy and entitled. According to the report, once the guaranteed basic income had been stopped, the poor began working harder, became more careful with their money, and moral, social, and even matrimonial decisions improved.

Prominent thinkers on the right and left, from Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Polanyi agreed that the Speenhamland experiment was a miserable mistake not to be repeated. Polanyi, the economist whom Nixon’s advisor quoted extensively in his brief, was especially influential and vocal about Speendhamland’s failure. Nixon changed his tune when he came across the story of Speenhamland. His pivot turned the tide against unconditional basic income for poor families and altered the course of history.

The tragedy of it all is that the Speenhamland study was a sham—but a sham that has shaped (or debilitated) political will and intellectual discourse for centuries. The research that the Royal Commission Report conducted on Speenhamland was notably the first attempt by a government to rely on organized research efforts to form policy, but the research was shot through with problems. For example, a mere tenth of the surveys sent out were ever filled out, the questions were leading, and the majority of the people who did fill out the surveys were the social and religious elites who were against the experiment from the beginning. Clergy were especially concerned that the experiment would make the poor lazy and unproductive—regardless of the evidence to the contrary. Very few of those who actually benefited from the program were surveyed. Most egregiously, the vast majority of the Royal Commission Report on Speenhamland was written before any data was ever gathered. It would seem that certain interested and influential parties wanted the report to reflect certain conclusions, regardless of what the on-the-ground-reality was.

So let’s take a step back: This Speenhamland report, which has impacted key pieces of legislation and shaped the perceptions of the public for more than 50 years, is a joke. But for more than 150 years, it has calcified the myth of the lazy poor and harmed generations of poor people who could have benefited from the financial support and had a better shot at getting their lives together. The idea that they’d fritter it away on alcohol and drugs is another assumption as bogus as the Speenhamland case study itself—and yet the legacy of the Speenhamland misinformation remains with us, deeply ingrained in our minds and cultural psyche. If we want to be honest, we have to do the hard work of retraining some of our basic intuitions about human nature, about the poor, and about what policies we have been told would never work and never help.

That all might sound absurd at first glance, but Keynes was observing a historical trend of diminishing hours already well underway. During the Industrial Revolution, a 70-hour work week was common (and even necessary) for a poor family to make ends meet. And this was without sick leave, vacation time, or weekends. This was normal for adults and for children. Too much free time for the poor would lead to depravity and pandemonium, according to the nobility.

The first group to establish an eight-hour workday were stone workers in Australia in the 1850s. By the late 1800s, the workweek was down to 60 hours. In 1926, in a meeting of 30 or so American tycoons, Henry Ford was the only business owner who thought reducing hours would help productivity. He proposed a 5-day work week, which everyone else thought was insane at first. But within a decade, everyone was marching to Ford’s drum. Ford found that his company’s productivity increased when his employees worked less. 

In 1933, a bill adopting a 30-hour work week passed in the Senate, but corporate influences mucked up its passage in the House. In 1956, Nixon, who was running for Vice President at the time, enticed voters with talk of four-day work weeks just around the corner. By 1970, sociologists were making prognostications about the coming end of work.

Since the 1980s, trends toward shorter work weeks slowed down, and then reversed. In the ensuing decades, time at work has been on the rise. One Harvard Business School study of professionals found that the hours people are working or near their phone on stand-by to text or email is up to 80 or 90 hours per week. Far from death by boredom or not knowing what to do with leisure, we are working ourselves into early graves.

Keynes’ predictions were off, but he wasn’t crazy. Far from a case of wishful thinking or backlash from reality, there are numerous studies that show the value of leisure and that there isn’t always a 1:1 correlation between hours worked and productivity. Henry Ford found that 60-hour work weeks yielded greater productivity than 40-hour work weeks, but only for the first four weeks, after which productivity dropped significantly. The cornflake tycoon W.K. Kellogg found his workers’ productivity increased when he reduced their workload to six hours a day. He was able to hire hundreds of new employees and dramatically reduce the number of accidents.

More recent studies have called into question whether 40-hour weeks are too much, as well—especially in intellect-heavy fields. Employers need not worry about productivity. Leisure is not only good for their workers’ health (as essential as a healthy diet), but also boosts the quality and quantity of work they do produce. Fewer hours would mean better work, less stress, fewer accidents and mistakes, more employment opportunities, and reduction of economic inequality. A 15-hour work week sounds unfeasible to our ears right now, but we need to start reintroducing a reduction of hours as an important political aspiration.

“Won’t all the extra leisure feed into the problem of excessive amounts of time given to phones and TVs?” This line of reasoning is no different than the nobility’s belief centuries ago that incessant work was a solution to alcoholism. It wasn’t—it seemed to encourage more drinking. Similarly, it’s the most overworked countries that devote obscene amounts of time to television and phones.

Everything else flows seamlessly across borders—from information to technologies to cargo—but not people. Worldwide elimination of tariffs and other trade barriers to this cargo would generate $65 billion. But if Harvard economist Lant Pritchett’s estimates are correct, we are leaving a thousand times that on the table by rejecting open borders for people. That’s right: Saying no to open borders means saying no to $65 . To put that enormous number into perspective, open borders would the “gross world product.”

The common m.o. of governments and philanthropists is not to open their arms to refugees, but to open their purse strings and support them from afar. But the sad truth is that aid to developing countries is often misallocated. According to the World Bank, 85 percent of all Western foreign aid during the 20th century ended up being used “different[ly] than intended.” That means that of the $5 trillion spent on alleviating poverty over the past 50 years, the vast majority ended up somewhere else. That’s almost $4,000 in foreign aid down the toilet every

When funds do reach their intended targets, it is difficult to determine how effectively they alleviate poverty. “Unclear” is probably the kindest way to describe the results of research. Instead of trying to bring money to the poor where they are, why don’t we allow the poor to come to the Lands of Plenty where the money originated? It is less of an economic strain on wealthy countries to allow people to come and work in the Lands of Plenty than constantly tossing out money that rarely makes it to the poor. Moreover, research from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development indicates that for every dollar poor countries get in foreign aid, they lose three dollars in tax evasion. Why not allow people the opportunity to leave countries where corruption runs this rampant?

The stock rebuttals against open borders don’t hold up against the data. One of the most careless arguments against immigration is that they’re all terrorists or criminals. But research from the University of Warwick on migration patterns between 145 countries found a connection between immigration and declining rates of terrorist activity. People who immigrate to the United States hoping for a new life are less likely to commit crimes or end up incarcerated than US citizens—and so are the children of immigrants. Though illegal immigration to the United States tripled between 1990 and 2013, the nation’s crime rate dropped significantly during that same period of time. Other arguments against open borders reflect a fear of losing social cohesion. Sociologist Robert Putnam’s famous 2007 study that ingrained this fear in the hearts of Americans has been thoroughly falsified by 90 studies that found no correlation at all between diversity and social cohesion.

“But they’ll take all our jobs!” is another common refrain. Yet studies find that immigration increases the number of opportunities available for everyone. A larger workforce leads to greater consumption, which leads to higher demand, and more jobs. It’s not a game of musical chairs, where we have more people and not enough seats. New arrivals are coming, but they’re bringing their own chairs to the party.

Yet another stubborn myth is that they will never leave. But ironically, opening up borders is the best way to ensure that people will not just freely come, but also freely go. In the 1960s, millions of Mexicans came to the United States, but 85 percent returned to Mexico. Since the United States has clamped down on border security in the past several decades, that percentage is down to just 7 percent. 

The movement toward open borders doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing enterprise. It would be absurd to open up everything all at once, but it is even more absurd to continue putting a stranglehold on the flow of human beings across borders—especially given the economic benefits that it would bring to not just immigrants but to the nations taking them in. Migration might rattle status quos and shock some systems, but historically, it has been among the great catalysts for progress.

However strongly you agree or disagree with Hayek’s or Friedman’s ideas, there is no question that they prove the power of ideas. Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the shift toward policies and a society that are decidedly free-market-friendly are all downstream from this small fringe group of intellectuals. The irony is that the Mont Pèlerin Society’s movement started almost a century ago—so at the time—has stopped moving and become the old guard, vigilantly snuffing out any ideas that could disturb the pro-capitalism status quo.

The Mont Pèlerin Society shows us what having the courage to hold to a dissenting opinion can achieve. The Society’s ideas once seemed crazy, but now they’re commonplace. It’s time to hoist the sails once again and find what’s politically unlikely now so that it will become increasingly tenable later. Unconditional basic income, open borders, and 15-hour work weeks sound insane to many right now—just like Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideas did almost a century ago.

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Foundations of Utopia: Knowledge, Reverence, and Equality

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The power of knowledge.

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The Perfect Country: How to Create a Utopia Without Sacrificing Liberty and Equality

Welcome to an exploration of a concept that has fascinated philosophers, thinkers, and dreamers for centuries — the creation of a perfect country, a utopia where liberty and equality reign supreme. In this article, we will delve into the key elements and principles necessary to construct such a society while ensuring a balance between individual freedoms and collective well-being.

Defining Utopia

Before we embark on our journey, let us define what we mean by “utopia.” Derived from the Greek words “ou” (meaning not) and “topos” (meaning place), utopia represents an ideal or imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable qualities and conditions.

In our quest to create a utopia, it is crucial to strike a delicate balance between personal liberties and societal equality. After all, a perfect society should respect and protect individual rights while fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. Let’s proceed by examining the key components necessary for the realization of such a vision.

Economic System and Distribution of Wealth

In our utopia, a fair and equitable economic system would be the cornerstone. A combination of market forces and social policies would ensure the optimal distribution of wealth, thereby preventing extreme income inequalities.

For instance, a progressive tax system could be implemented, where the wealthy contribute a higher percentage of their income to support public services and welfare programs. Additionally, the government could invest in quality education and healthcare, ensuring equal opportunities for all citizens regardless of their socioeconomic background.

Furthermore, implementing policies that encourage entrepreneurship, innovation, and small business growth would foster economic dynamism and create a society that rewards merit and hard work.

Political Structure and Governance

In our utopian society, a fair and transparent political structure would be essential. A system of representative democracy with checks and balances would ensure that power remains decentralized and accountable.

Citizens would actively participate in decision-making processes through regular elections, referendums, and open forums. Freedom of speech and expression would be protected, allowing individuals to voice their opinions without fear of retribution.

To safeguard against corruption and abuse of power, an independent judiciary would enforce the rule of law. Laws and regulations would be designed to protect individual freedoms while also promoting social cohesion and harmony.

Social Justice and Equality

No utopia can exist without addressing social justice and equality comprehensively. Our perfect country would prioritize inclusivity and strive to eliminate discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or any other characteristic.

Educational institutions would play a vital role in fostering tolerance and understanding among different cultures and backgrounds. Comprehensive anti-discrimination laws would be in place to protect marginalized groups and ensure equal access to opportunities.

Moreover, efforts to bridge the wealth gap and provide social safety nets for the most vulnerable members of society would be paramount. Affordable housing, universal healthcare, and accessible education would be considered fundamental rights for all citizens.

Environmental Sustainability

A utopia cannot thrive without a sustainable relationship with the environment. Our perfect country would prioritize ecological responsibility, striving for renewable energy sources, environmental conservation, and responsible consumption.

Investments in green technologies and initiatives to reduce carbon emissions would be at the forefront of government policies. Education and awareness programs would emphasize the importance of individual actions in preserving the planet for future generations.

The Role of Technology

Technology can serve as a powerful tool in building our utopia. It can enhance efficiency, communication, and access to information, empowering individuals and communities.

However, caution must be exercised to prevent its misuse or concentration of power. Striking a balance between technological advancement and personal privacy is crucial in maintaining individual liberties while harnessing the benefits of innovation.

In conclusion, the creation of a perfect country, a utopia where liberty and equality coexist harmoniously, requires careful consideration of various factors. A balanced economic system, fair governance, social justice, environmental sustainability, and responsible use of technology are all essential elements.

While achieving utopia may remain an idealized vision, striving towards creating a society that embodies these principles can lead us to a better and more inclusive world. Let us remember that the journey towards perfection is ongoing, and every step we take brings us closer to realizing our collective aspirations.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Utopia — A “Perfect Society” in “Utopia” Written by Sir Thomas More

A "Perfect Society" in "Utopia" Written by Sir Thomas More

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Published: Jan 21, 2020

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Utopias in america.

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A utopian society, as defined by Robert V. Hine in California's Utopian Colonies , includes “a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large to embody that vision in experimental form. " They are composed of either religious or secular members . The former stressed (in the western tradition) a community life inspired by religion, while the latter expressed the idealism of utilitarianism as a means to create happiness, with a belief in the cooperative way of life. Explored within this essay is the origin and development of the Utopian idea within in the United States. It includes examples of nineteenth century utopian societies and, occasionally, what led to their demise. Origins of the Utopian Idea:

Western ideas of utopias are linked to the desire to recreate paradises lost to history, such as Eden in the Old Testament. Utopia translates from Greek words ou and topos to mean “not a place.” In Republic, Plato described the ideal Greek city-state as requiring communal living among the ruling class, perhaps based on the model of Sparta. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, describing a perfect political and social system on an imaginary island. This book popularized the modern definition of "Utopia" as being any place or situation of ideal perfection. The 19th-century utopian sects can trace their roots back to the Protestant Reformation. Based on the organization of early Christian communities, communal living developed and grew largely within monastic communities. During the Middle Ages this communal organization spread to outside of monastic contexts and into several lay religious groups. The Protestant Reformation changed western European societal attitudes about the nature of religion and work. Martin Luther stressed that all work was of equal spiritual dignity. John Calvin believed that a person could not know for certain if they were among God's Elect or the damned. Outwardly a person's life and deeds, including hard work, could include them as one of the Elect. Ideals about work, such as these, were stressed in the various American religious utopian societies. The Shakers, for example, believed in productive labor as a religious calling. Amana Inspirationists saw labor as productive and good, part of God's plan of contributing to the community. In the wars and general disorder following the Reformation, some new Protestant sects practiced communal ownership of property. To avoid persecution several of these groups immigrated to America, where the idea of communal living developed and expanded. The early 19th century brought a great expansion of communitarian experiments within the U.S. Land was plentiful and inexpensive and unhampered by government regulations. Europe, in contrast, was emerging from a long history of religious wars. America became a location where people could start over, creating a "New Eden" across the Atlantic. The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion attracted European groups who were persecuted in their own countries. Upon arrival in America, many hoped to form Utopian societies - self-contained, agrarian, and communal in nature. Several of these societies are explored below. The Shakers:

Shaker societies were characterized by communal living, productive labor, celibacy, pacifism, and gender equality. They were also associated with feminist and abolitionist reform movements in the 19th century. A significant portion of Shakerism was founded in England by (Mother) Ann Lee in 1758, and was imported to America by Lee and several followers in 1774. By the Civil War there were 6,000 shakers who maintained their economic autonomy while also making items for outside commercial distribution. Their agrarian work was eventually redirected to handcrafts, particularly furniture.

Examples of Shaker communities can be found at:

Enfield Shakers Historic District (Enfield, Connecticut);

Hancock Shaker Village (Berkshire County, Massachusetts);

Shakertown at Pleasant Hill Historic District (Harrodsburg, Kentucky);

Canterbury Shaker Village (Canterbury, New Hampshire);

Mount Lebanon Shaker Society (New Lebanon, New York); and

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village (New Glochester, Maine).

The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was established at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on some 200 acres of land from 1841 to 1847. It was founded by Transcendentalists who wanted to live a life based on the principles of “plain living.” It became known for those associated with it, which included George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, William Henry Channing, John S. Dwight, and Sophia Dana Ripley. It began with about 15 members and never had more than 120 people at one time. Farm attracted not only intellectuals, but also carpenters, farmers, shoemakers and printers. The community provided housing, fuel, wages, clothing and food for all members. There was an infant school, a primary school and college preparatory course. A fire in 1846, combined with financial issues, brought about the end of the Brook Farm community in 1847. The Brook Farm site is now recognized as a National Historic Landmark, and Nathaniel Hawthorne used it as the basis for The Blithedale Romance . The Rappites:

The Harmony Society, also called the Rappites, were similar to the Shakers in certain beliefs. Named after their founder, Johann Georg Rapp, the Rappites immigrated from Württemburg, Germany to the United States in 1803. They established a colony in Butler County, Pennsylvania, called Harmony, and believed that the Bible was the sole authority. Under Frederick Rapp, George Rapp's adopted son, the economy of Harmony grew from one of subsistence agriculture to gradual diversified manufacturing. By 1814, there were 700 members, a town of about 130 houses, and several factories. Eventually the Harmony Society sold all of their holdings to a Mennonite group for $100,000 and moved to a new location in Indiana. They again they built a prosperous community, New Harmony, only to sell it too in 1825. The Harmonists returned to Pennsylvania and built their final home at Economy on the Ohio River. They reached their peak in 1866, but the practice of celibacy and several schisms thinned the Society's ranks, and the community dissolved in 1905. The Oneida Community:

The Oneida Community was founded and led by John Humphreys Noyes of Brattleboro, Vermont. He studied theology at Andover Theological Seminary, and later Yale. He became involved in the abolitionist movement, and in 1833 he founded the New Haven Anti-Slavery Society and the New Haven Free Church. His followers became known as Perfectionists, and they practiced "complex marriage,” meaning that they considered themselves married to the group, not a single partner. Noyes moved his community to the town of Oneida, in New York. The community practiced broom manufacturing, shoe manufacturing, flour processing, lumber milling and trap manufacturing. The Perfectionists in Oneida held communal property, meals and arrangements for the rearing and education of children. The Oneida Community Mansion House began housing the community in the early 1850s, and in 1874 there were 270 members. Misunderstanding of the community inspired an 1879 meeting of ministers in Syracuse, where they condemned the settlement. Unrest hit the Perfectionists, and Noyes fled to Canada on June 29, 1879. Their communal experiment ended in January of 1881 when the community was reconstituted as a joint stock corporation. The Demise of the 19th-Century Utopian Colonies:

Several religious and social communal groups developed in the nineteenth century. Yet of all these utopian groups only the Amana Inspirationists developed and built a network of seven villages set in an agricultural region. As other communal groups in the United State, the Inspirationists of Amana founded their communities with an agricultural basis as. They modified their system into two distinct organizations, one secular and one spiritual. Both men and women labored, although in Amana women's work did not include trades and the ministry as it did in the Shaker communities. While further experiments in communal living continued into the 20th century, the great wave of the 19th-century had begun to subside. Each community faced different circumstances that led to their individual demise. Overall, an increasingly industrialized world coupled with hostility of surrounding areas contributed most to their downfall.

The Community of True Inspiration made east-central Iowa their home in 1855 and practiced their communal lifestyle until 1932.

Mother Ann Lee brought the Shaker way of life to the US in 1774. Believers eventually founded 19 communities within the country.

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Last updated: October 24, 2023

Essay about Utopia

Utopia Sir Thomas More writes, in his book Utopia, about a society that is perfect in practically ever sense. The people all work an equal amount and everything they need for survival is provided. Most importantly is that everyone living in this perfect society is happy and content with their everyday lives. In this society everybody supports everyone. The community is only as strong as its weakest link. For society to progress everyone must work together. Opponents of the Utopian system, however, feel that the strong should not have to look after the weak. Progress would be maximized if all the resources are spent on the people most qualified to help society. A Utopian society, as perfect as the one …show more content…

The more helpful one is to society the more resources that person deserves. Free time is not very common, for people are constantly working to better their life and make themselves more important to society. In Utopia , people have an ample amount of free time. During “all the void time, that is between the hours of work, sleep, meat that they be suffered to bestow, every man as he liketh best himself” (More 137). People can focus on the activities which bring them pleasure because they are not trying to elevate themselves in society by working extra hard. People do not pick activities so that they can become the best at whatever hobby they choose. People choose a hobby based upon what brings them the most pleasure. Nearly everyone in the community reads and studies because they all take pleasure out of learning and improving their minds. An equal amount of time is spent in physical activities so that the body as well as the mind can experience pleasure. The Utopians strive to better themselves equally in the mind, body, and spirit. People of today love to compete. The best athletes and smartest intellects love to show everyone that they are superior to everyone else in their field. On the average people only focus on either becoming either a better athlete or a better scholar. Very rarely does one see a well rounded person. People tend to concentrate on improving

Building Our Own Utopia Essay

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Utopian communities have had an incredible impact on both American society and various recognized religious sects throughout the United States as a whole. Many people saw, and still see, democratic government as unfair, leaving the poor behind to become poorer while the rich continued to get richer; they felt a change in work and fairness was officially in order. Utopian societies were created with commendable intentions, and their idea of the perfect cooperative society is an attractive conference, but they were all considered experiments because they all declined swiftly and hopelessly.

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The term utopia is often coined as an ideal or perfect society. In Sir Thomas More “Utopia” such a society is presented. However, today’s reader can see that this ideal or perfect society is filled with many underlying problems that make it not utopic or even dystopic. To exemplify the society More’s mention puts a strain on the freedom and relationship the citizens have with its country in to question. Such an act is detrimental in creating a utopia because if the citizens are not happy with the freedom and rights they are given how can the society itself be presented as a utopia, it is instead like a prison.

Theme Of A Utopian Society

One of the major themes Mitchell plays with in his novel is the concept of a utopian society, and what it is comprised of. In each story, there is a setup for a ‘perfect’ society, but humanity, or humanity’s spirit got in the way. Each story represents how the interpretation of things can shape a society, depending on how literal they take the events. In the story “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everythin’ After”, the tales are in place to develop the role of each character. Zachry fights his inner demons, just as Truman Napes does with Old Georgie. Zachry chooses to protect and befriend Meronym, even though it goes against his initial judgement. Meronym fights for the overall good of the people just as the crow does in “Prescient yarnie”. She goes out and lives with the villagers to gather information, and saves Zachry’s sister. She is making diplomatic decisions to take on the risk of changing the course of things by helping her. The function of Zachry and Meronym are to be foils of each other, even the story is told from the biased perspective of Zachry. Meronym is focused on long term goals, and the redevelopment of society, while Zachry is very much focused on the present time, and the folklore that affects his day to day life.

Brave New World Utopian Society Essay

It is astounding how two pieces of literature can be similar but different at the same time, just by how the authors choose to use different literary devices. Two novels, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, portray these differentiated attributes because of the way the two authors vary in these literary techniques. Brave New World portrays a futuristic society in which people are artificially made and their jobs are pre-selected before they are created. All of the emotions and desires of man have been inhibited in these beings to create a so-called “utopian society” in which everyone lives and works harmoniously. The

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In Thomas More’s Utopia, the elimination of property and money has all citizens working for the commonwealth. It is “where every man has a right to everything. They all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything. For among them there is no unequal distribution so that no man is poor, none in necessity and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich” (More 81). More’s Utopia also encourages a balance of power within society. It is where an individual, in a position of power, is not “as idle as drones, that subsist on other men’s labor” (More 7) It is where that individual gives “more regard to the riches of his country than to his wealth” (More 21).

Essay about Utopia Vs. Dystopia

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It Is Impossible To Create A Dystopian Society

The Utopians live in a society that is free from the grips of money and hoarding, one that is as close to perfect as one can feasibly imagine. It is a world where people get along together in harmony, with “nothing private anywhere” (More 231). The only have gardening competitions, and even their gardens are not permanent, dying with each passing year. They “change houses by lot” every ten years to keep people from hoarding earthly goods, and by doing this create a society where not only does everyone contribute, and everyone also communicates and relates to those around them (More 231). This happens in large part, according to More, because of “communal living and their moneyless economy” (More 269). Through this revolutionary and ideal living, they create a place where there is no bribery because there is no money, with

Comparing and Contrasting Plato's The Republic and Thomas More's Utopia

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My Utopian Society Essay

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Compare And Contrast Death And Life Of Great American Cities

In our lives today, we take advantage of all the luxuries that are presented daily. Freedom alone is one of the greatest luxuries we possess as an American nation. In Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and Utopia by Thomas Moore, we are presented two life styles, which some might consider very similar in various ways. Both authors focus on a peaceful living lifestyle, to better the people of the nation. Although some of their specific details are different, I believe that Jacobs would definitely approve of the features that More develops in Utopia.

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such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man" (40).  In

The Impossible Utopia Essay

Societies will not only always have over ambitious people, but also a need for law and order. A flawless society would require a leading figure or group in order for there to be order and rules, but then it would no longer be a utopia. If there was a leading body, that group or individual would have more power than the regular people, thus a misdistribution of power is seen. “The contradictions in the overall Marxist scheme were all too apparent. On a philosophical level, it displayed an inherent contradiction between its fundamentally materialist position and its underlying idealist strain, which

Sir Thomas More's Utopian Community

A utopian community would be a world without oppression, discrimination or social hierarchy—essentially, an ideal place to live. However, does a perfect society really exist? In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, More flirts with the concept of a utopian community with regard to geography, city structure, labor, government and religion. Considering these aspects, the community depicted in Utopia is primarily a success, with limited failures.

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Utopian Literature of the Renaissance

Marie Louise Berneri (essay date 1950)

SOURCE: "Utopias of the Renaissance," in Journey Through Utopia , 1950. Reprint by The Beacon Press, 1951, pp. 52-58.

[ In the following excerpt from her critical study of Utopian literature, Berneri argues that "though the Utopias of Thomas More, Campanella and Andreae embody to a great extent the spirit of the Renaissance, they are also a reaction against it. " ]

From the Greek ideal commonwealths we now pass to those of the Renaissance. This does not mean that during this gap of fifteen centuries the mind of man had ceased to be interested in building imaginary societies, and a complete survey of Utopian thought should describe its manifestations during the Roman Empire and even more during the following period which is generally, and unjustly, called the Dark Ages. In many legends of that time one finds that the Utopian dream assumes a primitive form as in the early Greek myths.

With the theological thought of the Middle Ages the ideal commonwealths are projected in the next world either, in the mystic and philosophic manner of St Augustine's De Civitate Dei , or in the poetical and naive fashion of the narrative of the great Irish traveller St Brendan. This intrepid monk tells how, during one of his travels, his ship was driven towards the north, and how after fifteen days he and his companions reached a country where they saw cathedrals of crystal and where day followed day without night and they landed on an island which was the abode of the blessed. Though in this 6th century legend, Utopia is identified with Paradise, the combination of actual travels with the vision of an ideal island is a feature which will be found in many later Utopias.

If the Utopian writers of the Renaissance owe a great deal to Greek philosophy they are also indebted to the Christian Fathers and to later theologians. St Thomas Aquinas's De Regimine Principum , written during the 13th century, contains some passages which are worth quoting because they express ideas common to almost all the Utopias of the Renaissance. Firstly that human happiness is dependent on ethical principles as well as material comfort:

For an individual to lead a good life two things are required. The first and most important is to act in a virtuous manner, for virtue is that by which one lives well; the second, which is secondary and as it were instrumental, is a sufficiency of those bodily goods whose use is necessary to an act of virtue.

The self-sufficiency of the city and surrounding country is the ideal to be achieved:

Now there are two ways in which an abundance of food-stuffs can be supplied to a city. The first is where the soil is so fertile that it nobly provides for all the necessities of human life. The second is by trade, through which the necessities of life are brought to the town from different places. But it is quite clear that the first means is better. For the higher a thing is the more self-sufficient it is; since whatever needs another's help is by that very fact proven inferior. But that city is more fully self-sufficient which the surrounding country supplies with all its vital needs, than is another which must obtain these supplies by trade. A city which has an abundance of food from its own territory is more dignified than one which is provisioned by merchants. It is safer, too, for the importing of supplies can be prevented whether owing to the uncertain outcome of wars or...

(This entire section contains 21235 words.)

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to the many dangers of the road, and thus the city may be overcome through lack of food.

St Thomas Aquinas perceived the disruptive effect of commerce upon the community:

Again, if the citizens themselves devote their lives to matters of trade the way will be opened to many vices. For since the object of trading leads especially to the making of money, greed is awakened in the hearts of citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will be offered for sale; confidence will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good: the cultivation of virtue will fail, since honour, virtue's reward, will be bestowed upon everyone. Thus in such a city civic life will be corrupted.

It would have been impossible for the Renaissance writers to model their ideal commonwealth entirely upon those of the Greek thinkers, for the structure of the society they had before their eyes was fundamentally different from that of ancient Greece. The Athenian or Spartan city, with its watertight division between citizen and slaves, its primitive economy based almost exclusively on agriculture, could not be transplanted into the society of the sixteenth century without undergoing some radical changes.

The most important change was in regard to manual labour. For Plato manual work was merely a necessity of life and should be left to the slaves and artisans, while a special caste busied itself with the affairs of State. The experience of the mediaeval city had shown, on the contrary, that the whole community was capable of governing itself through its guilds and city councils, and this community was entirely composed of producers. Thus work had acquired an important and respected position which it did not altogether lose with the breaking up of communal institutions.

All the utopists of the Renaissance insist that work is a duty for all citizens and some of them, like Campanella and Andreae, maintain that all work, even the most menial, is honourable. Nor was this a mere statement of principle; it was reflected in the institutions which gave equal rights to the labourer as to the craftsman, to the peasant as to the school-master. These Utopian institution deprived work of its mercenary character by abolishing wages and trade, and they further endeavoured to make work pleasant by reducing the number of working hours. These institutions, which strike us as modern, had in fact existed in the mediaeval city where hired labour was practically non-existent and where manual labour was no token of inferiority, while the idea that work must be pleasant was a current one and was well expressed in this mediaeval Kuttenberg Ordinance which says: "Every one must be pleased with his work, and no one shall, while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced by applicationand work, because laws must be a shield for application and work." The Utopian idea of a short working day which to us, accustomed to think of the past in terms of the nineteenth century, seems a very radical one, does not appear such an innovation, if it is compared with an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner's day at eight hours. And according to Thorold Rogers, in fifteenth century England men worked forty-eight hours a week.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the cities gradually lost their independence, their prosperity began to decline and soon the most abject poverty prevailed generally among working people. But the experience of the free cities was not lost and was consciously or unconsciously assimilated in the constitution of ideal states.

The Utopias of the Renaissance introduced, however, some important innovations. The mediaeval city had not succeeded in allying itself with the peasantry and this had been one of the chief causes of its decay. The peasant had remained in a condition of slavery and, though in England serfdom had been abolished, in most European countries the peasants were enduring conditions not dissimilar from those of the Helots in Sparta. The Utopian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century realised, as St Thomas Aquinas had done, that a stable society must integrate the town and the countryside, craftsmen and peasants, and that agricultural work should be given an honoured position equal to that of the other crafts.

The importance given in Utopian writings to the scientific cultivation of the land was probably inspired by the work done by the monasteries in this field. Other features of monastic life, such as the rigid time-tables, the meals taken in common, the uniformity and austerity of clothes, the considerable amount of time devoted to study and prayer were also included in the constitutions of ideal cities.

Of more importance than the experiences of the past, however, is the direct influence that the movements of the Renaissance and the Reformation have had on Utopian thought. This influence is a complex one for, though the Utopias of Thomas More, Campanella and Andreae embody to a great extent the spirit of the Renaissance, they are also a reaction against it.

The splendid artistic and scientific movement of the Renaissance was accompanied by a disintegration of society. The assertion ofman's individuality, the development of his critical faculties, and the widening of knowledge, had consolidated the destruction of the collective spirit of the Middle Ages and undermined the unity of the Christian world. The Renaissance furthermore had led to the formation of a class of "intellectuals" by creating a division between the worker and the technician, the craftsman and the artist, the mason and the architect. A new aristocracy was born; not, at first, based on wealth and power, but on intelligence and knowledge. Burckhardt, the brilliant apologist of the Renaissance, admits that this movement "was anti-popular, that through it Europe became for the first time sharply divided into the cultivated and the uncultivated classes."

This division quickened the disintegration of society. The rising power of the nobles and the kings was no longer held in check by the Communes, and led to continuous and exhausting warfare. The old associations had been broken up and nothing had come to take their place. The condition of the people grew increasingly worse until it reached that abject poverty so powerfully described in More's Utopia.

The Utopias of the Renaissance represented a reaction against its extreme individualism and were an effort to create a new unity among nations. For this purpose they sacrificed the most cherished conquests of the Renaissance; Thomas More the scholar and humanist, the patron of painters and friend of Erasmus, produced an Utopia where the lack of individuality is evident—from the uniformity of the houses and clothes to the adherence to a strict routine of work; where artistic manifestations are completely absent; where the "unique" man of the Renaissance is replaced by a "standard" man. Except for Rabelais, who is in a category of his own, all the other Utopian writers are as parsimonious as More, in their allowance of personal freedom.

If these Utopias represented a reaction against the movement of the Renaissance they also anticipate its logical outcome. The development of the individuality had taken place in a minority at the expense of the majority. A cathedral built according to the plan conceived by one artist, more clearly expresses his individuality than one built by the common efforts of an association, but the workmen who execute the plan have less chance to develop their personalities.

In the political sphere the initiative also passed from the people to a few individuals. The condottieri, the princes, kings and bishops, dispensed justice, waged wars, contracted alliances, regulated commerce and production: all tasks which had been previously undertaken by the communes, guilds or city councils. The Renaissance which had allowed the development of the individual also created the state which became the negation of the individual.

The Utopias of the Renaissance try to offer a solution to the problems facing a society in the process of evolving a new form of organisation.

As has often been pointed out, the discovery of the New World gave a new impetus to Utopian thought, but it played only a secondary role, and one can safely assume that had More never read Vespucci's travels he would have imagined an ideal commonwealth in a different setting, like Campanella or Andreae who did not bother to consult travel books before they described their ideal cities. The main impetus came from the need to replace the associations, and the philosophical and religious systems of the Middle Ages, with new ones.

Next to the Utopias we find, as we did in Greece under similar circumstances, the elaboration of ideal constitutions which sought a solution in political reforms rather than in the establishment of a completely new system of society. Among the creators of ideal constitutions of that period, Jean Bodin probably exerted the greatest influence. This French philosopher strongly resisted the temptation of wishing to build "a Republic in the imagination and without effect such as those which Plato and Thomas More, the chancellor of England, have imagined." He believed, like Aristotle, that private property and family institutions should remain untouched, but that a strong state should be created which would be able to maintain the unity of the nation. At the time when Bodin wrote his Republic (1557), France was torn by religious wars, and there began to grow up a movement in favour of a monarchical state which would be strong enough to prevent religious struggles but which would at the same time allow political and religious freedom. Bodin's theories on the state answered these preoccupations and his works were read with interest all over Europe. He himself translated La République into Latin in 1586, when it had already been translated into Italian, Spanish and German. His ideas seem to have met with similar interest in England, for when Bodin came to this country in 1579 private lectures were held both in London and Cambridge to explain his work.

… [The Utopias of the Renaissance] are, in many respects, widely dissimilar. Thomas More abolishes property but retains family institutions and slavery; Campanella, though a staunch Catholic, wants to abolish marriage and the family; Andreae borrows many of his ideas from More and Campanella but puts his faith in a new religious reformation which would go deeper than that inspired by Luther; Bacon wants to preserve private property and a monarchal government but believes that the happiness of mankind can be achieved through scientific progress.

Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick (essay date 1952)

SOURCE: "Utopias from 1500 to 1850," in The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies , Henry Schuman, Inc., 1952, pp. 286-95.

[ In the following essay, the critics discuss the revival of utopianism during the Renaissance, focusing on themes of communism, religion, and natural science in Utopian thought. ]

With the rise of humanism and naturalism, and with the general revolution in human thought at the time of the Renaissance, utopianism revived. The medieval ideal of a static, divinely sanctioned order persisted in the writings of Robert Crowley in the sixteenth century, and lingered as the ideal of one aspect of seventeenth-century utopianism, though in national rather than international application. The semiutopian ideal of the Holy Roman universal society persisted through the middle ages and revived in modified form in Tommaso Campanella's Spanish Monarchy and in the hopes for a united Christendom which centered about Philip II of Spain. In 1516, Thomas More started a tradition of humanist Utopias, the chief of which were probably intended less as models for society than as norms by which to judge it. The revived study of the classics, a movement with which More himself was closely connected, also led to a group of Italian Utopias.

These Italian Utopias of the sixteenth century are of two types: the "ideal" and the "practical." The first type is universal in basis and application, and presents the idea or ideal of a state. The other is more specific: it is civic or national in both its nature and its application. The "practical" Utopia is thus a model, applicable constitution or plan for society, of the type represented by Harrington's Oceana in the following century. An "ideal" Utopia like Plato's Republic puts forward the philosophical or theoretical end of a state and society, in general, moretheoretic terms. During the Renaissance in all countries, the "practical" type predominated, probably because of the prevalence of naturalism. Natural philosophy taught the infallible goodness of natural law as the guide and purifying force of every society. If science was directed to study the laws of nature, and if the laws of nature were utilized to the ends of civil society, conclusions could be drawn which would contribute to the ordering of an ideal society which would be constructed in accordance with the dictates of the new experience. Natural philosophy thus led men to envisage the possibility of a model state governed by few and wise laws deduced from nature and yet dominant over her. Since it was believed that error was absent from nature, it would likewise be absent from this state; nor would anything there contradict the principles of philosophy.

The kind of model state which matured in the humanist, renaissance mind was fixed by the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and by three Italian Utopias, "The Imaginary Republic" by Ludovico Agostini, "The Learned World" by Antonio Francesco Doni, and The Happy City by Francesco Patrizi. All four, especially the Italian ones, are in the nature of academic exercises devoted to philosophical speculation or the instructive admiration of a Utopian people. An account of one of them will illustrate this. The goal of the citizens in Patrizi's Happy City (Venice, 1553) is to get into tune with the Divine Idea and to drink supercelestial waters. The society is divided into six castes or orders. Physical necessities are provided by the three lowest orders, the peasants, artisans, and merchants. Since they are unable to give their souls to civic and contemplative virtues, they cannot attain happiness, and are, accordingly, denied citizenship and its privileges. The superior classes—warriors, governors, and priests—perform civic duties, but their chief aims are the speculative virtues and communion with the highest. However, there is no need to give further details here: the work is essentially a recasting of Plato's Republic.

In contrast with such "ideal" works, an example of a "practical" sixteenth-century utopia is to be found in "The Door Opened to the Republic of Evandria," which Ludovico Zuccolo included in his Dialogues (Venice, 1625). It is significant because of the light it throws on one origin of Utopias. The practice of idealizing an existing city or state is common to all ages, but it was particularly strong in sixteenth-century Italy. Glorifications of Lucca, Florence, and Venice are not far to seek in that period. The transition to an imagined perfect society was an easy one. Zuccolo first described San Marino with admiration for the simple butcomfortable life of its citizens. They were poor, but enjoyed a sufficiency of this world's goods; and the result of their poverty was cooperativeness, plain living, freedom from covetousness; a lack of corrupting luxuries and vices; absence of strangers, visitors, and bankers; and consequent freedom from the harms which they might bring. Zuccolo then proceeded to describe a fantastic voyage to the exemplary Republic of Evandria. Its site is remote, and it is further protected by natural barriers. In it wickedness is banished, and a perfect society exists under an annually elected magistracy. Thus Zuccolo's Utopia began in glorified reality and was carried to imaginative perfection. In contrast, More started from a consideration of the evils of England and then moved into a speculative dream of an ideal state which he held to be impossible of attainment.

The difference between Utopias classified as "ideal" and those grouped as "practical" is one of degree and tendency, but such a difference is quite noticeable if the states of More and Patrizi are compared with those written in the seventeenth century. In general, the latter, influenced no doubt by the Reformation and by developments in natural science, were intended to be practical. Joseph Hall's Discovery of a New World is an exception, for it is an academic exercise in burlesque and satire. But the extraordinary Utopian efflorescence in the two decades which followed produced in four different countries five accounts of imaginary societies. In varying degrees, all of them may be classified as "practical." Tommaso Campanella not only asserted the practicability of his City of the Sun , but participated in a Calabrian revolt to realize his end. I.D.M.'s Antangil , though strongly influenced by Plato and More, is obviously intended to be applicable to France in 1616. Bacon's New Atlantis , which appeared a decade later, heavily stresses the practical advantages of science and invention; and even Robert Burton's "poetical commonwealth of mine own" proves, on examination, to have realistic reference to the condition of England. Johann Valentin Andreae's Latin utopia, Christianopolis , like Campanella's City of the Sun , combines metaphysical speculation and immediate applicability.

Sufficient background in the history of utopianism has been given above to make possible a more rapid survey and classification of Utopias written before 1850.

One of the main currents was that of communism and socialism. It is traceable back to early accounts of the Golden Age. Developed in the Utopias of Plato, Iambulus, and Euhemerus, it recurred in the Middle Ages in such teachings as those of John Ball, which provided an ideological basis for peasant revolts. Thomas More based his Utopia on communism but moderated its power by his humanistic stress on education, natural virtues, and the institution of the family. Campanella went to an extreme and provided for community of property and women. After him, for a few decades, communist theory lingered in oral tradition, in poetry about the Golden Age, and in satire. However, in 1652, Gerrard Winstanley published a communist Utopia, The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Since it is not included in the present anthology, some account of it is necessary. Winstanley was a leader of a tiny group known as the Diggers at the extreme political Left of the Puritan Revolution. As the result of mystical visions and voices he and his fellows attempted to cultivate some rather barren land in Surrey in defiance of those who had property rights over it. Morally their case had some strength, for, having helped to overthrow the despotism of Charles I, they sought to have a small share of England on which they could earn their living. However, when the religious miracle which was expected to fertilize the ground they had chosen failed to materialize, and when landowners and the state interfered with force, they abandoned their attempt. Winstanley's Utopia was printed two years later in an effort to persuade Cromwell to set up a somewhat primitivistic communistic system in England.

Winstanley's theme is simple: the earth and its products should belong to all; therefore the land should be returned to its original owners, the people. He decides that the main work of reformation is to reform the clergy, the lawyers, and the law. After reviewing the injustices of economic tyranny, he stresses the favorite seventeenth-century theme of legal and constitutional right, and proves, to his own satisfaction, the laborer's right to the land. He attempts to answer the stock objections to communism, distinguishes between individualism and individuality, and between private and personal property, and halts short of advocating compulsory participation in communism. In his society each man produces for central storehouses from which he draws as his needs demand. The control of this system is under the aegis of clearly expressed laws, strictly enforced. After disposing of freedom to trade, religious freedom, and freedom of inheritance, as bogus types, Winstanley lays down the thesis that true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment, and that it consists in the free enjoyment of the earth. His description of the governmental function arises out of this conception: "Government," he writes, "is a wise and free ordering of the earth and the manners of mankind by observation of particular laws or rules, so that all theinhabitants may live peaceably in plenty and freedom in the land where they are born and bred." His interpretation of history is a materialistic, economic one. He approaches the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat by confining the vote to men of stern moral character and excluding "kingly" men from the franchise. He describes a pyramided structure of government with an all-powerful "preserver of the peace"—Parliament—at its head. It lacks an executive, but the lack is compensated by the provision of overlapping officials whose only function is to see that the laws are kept. Education is to be severe, comprehensive, and practical. Everyone will follow a trade or profession. Invention and the use of talent will be encouraged. Punishments will take the form of work under a taskmaster. A short civil ceremony will suffice for marriage or divorce. And the institution of the family will be maintained.

Though outwardly "progressive," Winstanley's Utopia was retrograde in tendency. It would have resulted in a primitivistic agrarian society inconsistent with the economic development of England and the growth of that country as a great trading nation. But his communism had at least the merit that it was tempered by Christian ethics.

Communism in Utopian writing next appeared in The Australian Land Discovered by Gabriel de Foigny and The History of the Sevarites by Denis Veiras, though it is to be doubted that either of them proposed the abolition of private property with any seriousness. Common ownership of productive goods was more earnestly advocated in the eighteenth century by Morelly in his Code of Nature. Francis Babeuf took over his theoretical teachings and attempted to promote them during the French Revolution. Neither of those men wrote a proper Utopia, but their teachings probably influenced the author of Equality or A History of Lithconia , the first major Utopia to be published in America. It was exceptional, for other socialists and communists, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Robert Owen, and Proudhon, failed to write proper Utopias, but much of their thought is reflected in Etienne Cabet's A Voyage to Icaria , one of the most comprehensive communist Utopias ever written.

Religious Utopias are probably as numerous as communist ones in the period between 1600 and 1850. I.D.M.'s Antangil , the first French Utopia, is dominated by a type of Puritanism, as are Andreae's Christianopolis and Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma (London, 1648).

Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis, the Description of a Christian Commonwealth and Administration was written in Latin and published at Strassburg in 1619. It has not been included in the present volume because the Utopias of I.D.M., Burton, Campanella, and Bacon sufficiently represent the ideal commonwealths of the early seventeenth century. Nevertheless the account merits some consideration.

Andreae (1586-1654) was born at Herrenberg, studied at Tübingen, and traveled widely in Europe. Religious discords in Geneva impressed him unfavorably, but he greatly admired the harmonious unity of customs and morals there. Having entered the Lutheran ministry, he made his congregation at Calw the starting point in an attempt to set up the ideal social system of which he had dreamed ever since his visit to Switzerland. This was the "practical" type of utopianism. His efforts began with the children but soon extended to the working classes at Calw. He organized cloth and dye workers in a mutual protective system supported by free contributions from his friends and parishioners. This association was so successful that it continued into the twentieth century. But Andreae's Utopia is "ideal" in type.

Religion, education, morality, and science are the foundation stones of Caphar Salama, "the place of peace" which is the island site of Andreae's utopia. The allegorical content of the work is more considerable than that in Campanella's City of the Sun , with which Andreae was familiar. Setting sail in the good ship Fantasy , he was shipwrecked on the island which is a miniature of the whole world. Since he was a seeker of truth, he was accepted into the Christian city and well received by its four hundred inhabitants. In it production is carefully planned in advance. Supplies are placed in public storehouses from which the workers receive what they need without the use of money. Life is simple and untainted by luxuries. Although production and distribution are communistic, houses are inhabited by couples and meals are private. Great attention is paid to education, particularly to the advancement of science and its application to agriculture and industry. Working hours are short, because the laborers are industrious and efficient. Leisure time is devoted primarily to the service of God, the avoidance of temptations, and growth in virtue. Government is by eight men and eight subordinates all full of the spirit of Christianity. "Never have I seen so great an amount of Christian perfection collected into one place." "Their first and highest exertion is to worship God with a pure and faithful soul; the second, to strive towards the highest and chastest morals; and the third, to develop the mental powers." They prize these qualities inmen: equality, the desire for peace, and contempt for riches, and, above all, culture of the soul. "The chief point with them is that Christians ought to be different from the world around, in morals as well as religion…. They declare that the Gospels require a government different from that of the world."

Thus Christianopolis is the City of God, the communion of practicing Christians throughout the world, symbolized in Andreae's theocratic community.

Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma, the New Jerusalem is a livelier work, descriptive of a far less ascetic religious commonwealth. It is couched in the form of a romance of intrigues and adventures. They integrate poorly with his holy community dedicated to God and the bourgeois virtues. Other Puritan works such as Richard Baxter's A Holy Commonwealth (1656) and John Eliot's The Christian Commonwealth (1659) describe theocracies, but are on the outskirts of Utopia. After 1660, few Utopias are classifiable as dedicated primarily to Christianity. Joseph Glanvill's continuation of Bacon's New Atlantis , published at the end of his volume of Essays in 1676, centers upon religion but is better regarded as an exposition of the doctrines of the Cambridge Latitudinarians than as a proper Utopia. However it is interesting to note that Glanvill apparently regarded the Utopian genre as the most effective form in which to propound his ideas.

The Christian element in Utopias written after 1660 undoubtedly declined, but not the interest in religion. More's Utopians had practiced a naturalistic religion. Following his precedent a series of deistic and libertine Utopias appeared in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Utopias of Foigny and Veiras, Tyssot de Patot's Voyage of Jâmes Massey (1710), Mercier's Memoirs of the year 2500 (1770), and G. A. Ellis's New Britain (1820), all devote chapters to natural religion and deistic speculations. These are also echoed by Cabet.

Natural science is also important in Utopian thought. Bacon's concentration upon it was anticipated slightly by More, largely by Campanella, probably by Andreae, and mildly by Robert Burton (in the Utopia which the latter included in the first and second edition of his Anatomy of Melancholy). Later editions of the last-mentioned work showed the influence of Baconian science. Likewise under the influence of Bacon, Gott paid some attention to scientific experimentation in his Nova Solyma , and Winstanley wrote what is probably his finest prose passage in praise of science. In 1660, New Atlantis Continued by R. H. was devoted to adulation of monarchy and glorification of the possibilities of science. Thenceforth nearly all Utopias paid some attention to the importance of science in a perfected society. This element is particularly noticeable in the Utopias of Mercier and Cabet.

Militarism is also a leading theme in Utopias written before 1850. Plato set the precedent of devoting a whole class to the protection of society. Thomas More also paid great attention to the military aspects of his Utopia , not that he favored militarism as such, but that realism demanded its inclusion. It is startling to find that his highly moral Utopians, who would have despised bribery at home or any hiring of one free man by another, used both hired soldiers and bribery in wars. The author of Antangil may well have been a soldier, for militarism is one of his main preoccupations. The problems of war and peace, defense, military organization, and the like also receive special attention from James Harrington in the various Utopias which he wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century; militarism is also stressed by Veiras, and by Foigny (who makes the wars of the Australians against natural and human enemies an integral part of his plot), and, indeed, by almost all the Utopias up to 1850. Ellis, for example, in New Britain , is especially concerned with military problems and organization, though he does not allow them to be dominant in his society, as I.D.M. had done in Antangil.

The main theme of Utopias from 1500 to 1850 was advocacy, explicit or implicit, of the fullest possible, efficient utilization of the available resources of men and materials in a given society. Conservatives found this a means of supporting established ideas, institutions, and ways of life. Radicals, intent upon such total utilization, advocated a revolution in ideas and institutions as necessary to their goal. In general, the conservatives, Bacon, for example, looked to science tempered by morals and religion as the chief means to this full exploitation of resources. Radicals like Cabet, looked less to science than to education and institutional reforms.

However, not all utopists regarded the material basis of society as primary in their Utopias. Fénelon and Ellis, for example, saw the value of the simple life, uncomplicated by luxuries and their accompanying vices. This ascetic, somewhat primitivistic current in Utopian thought derived largely from More and was greatly influenced by Rousseau.

Utopias from 1600 to 1850 may be roughly classified in their historical development, as follows. The imaginary states of I.D.M., Campanella, Andreae, Burton, and Bacon constituted what might be called the Utopian Efflorescence of the earlier seventeenth century. Although they vary greatly from each other, all these writers were influenced by Plato and More; all stress the application of modern science in society; all are optimistic in outlook and show the influence of the idea of progress, which previously had not been widespread. These Utopias were written between 1600 and 1630. Then a current of Utopian fantasy revived—a continuation of the tradition of fantastic voyages which dates back to Iambulus and Euhemerus, and which was frequently echoed in the Middle Ages in such works as The Anticlaudian of Alain de Lille and in the voyage of Astolfo to the moon in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. The imaginary societies described by Rabelais and by Joseph Hall in his Discovery of a New World were in the same tradition. In 1638 it revived with The Man in the Moon , by Francis Godwin, which was rapidly followed by John Wilkins' Discourse concerning a New World and Another Planet (1640). Further fantastic celestial voyages and satirical accounts of imaginary commonwealths are contained in D'Ablancourt's translation of Lucian's True History , a work of the later period of ancient Greek civilization. Indeed, Lucian may be regarded as the father of this type of superterrestrial "science fiction." D'Ablancourt added a supplement of his own to the True History and published both about 1648. The tradition continued in Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History (1656 and 1662), with its satirical accounts of societies on the moon and sun.

Meanwhile Puritan utopianism came to the fore. The tradition established by I.D.M. and Andreae branched into romance literature with Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma (1648). The Levellers of the Puritan Revolution had many Utopian ideas but failed to write a work in this genre. However, Digger communism produced such a work in Winstanley's Law of Freedom. Meanwhile the Fifth Monarchist Puritans propounded semiutopian conceptions of a Kingdom of Christ shortly to be established on earth; and Baxter and Eliot approached the Utopian type in A Holy Commonwealth and The Christian Commonwealth , both of which appeared in 1659. But as secularism began to prevail over Puritanism, less theocratic imaginary states were described: such were Samuel Hartlib's Macaria (1641), which was strongly influenced by Bacon; The Poor Man's Advocate , by Peter Chamberlen (1649); Robert Norwood's Pathway unto England's Perfect Settlement (1653); Peter Plockhoy's Way to the Peace and Settlement of these Nations , and similar works. Few of these completely satisfy the definition of a proper Utopia, but all of them propound economic programs intended to realize something approaching a perfect society. Parallel to them were a host of political Utopias and related works. These put forth model constitutions. Such were Marchamont Nedham's Excellency of a Free State (1656), the anonymous Chaos (1659), William Sprigge's Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth (1659), the various Utopias penned by James Harrington, especially his Oceana (1656), and a royalist work written in Latin by a Frenchman in England— Syndro-media by Antoine Le Grand (1669).

Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History may be classified as the first of a series of French libertine Utopias. After England had her Revolution, utopianism declined there, except for semiutopian schemes written largely under the influence of Harrington, of which the anonymous Free State of Noland (1696) is representative. But in France the ideological undermining of the ancien régime had still to take place, and a potent force in that direction were the libertine Utopias by Cyrano, Veiras, Foigny, Claude Gilbert, and Tyssot de Patot. In general, the outlook of these writers was heterodox. Not infrequently blasphemous, they questioned the established orthodoxies of religion, morals, and politics in their period.

German utopianism lagged behind that of the rest of Europe. If Andreae's Latin work is excepted, the first German Utopia was the anonymous State of Ophir (Ophirischer Staat) , a comprehensive, pedestrian, earnest, prodigiously long work published in 1699. It has been largely neglected by scholars, and, like the Latin Utopia, Icaria (1637), by Joannes Bisselius, deserves further attention….

In the eighteenth century, the fantastic voyage tradition continued and resulted in the semiutopian land of the Houyhnhnms in Swift's Gulliver's Travels , and in such works as Simon Berington's Gaudentio di Lucca. Ludvig Holberg followed the precedent of Swift in The Voyages of Niels Klim (1741); and the constitutional type of Utopia, combined with a modified communism, recurred in the accounts of Spensonia by Thomas Spence about 1800. But for the most part, though rich in Rousseauistic and Utopian socialist theories, the eighteenth century produced few Utopias. Memoirs of the Year 2500 by Sebastien Mercier, published in French in 1770, is therefore noteworthy. Its intrinsic value is slight, but its historical interest is great, for, in some measure, it forecasts the French Revolution. Moreover, it reflects the sentimentality, the optimism, and, to some extent, the Rousseauism of the eighteenth century; and it anticipates Romanticism….

Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "The Utopian Propensity," in Utopian Thought in the Western World , Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 1-29.

[ In the following excerpt from their introduction to Utopian Thought in the Western World, the critics discuss several aspects of Utopian literature, including: Utopian literary forms, critical approaches to interpretation of Utopian literature, the influence of New World exploration and scientific discovery on Utopian thought, the cultural traditions that have influenced the western conception of utopia, and the characteristics of the Utopian writer. ]

Boesky on Utopias of the seventeenth century:

In the 1640s and 1650s, while Milton was earning a name for himself through the achievements of his "left hand," a prodigious number of Utopias were being written and published in England. There were as many as two hundred sects in England in the middle of the century, and almost every sect had its utopia….

English utopias written during the 1640s and 1650s reflect [a] new aesthetic of discipline and regulation while introducing a new kind of army—a civilian corps of trained and zealous workers, dedicated to the common goal of productivity. In Gabriel Plattes's A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria … (1641), a Traveler presents "strange newes, and much knowledge" of the commonwealth of Macaria, governed by exacting "principall Lawes," a commonwealth in which self-regulation is projected onto the "treasure house" of the land. Macaria's citizens, trained in its central College of Experience, are presented as a regiment of workers, uniform in their zeal to conquer "want" by mining and plumbing the land.

Amy Boesky, "Milton's Heaven and Utopia, " in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Winter, 1996.

Anthropologists tell us that blessed isles and paradises are part of the dreamworld of savages everywhere. The dogged wanderings of the Guarani tribe in search of a "Land-without-Evil" have been tracked over the length and breadth of Brazil, and the contemporary cargocults of Asia and Africa have been investigated for their marvelous syncretism of Christian and native paradises. Neither pictorial nor discursive philosophico-religious utopias are exclusive to the Western world. Taoism, Theravada Buddhism, and medieval Muslim philosophy are impregnated with utopian elements. There are treatises on ideal states and stories about imaginary havens of delight among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, and the Arabs, but the profusion of Western Utopias has not been equaled in any other culture. Perhaps the Chinese have been too worldly and practical, the Hindus too transcendental to recognize a tension between the Two Kingdoms and to resolve it in that myth of a heaven on earth which lies at the heart of Utopian fantasy.

In the Beginning Was the Word

For some time before the publication in 1516 of the De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia Libellus Vere Aureus , Thomas More and his friend Erasmus had been referring to it simply as the "Nusquama," from a good Latin adverb meaning "nowhere." But then the spirit of neologism possessed the future saint. He combined the Greek ou , used to express a general negative and transliterated into the Latin u , with the Greek topos , place or region, to build Utopia. In the playful printed matter prefixed tothe body of the book the poet laureate of the island, in a brief self-congratulatory poem written in the Utopian tongue, claimed that his country deserved to be called "Eutopia" with an eu , which in Greek connoted a broad spectrum of positive attributes from good through ideal, prosperous, and perfect. Guillaume Budé, the great French humanist and a well-wisher of More's, added to the confusion by remarking in his complimentary Latin letter to the author that he had heard the place called "Udepotia," or "Neverland," from the Greek for "never." Finally, Germain de Brie, otherwise known as Brixius, author of the sarcastic Antimorus , heaped scorn on both the Greek of More's title and the many new words crowded into his Latin text. Through the centuries Utopias have preserved the complexity of the original nomenclature.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, descriptive works that imitated the Utopia were called Utopias, with a minuscule, and they adhered more or less to traditional literary devices that More himself had received from Lucian of Samosata, who in turn had inherited them from Hellenistic novels, many of them no longer extant. The invention of printing made readily available translations of tales of this character from one European language into another, and they came to constitute an ever-expanding corpus, in which stock formulas and concepts can be traced historically and their modifications charted. The principal elements are a shipwreck or chance landing on the shores of what turns out to be an ideal commonwealth, a return to Europe, and a report on what has been remarked. If arranged in chronological order these works, considered "proper Utopias" by bibliographers, form a sequence in which the imitation of predecessors is patent.

How to classify the Morean Utopia as a form of rhetoric and a way to knowledge was taken up as early as 1595 in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie. There he coupled Utopia with poetry and ranked them both above philosophy and history as more persuasive in leading men to virtue than a weighty philosophical argument: "But even in the most excellent determination of goodnesse, what Philosophers counsaile can so readely direct a Prince, as the feined Cirus in Xenophon , or a vertuous man in all fortunes as Aeneas in Virgill, or a whole Common-wealt, as the Way of Sir Thomas Moores Eutopia?" Courtier of Elizabeth and loyal member of the Church of England, Sidney discreetly avoided what might have been interpreted as unqualified commitment to the political ideal of a Papist executed for treason; but his praise of the genre was unaffected. "I say the Way, because where Sir Thomas Moore erred, it was the fault of the man and not of the Poet: for that Way of patterning a Common-wealth, was most absolute though hee perchaunce hath not so absolutely performed it." Sidney's pithy definition of poetry, "a speaking Picture , with this end to teach and delight," was applied equally to Utopia. The term utopia speedily made its way into other European languages. By the early seventeenth century it was not uncommon for great writers—Cervantes, Shakespeare—to interpolate a Utopian episode or allude to Utopian conceits by name. Francis Bacon made a point of mocking Utopias and labeling the New Atlantis a fable, but contemporary compendia-makers forced him into the Utopian company of More and Campanella.

Before the sixteenth century was out, the adjectival form "utopian" was born, and when it was not a merely derogatory epithet, connoting a wild fancy or a chimerical notion, it could refer to an ideal psychological condition or to an idealizing capacity. The use of the word by John Donne, a descendant of More's, may be its subtlest early extension to imply a general emotional attitude. In a verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton, who had spent many years in the courts of Venice and Florence, the poet wrote:

I thinke if men, which in these places live Durst looke for themselves, and themselves retrive, They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then Utopian youth, growne old Italian.

By the seventeenth century Utopia was no longer restricted to a speaking picture, a dramatic narrative portrayal of a way of life that is so essentially good and fulfills so many profound longings that it wins immediate, almost instinctive, approbation. It could embrace as well the underlying principles of an optimum society expounded and argued either by the author directly or by several interlocutors. Utopia also came to denote general programs and platforms for ideal societies, codes, and constitutions that dispensed with the fictional apparatus altogether. When the discursive, argumentative utopia assumed a place alongside the speaking picture, the line between a Utopian system and political and social theory often became shadowy. In A Voice in Rhama (1647) Peter Chamberlen, an English royal physician and a Fifth Monarchy man—not so improbable a combination as might be imagined—wrote of his hope that the world would return to its "first simplicity" or to a "Christian Utopia." John Milton, in his Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), and his friend Samuel Hartlib, who had been appointed an official "Projector" by Parliament, both used Utopia in the sense of a model for an ideal commonwealth. In the Pansophic Utopia of Campanella, Andreae, Comenius, and Leibniz, the boundaries of an ideal Christian republic were enlarged to encompass the whole world. While religious commentaries on what heavenly paradise would be like kept up a constant flow of images as they had for two thousand years, the conception of a millennium as a real society on earth covering a fixed period of time gave rise to speculations about what events would occur in that blessed epoch, what government would be instituted, and what social relationships would prevail. Whenever the vaguely oracular mode of prophecy was set aside in the seventeenth century, the millenarian Utopia could respond to concrete, matter-of-fact questions. Fifth Monarchy men of England even committed themselves to a specific tariff policy for their millennium.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, in a growingly de-Christianized Europe, even while the old isolated island and valley Utopias and a newer type of awakened-dreamer Utopia continued to be regurgitated, there came into greater prominence the branch of Utopian thought that spurned any fictional backdrop, broke with the limitations of specific place, and addressed itself directly to the reformation of the entire species. The Frenchmen Morelly, Dom Deschamps, Restif de la Bretonne, and Condorcet wrote what in effect were constitutions for a new secular, global society, and conceived of themselves as universal lawgivers, as would the utopian socialists of the post-Revolutionary era. By the early nineteenth century innovative utopian thought had all but lost its enclosed space. The novels portraying encapsulated and protected pictorial Utopias, while they have continued to be sold in millions of copies into our own time, were often in content residual and derivative, dependent upon revolutionary Utopian theory that others had propounded. A Utopian genius like Charles Fourier might still initiate his project with the description of a single phalanstery, and on occasion one detects the rudiments of a story among his papers, but his phalanstery was conceived as a cell in an international movement that he hoped would soon spread throughout the globe, with similar communities joined in a vast federation.

In these rationalist, systematic utopias whose province was the whole world, the means of reaching utopia was transformed from an adventure story or a rite de passage to Elysium into a question of political action: How do you change a present misery into a future happiness in this world? The method of reaching utopia and the speed of travel, usually peripheral in the novelistic form, were now central, and the prickly issues of revolution, evolution, the uses of violence, the mechanics of the propagation of a new faith, determinism and free will, the imperatives of blind historical destiny, and the requirements of human freedom became intrinsic to Utopian thought. In the early Utopia the mode of access did not alter the nature of the perfect society. In the discursive universal Utopia, though the idea was rarely spelled out, the way of attaining the ideal city affected the nature of the city itself. The vision of perfection was henceforward either disfigured or enhanced by the path to Utopia. When Utopia became attached to global philosophies of history, practitioners of that form of knowledge were turned into unwitting Utopians or anti-utopians as they prognosticated the ineluctable end toward which mankind was moving.

Utopia thus became laden with meanings as it moved through time: a literary genre, a constitution for a perfectly restructured polity, a state of mind, the religious or scientific foundations of a universal republic. Many French eighteenth-century works called by their authors rêves, codes, robinsonades, voyages imaginaires were patently Utopias in the conventional sense. Utopia could always be used either positively or pejoratively. In philosophe circles, Grimm and Meister's literary newsletter applied the disdainful epithet espèce d'utopie to the flood of stories that, with constantly changing content, imitated Morean devices. In the positivist tradition of the nineteenth century Littré's French dictionary defined utopie as chimère , noted its early appearance in Rabelais's Pantagruel , and seized the opportunity to deliver a brief homily on the deceptions of Utopian promises. Over the years a Utopian vocabulary entered the French language— utopie, utopique, utopiste, utopiens —though not all terms were welcomed into the Academy. In English a Utopian became a person who inhabits a utopia or one who would like to be in a Utopia or has a Utopian cast of temperament. Some men were utopographers, a seventeenth-century word for the writers or inventors of Utopias. The researcher into the Utopian propensity of mankind, though he is one of a long line going back to Aristotle, has no particular name, and must rest content with the plain appellation historian, though his subject has been dubbed utopology by a recent innovator.

Two further neologisms have proved to be of use to us in designating different aspects of the subject, and we have accepted them without slighting the time-sanctioned coverall of Utopia. The term uchronia, no time, was invented in the late nineteenth century by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to characterize a fictitious history of the past written on the supposition that a critical turning point had had a different outcome. There has beena sizable literature of such exercises since the end of the eighteenth century, none of it noteworthy. We took the label uchronia, rashly altered its spelling to euchronia, good time, and applied it to a major departure in Western Utopia and Utopian thought that occurred when good place, good state of consciousness, and good constitution were all translated to a good future time. The Germans have coined a word for the speaking-picture euchronia, the Zukunftsroman. The other neologism, eupsychia, was introduced by the psychologist Abraham Maslow to signify an ideal state of consciousness; though the idea had already been incorporated into Utopia in the sixteenth century, we have had occasion to borrow its new name.

This abbreviated overview of historical semantics with its limited terminological armature may help to guide us through a broad and loose-jointed universe of Utopian discourse.

The Shadowy Boundaries of Utopia

[If] the land of Utopia were thrown open to every fantasy of an individual ideal situation the realm would be boundless. The personal daydream with its idiosyncratic fixations has to be excluded. The ideal condition should have some measure of generality, if not universality, or it becomes merely a narcissistic yearning. There are Utopias so private that they border on schizophrenia. The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, has much in common with the delusions of Dr. Schreber analyzed by Sigmund Freud in a famous paper. Uncounted Utopian worlds of this stripe, many of them highly systematized, are being conjured up every day, in and out of hospitals, though few of them are ever set in print. (The title of Giulio Clemente Scotti's Lucii Cornelii Europaei Monarchia Solipsorum ad Leonem Allatium [1645] suggests a solipsistic Utopia, but the work turns out to be a Utopian parody of the Jesuit order.) We have preferred to steer clear of solipsistic manifestations and continently restrict ourselves to those Utopias that have won a measure of public acceptance and become at least folie à deux, the author and the printer. When, however, a solipsistic utopia is projected into a social utopia, it falls within the permissible sphere, especially if the creator of the psychic monde idéal happens to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It would require a bit of stretching to incorporate Diogenes the Cynic's concept of autarchy into Utopia, though a fragment on an ideal primitive condition is imputed to him, and his notion of shamelessness has found a counterpart in Reformation andpresent-day eupsychias.

Nor should every political and economic prognostication be considered Utopian. In mid-eighteenth-century England, a Tory gentleman outlined the future history of European wars in the twentieth century under the reign of a George VI [in The Reign of George VI]. He predicted Russia's penetration deep into Europe, the occupation of Scandinavia, and the defeat of France by England. Nothing in the life of the British Isles is portrayed as remarkably different from what it was under George III, except that the empire is administered from a Versailles-like capital called Stanley. The changes envisaged are not radical enough—they do not strike at the roots of existence—to be included in the Utopian orbit. They are nothing but minor, false prophecy. A perennial question arises as to how to distinguish a program of reform or a five-year plan from a Utopia. The reply that the difference lies in the extent of the proposed transformation begs the question, because one man's trivial revision is another man's upheaval. Utopia should probably exclude mere futurist projections of existing series, short-term predictions still fettered to the present. Final judgment in these instances has to be subjective, though perhaps some historical testimony or contemporary consensus can be invoked.

The facile extrapolations of a scientistic futurology that looks only to tomorrow, or to the year 2000, and engages in immediate problem-solving are of a different order from the leap into a new state of being in which contemporary values in at least one area—the critical one for the Utopian—are totally transformed or turned upside down. In the Utopia of Thomas More, who was anguished over greed and corruption in the Christian polity, such a transvaluation was symbolized in the conversion of gold specie into chamber pots and jewels into children's baubles, and was embodied in conceptions of work, pleasure, and property. And in the seventeenth century, when the new science, which had earlier been obliged to apologize for its existence, was glorified as the foundation stone of a world Christian society in Pansophic visions from Bacon through Leibniz, a real world in which science had either been feared or despised was metamorphosed by Utopia. Condorcet's flights of imagination in his commentary on the New Atlantis and the recent projections of those who expect a self-alteration of species man in an extraterrestrial environment may have been regarded by these scientist-utopians as reasonable predictions. Many of their foretellings have in fact come true, and the developments they envisaged could be read as possible, if daring, extensions of contemporary knowledge. But their revolutionary character has produced the pattern for a human condition that is totally new by any standard.

We have deliberately separated Utopian theory and invention from attempts to put them into practice. Studying the actual experience of those who sought to implement Utopias would bring us too dangerously close to reality. There have been thinkers who, having given birth to an idea, proceeded to act it out, men who founded movements and organized schools, who formed conspiracies and hatched cabals, who led bands of followers to strange places. Some, like Thomas Müntzer and Tommaso Campanella and Gracchus Babeuf, paid dearly for their ventures; others, like Fourier, Owen, Comte, and Marx, ended up in constant bickering with their disciples. The fortunate ones, like Henri Saint-Simon, initiated their followers into the system and then had the good judgment to die. But usually there has been a functional division of labor between writers of Utopias and the activist Utopians who have established Utopian communities or launched revolutions for the sake of seeing the glory of Utopia with their own eyes. When we analyze popular millenarian or revolutionary movements, it is the content of the dreams, manifest or hidden, not the strategies for their realization, that primarily engages us. Were a new science to be founded—and we have no such pretension—it would be valid to distinguish between theoretical utopistics and applied utopistics. Utopian practice, if indeed it is not a contradiction in terms, has sometimes affected later theorists; but on the whole the ardor of a Utopian innovator in the moment of creation is overwhelming and is not dampened by his knowledge of previous defeats.

Popular hope literature has not been excluded from this study on principle, or without awareness that a police or other judicial record, or a hospital casebook, or a prize essay contest in a provincial French academy, might reveal an unnoticed Utopian thinker operating in his own world whose dreams could be more representative of large segments of the population than a formally printed Utopia. The lines had to be drawn somewhere, and the task of capturing the Utopian consciousness of great masses of people has been left to others, some of whom have already begun their explorations. A distinction has to be made between a collective Utopia that exists in a passive state among a large segment of the population and a Utopia expressly written for the purpose of instructing men and persuading them to some action. Doubtless the unwritten popular Utopia of a country is constantly undergoing change, but access to the transformations would involve the development of new strategies that will have to await other historians. The complete speaking-picture or finished discursive Utopia is usually the product of deliberate educative intent, and it is explicit and organized in its presentation. This may be both a virtue and a limitation.

The problem of the relations between the book utopia and other more popular manifestations of similar ideas has not been wholly resolved. There are times when both have been swept up by a wave and carried away in the sea of a common utopia. The Utopia of the people has been mediated by members of the literate classes in Attic comedy, in Midrashic literature, in trial records of the Inquisition and interrogations of millenarians, in police spy reports, in court trials following riots and uprisings. The mutual interpenetration of popular Utopian elements and literary documents appears obvious. If a group or a class is isolated, it will evolve a utopia unique to itself; its archaeological reconstruction is another matter. But there is reason to be leery of the eighteenth-century Bibliothèque bleue , written for, but not by, "the people," as a mirror of the Utopian espérance of the masses. Folktale and folksong may yield a more authenic picture, though the decipherment of their universal images demands skills beyond those of the professional historian and their message may be ahistorical.

This history is not in search of the Utopian ideas most widely diffused in the population of the West at particular moments, one living head being counted as the repository of one Utopian idea. Kant's reading of Rousseau's primitivist Utopia is not equivalent to everyman's. Since for most ages the popular Utopia is largely inaccessible, or the materials still remain to be assembled, the present work tends to dwell on the Utopian thought of the literate classes in Western society. Through time they have changed in character and in numbers and so has the representativeness of their Utopias. But the study of Utopian thought in books composed by philosophers and litterateurs does not limit the significance of the enterprise to upper-class culture. Often the Utopias of the "educated classes" have had a way of seeping into popular action programs and general social movements, so that in considering today's upper-class Utopia we may be witnessing a preview of tomorrow's mass demands. (This is not always so; many major Utopian conceptions remain literary.) Though the Utopia is inspired by one man's experience of his society, he may well become the voice of whole silent segments of the population. He creates consciousness, as the chapbooks say. Virtually every one of the major slogans that expressed the hopes of French and English working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century was plucked from the gardens of the printed works of Utopian writers.

The Critical Study of Utopia

Like the Utopias themselves, the analytic and historical study of Utopia has had precedents going all the way back to the Greeks. That proposals for "ideal states" demanded objective critical examination was first argued by Aristotle in Book II of the Politics , where he entered the lists against forms "designed by theorists" and took on seriatim Plato, Phaleas of Chalcedon, and Hippodamus of Miletus. If we forgo for the present a laborious tracing of Aristotle's successors and restrict ourselves to relatively modern times, the earliest known academic treatment of Utopian thought is probably a stillborn Latin dissertation published in 1704 by the hapless Henricus ab Ahlefeld, whose fame has been obscured by cataloguers' attributing his work to Georg Pasch, the professor who approved the thesis. But it was not until Louis Reybaud's Etudes sur les réformateurs ou socialistes modernes (1840) that the utopies sociales , which he branded subversive, really received detailed consideration as a type. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Rhine, Robert von Mohl drew up a list of some twenty-five Utopias from Plato down, baptized them Staatsromane , and bravely proposed to incorporate them into political science. Utopia became a subject of contention in world revolutionary movements when Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Engels in the Anti-Dühring conceived of their doctrine dialectically as at once an outgrowth of earlier Utopian thought and its contradiction, and condemned Utopias as outdated and historically superseded fantasies, though anyone ploughing through the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe is immediately aware of a constant preoccupation with Utopians of the past.

Although utopianism attracted a few champions in the 1920s and 1930s, to many observers it was a corpse. The nails were hammered into the coffin with resounding blows struck by Marxists at one end and Fascist theorists at the other. The latter group, adapting the language of Georges Sorel, grandiloquently proclaimed the superiority of their own creative myths as "dynamic realities," spontaneous utterances of authentic desires, over the Utopias, which they dismissed as hollow rationalist constructs. For a whole galaxy of other twentieth-century thinkers Utopia was a Schimpfwort: Ortega y Gasset labeled it outrightly "the fallacious"; Karl Popper, no less contemptuous, was more verbose in denigrating Utopian engineering; and for Arnold Toynbee Utopia was a symptom of the descending stage of the civilization cycle.

But in a renewal of critical and historical study, a number of twentieth-century writers—particularly in the last three decades—have been considering the Utopian propensity of man in a different spirit, making strenuous efforts to grasp its inner meaning as an aspect of human nature instead of sitting in pontifical judgment and either approving or condemning. Along with university seminars on Utopian thought and international conferences among the learned in various parts of the world, an accumulation of theoretical works bears witness to the revival of interest in utopianism. Karl Mannheim's redefinition in his own private language of the idea of Utopia and his typologizing of the whole body of political and social thought in Ideologie und Utopie (1929), though it hardly won universal acceptance among sociologists and political scientists, had been hailed in its day as the outline of a discipline that promised a new and more profound understanding of social life. Shortly after World War II, two French thinkers, both of whom died prematurely, devoted themselves to a fresh consideration of the uses of Utopia. Raymond Ruyer's L'Utopie et les utopies (1950) delineated the "utopian mentality" in psychological terms and identified le mode utopique as "a mental exercise on lateral possibilities." Georges Duveau's plan for a full-scale sociology of utopia was left incomplete, but his posthumously assembled essays [Sociologie de l'utopie et aûtres "essais "] constitute a serious effort at a rehabilitation of what he called the "realistic" eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Utopias as guides for the world of tomorrow, in preference to Hegelian-Marxist historical determinism. In an entirely different intellectual atmosphere the writings of Martin Buber on Utopian socialism were meant to serve a similar purpose in the reconstruction of modern society.

Even more ambitious undertakings on the conceptual level were the works of Ernst Bloch, Frederik Lodewijk Polak, and Roger Mucchielli. Bloch, a Weimar philosopher who migrated to the United States, moved to East Germany after World War II and to West Germany in 1967, had first propounded his ideas back in 1918 in Geist der Utopie , a work aimed at infusing positive meaning into the idea of Utopia. At his death in 1977 he was the most famous contemporary commentator on the Utopian propensity of Western man. The full development of his concepts of the Noch-Nicht-Seins and of the Utopia of the concrete, with their amalgam of Marxism and expressionist flights of fancy, did not come until the 1940s and 1950s in the writing and publication of his three-volume chef d'oeuvre, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Two volumes first appeared in East Germany, the third in West Germany. The wanderings of thisperennial heretic have inevitably left their traces in the changing ideational nuances of his works over six decades. In The Image of the Future (1955) Polak, who enjoyed the patronage of the Council of Europe, warned of grave dangers to Western culture should its "unique succession of powerful images of the future" become exhausted and not be replenished. Roger Mucchielli's Le Mythe de la cité idéale (1961) saw Utopia as an enduring manifestation of the human spirit. We need not accept Mucchielli's rather complex typology of ideal cities, or his turgid definition of Utopia as "a myth, awakened by a personal revolt against the human condition in general in the shape of existing circumstances, which, meeting the obstacle of impotence, evokes in the imagination an other or a nowhere, where all obstacles are removed." But his pointed critique of Ruyer's psychological reductionism that posits a single Utopian mentality is persuasive.

In 1967, Jean Servier presented a brief synoptic view of the history of Utopias in the West that nourished the dominant sociological and psychological interpretations with an adventurous psychoanalytic reading of some of the symbols in Utopian literature. Melvin Lasky's Utopia and Revolution (1976) is the most ambitious recent attempt to relate theoretical and applied utopistics. Pierre Versins's Encyclopédie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction (1972), a thousand pages of summaries of utopian stories and projects arranged in alphabetical order, though amateurish in its execution, is testimony that concern with Utopias of the past has moved from the anthological stage to the higher stage of the compendious lexicon. In 1978 Michael Winter published the first volume of a Compendium Utopiarum that promises to assemble as complete and meticulous a bibliography of "proper" Utopias as the present state of the art allows. Critical literature on the nature of utopia in books and journals has now reached avalanche proportions, perhaps testimony that the analytic mode has submerged, at least for the time being, the creative Utopian impulse. The concentrations is heavily German and Italian, and appears to be intimately related to attempts at a redefinition or revision of Marx. The theologizing of Marx and the multiplication of deviations only highlight his continued centrality in Utopian thought and the poverty of contemporary Marxist philosophy.

Our Way to the Utopian Constellations

The historical longevity of certain mythic themes in Utopia that evoke associations remote and deeply rooted in Western consciousness can help us to understand the fascination Utopias have exerted over the minds of men. Anyone born into a culture is likely to imbibe a set of Utopian fantasies even as he internalizes certain prohibitions at an early age. We do not know whether these Utopian elements are part of a collective unconscious. The problem of conformities in the symbols of Utopia is not unlike that of dream symbols. They may be ahistorical and acultural, though always found in a specific context, social and psychological. But even as we probe in this study for the continuities in Western Utopian thought, we are acutely aware of the temporal and geographic fractures and demarcations that separate one Utopian constellation from another.

Particularly rich Utopian moments have been attached to political revolutions and the dictatorships that follow in their wake, such as the English Civil War or the Age of the French Revolution—periods, incidentally, in which de facto restrictions on printing disappear for a while and allow a host of new conceptions to surface. At such times all things seem possible, and the Utopian appears no madder than other men. Religious schisms and intellectual revolutions like the emergence of the new science in the seventeenth century, or the dramatic introduction of new modes of production in the nineteenth, or the exploration of new space in the Americas, in the South Seas, or beyond the bounds of this sphere, have all sparked novel Utopian ideas and led to the formation of startling new Utopian constellations.

Despite the thesis in Victor Dupont's grand compendium on Utopia and Utopian thought in English literature—that there is a special affinity between the English national temperament and Utopia [ L'Utopie et le roman utopique dans la littérature anglaise] —the Utopian propensity is common to the Western world. The Italian architectural Utopias of the Renaissance and the French social Utopias of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were among the heights of Utopian expression, and the Pansophic vision of the seventeenth century had a deep Germanic and Lutheran coloration. In a particular epoch the spirit of Utopia may have been more active in one national culture than in others or a Utopian form may have flourished in only one land; but Utopia in general has not been geographically exclusive. The relative unity of Western culture has guaranteed the rapid diffusion of Utopian ideas irrespective of the countries in which they originated. We consider Russian and American Utopian thought before the late nineteenth century an overflow of European types—Prince M. M. Shcherbatov's Journey to the Land of the Ophirs (1796) and New England millenarian sermons are derivative. A long tradition identifies the colonies and the United States with utopia, but, curiously, those who were actually fashioning that utopia were dreaming about it in European terms. The writings of the Puritans with all their millenarian imagery and the later Utopian proclamations of the victorious colonial insurgents are extensions of European idea systems. The seven books of Cotton Mather's Magnolia Christi Americana: or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from its first planting in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord, 1698 , constitute a mammoth, selfadulatory Utopia whose spiritual roots are in England, where it was first published in 1702. The Winthrops and the Mathers were putting Utopia into practice, building a Christian utopia and a New Jerusalem in their commonwealth with imported thoughts and symbols, even as in the nineteenth century New England Transcendentalists would experiment with Fourierist ideas in Brook Farm. The absence of a sustained Utopian tradition in Spain is peculiar, though free-floating Utopian affect may have somehow attached itself to the figure of Don Quixote. The manuscript of an Enlightenment Utopia, Descripción de la Sinapia, peninsula en la terra austral , has recently been published, but it hardly modifies the generalization that Spain was relatively untouched by the Utopian main current until the penetration of Marxist and anarchist thought. Danes, Swiss, Poles, Czechs, and members of other European nations have written Utopias, though the overwhelming number of Western utopias—whatever their national origin—were first printed in Latin, English, French, Italian, or German.

Not all Utopias can without straining be squeezed within the chronological benchmarks and attached to the ideational clusters that we shall outline, but one can seek out those constellations of Utopias and Utopian thought in each epoch that have embodied significant innovations and new content. Although virtually all Utopias deal with major aspects of living, such as work, government, love and sexuality, knowledge, religion, beauty, the tone and quality of life, dying, each of these subjects has at one or another time preempted a central position in Utopian consciousness and has inspired new forms. Works that spew forth worn-out themes, even when numerically weighty, have been neglected or underplayed here in favor of new departures. Nobody can really copy straight even when that is the intention, and hence there are minor intrusions of novelty in the most hackneyed Utopian thought; these offshoots, however, are to be distinguished from authentic innovations, when the rather repetitive series is broken by a genius who establishes a new style. Though in most Utopian thinkers the past is present, there are rare moments of disjuncture too acute to allow for the Utopian past as a prime catalytic agent in a new creation. We have usually hurried over the pabulum of an age, the chewed cud of previous epochs, and looked for fresh invention.

The underlying pattern of this book involves identifying the major historical constellations of Utopian thought in the Western world. Our task has been to explore the main lines of transmission, without enslavement to a chain of influences, and at the same time to mark and highlight innovations, fractures, and discontinuities, the formation of new clusters, without accepting every selfproclaimed discoverer in Utopia at his word.

Mapping the Constellations

The fixing of a point of departure confronted us with our first problem. One possibility entailed going all the way back to the paradisaical fantasies of the Near East in the third millennium before Christ, another to Plato's presentation of both the mythos and the logos of an ideal city. But the unique character of Utopia in the West was in our judgment best brought out by initiating the history in medias res, so to speak, with its baptism in the Age of the Renaissance. Utopia is a hybrid plant, born of the crossing of a paradisaical, other-worldly belief of Judeo-Christian religion with the Hellenic myth of an ideal city on earth. The naming took place in an enclave of sixteenth-century scholars excited about the prospect of a Hellenized Christianity. While we may loosely refer to ancient and medieval works with some Utopian content as Utopias, the Western Utopia is for us a creation of the world of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Since that period, the history of Utopia has been reasonably continuous. Works and parts of works that entered Utopian consciousness from the ancient Judeo-Christian, Hellenic, and medieval worlds have been considered not in themselves but as the vital prehistory or underthought of modern Utopia, that strange absorption in a heaven on earth, the desire for both worlds. In this context we have read the ancient works, in the first instance, not as they might be reconstituted in their native habitat by present-day scholars, but as they appeared to Renaissance Europeans who laid the foundations of the Christian utopia. After tracing the Judeo-Christian and Hellenic strands in the underthought of utopia, we advance directly to our first historical constellation, marking the principal figures in the age of birth and naming.

The period of the latter part of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries recommended itself as a starting point because of the confluence of diverse intellectual and social forces whose relation to the creation of modern utopia was provocative, if not causal: the translation of Plato's Republic in the fifteenth century, to the accompaniment of a tumultuous debate on Italian soil among Byzantine émigrés over the admissibility of Plato's communist politics into Christian society; the printing within a century or so of a large part of the Greek and Latin corpus, which made available to the learned a thousand years of experience with the ancient rationalist problem of what an ideal condition in this world would be like; the overflow into print and into organized social movements of a stream of paradisaical, apocalyptic, and millenarian visions that had had a continuous existence since the Christian era and some roots going further back to the early cultures of the Near East; the discoveries of lands to the West, throwing open the windows of the Utopian imagination to novel social and religious arrangements, as Alexander's push eastward had given rise to Hellenistic exotic novels.

A Renaissance Utopian did not have to seek out esoterica buried in the Greek and Latin corpus. If he had access to Aristotle's Politics , Plato's Republic and Laws , and Cicero's Offices , what Aristotle called the study of the form of political association that was "the ideal for those who can count upon the material conditions of their life being, as nearly as possible, just what they would themselves wish" could be nourished with the fundamental texts inherited from antiquity that were necessary for a discursive utopia. The speaking-picture utopia had a storehouse of images in Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, in Xenophon's historical romance, the Cyropaedia , in excerpts from Hellenistic novels incorporated as geography in Diodorus Siculus' Library of History , and in Plutarch's lives of Solon and Lycurgus. Aristophanes and Lucian provided materials in a lighter vein, but when they were read in a humorless, literal fashion the ideal cities and government projects they mocked could inspire earnest Utopian disquisitions. Reports from explorers to the New World fitted in neatly with classical sources and medieval accounts like Sir John Mandeville's of exotic peoples living in a state of happiness. Paradisaical, apocalyptic, and millenarian fantasies had been kept alive throughout the Middle Ages in scores of heretical and some orthodox movements of reformation. The publication of the works of Joachim of Fiore spread more widely ideas about a third status on earth, the reign of the Holy Ghost, an age of peace and love. And medieval fabliaux preserved the delights of a cokaygne utopia, sustained by a collective gastronomic unconscious whose manifest images had surfaced in Attic comedy, the Midrash, and the Church Fathers.

The two ancient beliefs that molded and nurtured utopia—the Judeo-Christian faith in a paradise with the world and destined to endure beyond it, and the Hellenic myth of an ideal, beautiful city built by men for men without the assistance and often in defiance of the gods—were deeply embedded in the consciousness of Europeans. The Utopia born in the Renaissance was of course designed for a society whose cities, jewels in a rural landscape, were assuming new dimensions to which both the Eastern paradise and the community of the small Greek city-state in pursuit of perfection were profoundly alien. There were also inherent contradictions between the two myths, which the Christian utopia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attempted to gloss over. Moreover, neither the paradisaical nor the Hellenic myth was a monolith; the legacies transmitted were rich and varied, full of contrarieties. But though the powerful arguments of the Greek philosophers and the authority of the philosophical poets were in many respects profoundly different from the prophetic spirit of Judaic and Christian enthusiasm, there were times when they fortified each other. The Greek golden age and biblical paradise were recognized to have striking similarities, readily explained by the Church Fathers and Renaissance commentators as the classical poets' piracy from Moses. On rare occasions the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian worlds shared a utopianized historical reign, like that of Cyrus, though the divergent perceptions of Xenophon and Isaiah are illustrative of the different tempers of their two societies, briefly joined in common celebration. But even when the Hellenic and the Judeo-Christian elements were uncongenial to each other, they coexisted in Utopia, a synthesis often on the verge of falling apart.

The conception of a heaven on earth that underlies Western Utopian thought presupposes an idea of perfection in another sphere and at the same time a measure of confidence in human capacity to fashion on earth what is recognized as a transient mortal state into a simulacrum of the transcendental. Judeo-Christianity and Hellenic culture provided Europe with two distinct versions of an otherworldly state which could be conjoined. But the relation of the Utopian to the heavenly always remains problematic. Utopia may be conceived as a prologue or a foretaste of the absolute perfection still to be experienced; it then resembles the Days of the Messiah or the Reign of Christ on earth of traditional Judaism and Christianity, with the vital addition of human volition as an ingredient in the attainment of that wished-for state. Or the utopia, though originally implanted in a belief in the reality of a transcendental state, can break away from its source and attempt to survive wholly on its own creative self-assurance. Whether the persistence of the heavenly vision in a secularized world, if only in some disguised shape, is a necessary condition for the duration of utopia is one of the unresolved questions of Western culture. At that moment in time when utopia first came into existence faith in a Christian heavenly paradise was still unshaken and the assertion of human talent to invent, discover, and devise was as if reborn.

The Utopian constellations of the period from the mid-fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, still united by their total commitment to Christianity, have a common driving purpose: the radical transformation of the nature and domain of the Christian world. The main line of this Utopia runs roughly from Thomas More and Thomas Müntzer to the death of Leibniz. In Italy one has to reach back to Alberti and Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio Martini in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance rediscovery of the symbolic radial form of the ideal city, thereby spoiling the perfect symmetry of a simultaneous beginning everywhere in Europe but gaining the advantage of initiating the modern Utopian world with the printed recovery of the corpus of classical antiquity.

The Utopia that was born and bred in the Christian society of Europe has been divided into two separate constellations, one covering the period of its birth, the other its seventeenth-century flowering and final demise. The chronological beginning of the first constellation could conceivably have been pushed back to the Middle Ages. The rule of the Benedictines and subsequent regulations for the government of monastic institutions doubtless left prototypes for an ideal Christian existence on earth, and the passion for ordering the minutiae of every aspect of existence made its imprint upon later Utopias, which often are reminiscent of monastic establishments. Ramón Lull's Blanquerna , a didactic romance written in Catalan between 1283 and 1285, and Pierre Dubois's De recuperatione Terre Sancte (ca. 1305-1307) might be considered embryonic Christian Utopias, but they appear to have left no significant traces in Western Utopian literature before the seventeenth century. The philosophical writings of Lull then joined the main current of Utopian thought and and were assimilated by the Pansophisits. Campanella and Leibniz were aware of Lull's ideas when three centuries after his death they again tried to interest princes and popes in projects for Christian unity and militant propagation of the faith among the heathen in order to establish one heavenly community on earth, but both Lull and Dubois have to be regarded as precursors rather than initiators of a new mode.

Similarly, the second constellation of the Christian Utopia could have been prolonged to include residual manifestations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examples of a surviving Christian Utopian force in a de-Christianized Europe: the ideas behind the communal organization imposed upon the Paraguayan Indians by the Jesuits, the various forms of the Herrnhut communities founded by Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the intermittent recrudescence of millenarian conceptions among groups like the Shakers, the Catholic traditionalist political theory of Joseph de Maistre and Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald, the mystical visions of Pierre-Simon Ballanche, and even the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy. But in our judgment the principal Utopian concerns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were secular, and Christian Utopia was a feeble remnant. It is primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when nascent secular Utopian and Christian other-worldly strains of thought inter-penetrate, that the tension of the Christian Utopia is at its highest. It does not matter that major Utopias, such as More's little book, Campanella's City of the Sun , and Vairasse's History of the Sevarambians , portray pre-Christian or non-Christian societies; all are confronting the problems of Christianity in a world that is approaching the crisis of secularism. Utopian thought is a fair barometer of this spiritual contest.

Under the rubric of the Birth of Utopia we have treated three different geographic and temporal units. The Christian humanist Utopia of More has been read in the spirit of northern humanism common to Erasmus and Rabelais, though here can also be discovered conceptions of work and honest pleasures and equality that have an enduring resonance and a complicated fortuna as More goes through scores of translations. The Italian Renaissance utopia of the città felice (from the title of Patrizi of Cherso's book), embodied both in words and in architectural drawings, is one of the rare moments when the idea of beauty permeates Utopia and creates an aristocratic Christian fantasy that is conscious of two levels of social existence, symbolized perhaps by the two-layered city of Leonardo's sketches. As a celebration of radial form, the architectural Utopia responds to a variety of military, symbolic, and hygienic needs that live together in close disharmony. Finally, in the Germanic world of the early sixteenth century the Utopia of the common man, the Gemeinermann , rises out of the mystical and political sermons and the legend of Thomas Müntzer and the radical Anabaptists.

Morton on the national characteristics that have influenced the English Utopian tradition:

[A] reason for the richness of the English Utopia is the simple one that England is an island. For it is always easier to imagine anything in proportion as it resembles what we are or know, and it is as an island that we always think of Utopia. The fact that an island is selfcontained, finite, and may be remote, gives it just the qualities we require to set our imagination to work. True we shall find Utopias underground, under the sea, surrounded by mountains in the heart of Africa or Asia, even on another planet or perhaps remote in time rather than space, nevertheless the vast majority of Utopias are still to be found on islands….

In the beginning Utopia is an image of desire. Later it grows more complex and various, and may become an elaborate means of expressing social criticism and satire, but it will always be based on something that somebody actually wants. The history of Utopia, therefore, will reflect the conditions of life and the social aspirations of classes and individuals at different times. The specific character of the land is reported varyingly according to the taste of the individual writer, but behind these variations is a continued modification that follows the normal course of historical development: the English Utopia is, as it were, a mirror image, more or less distorted, of the historical England.

A. L. Morton, in his introduction to The English Utopia, Lawrence & Wishart, 1952.

Christian Utopian thought in the seventeenth century, which saw its apogee and decline, while forming one overall cluster, has been examined in its varied geographic manifestations. The protracted upheavals of the English Civil War allowed for a massive discharge of Utopian fantasy. A few of the radical Utopians acknowledged a distant relationship to Müntzer and the Anabaptists and referred to them with favor; for the most part, however, their thought, steeped in bibliolatry, has a distinctive national character, and its magnificent vituperative style was not for export. By contrast, the Pansophic dream of a universal Christian Republic that would be nourished by the new science is European in its contours (there were influential Comenians in England and in the American colonies), though if a principal locus were to be established it would be the Central European world, devastated by war. Pansophia is anything but a populist Utopia; its propagators are learned men associated with universities and courts, most of their all-too-voluminous tracts and treatises are in Latin, and the scholars engaged in the enterprise look to ruling princes, rich burghers, the Pope, the Emperor, the Czar as the divine instruments for its implementation. The Pansophists of the Germanic world, Italy, and England are closely linked with one another and are the bearers of the last great Christian hope for a unified religious society of all men everywhere. A third Utopia of the seventeenth century is relatively minor, as parochially French as the creations of the English Civil War are English. Both Huguenot and Catholic Utopians of the latter part of the century, Vairasse as well as Fénelon, repudiated the luxury-ridden society of Versailles forged by the triumphant monarchy of Louis XIV and moved off to Sevarambia or La Bétique. Since they recounted daring exploits and wrote in French (readily translated into other vernacular tongues), they appealed to a far broader audience than the scholarly Pansophists.

The Utopian constellations of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolutionary era lose the focus of the earlier centuries as their authors are pulled in different directions. Old hopes of the Christian Utopia have been forsaken and there is not yet full commitment to the euchronian constellations that dominate the next epoch. The patres majores among the French philosophes, with their troubled ambivalence toward Utopia, and even Rousseau's enigmatic moi commun and monde idéal , are transitional. The philosophes have to be left in Utopian limbo, which is just where they belong. They were not emancipated enough from the classical doctrine of the cyclical vicissitudes of states and empires to be convinced of an endlessly dynamic future. There is no article on Utopia in the Encyclopédie , and old Utopians are treated with contempt. Nonetheless, the eighteenth century proliferated Utopias of every type—Morean, Robinsonian, physiocratic, communistic, sexual. On the eve of the Revolution, disquisitions on sexuality, ideal architectural forms, property, and equality cropped up all over the place in a Utopian format, signaling alternative paths for a return to nature, or, faute de mieux, to a quasi-natural state in the midst of civilization. A babel of Utopias trumpeted in the Revolution. Its many tongues were the education of party chiefs, but however radically the visions may have differed from one another, in toto the eighteenth-century utopia was still framed in terms of an agrarian society.

Unfortunately, chronological models are rarely neat, and Turgot, Condorcet, and Mercier, the initiators in different styles of the new euchronia, in which good place gives way to good time, had the bad grace to be Enlightenment stalwarts, bred in its Parisian womb. In this instance nothing avails but to call the dialectical principle to the rescue: In the bosom of a Utopia of agrarian calm felicity a Utopia of endless, dynamic change in science and technology was born. This switch to euchronia was heralded with the awakened sleeper of Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440 and with the Utopian projections in the Tenth Epoch of Condorcet's Esquisse. The vision of a future society of progrès indéfini predominates through the emergence of Marx on the Utopian landscape. Paradoxically, un-Christian euchronia represented a resurgence of a strong millenarian, paradisaical, and apocalyptic current in secular form. The free rational choices of the Morean Utopian lawgiver or the Renaissance architect were abandoned to history: Utopia became less Hellenic and more Judeo-Christian. Older rhythms of thought from millenarianism and Joachimism were secularized, and translations of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic rhetoric into new terms became the stuff of the transformation.

Both in fertility of invention and penetrating insight into the human condition, the French thinkers from Saint-Simon through Fourier, Comte, and their schools were a luminous constellation of modern Utopian thought: Work and love were brilliantly analyzed and their felicitous union was established as a prerequisite for an ideal society. Robert Owen and German originals like Wilhelm Weitling were lesser lights of the same species. Marx brought the triumph of euchronia to a European climax by incorporating French, German, and English elements into a unique synthesis, condensed in that banderole of the Gotha Program Critique , "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." After Marx, there was a falling-off in Utopian invention. The Utopians of the earlier part of the nineteenth century were reacted against, assimilated, cribbed, echoed, regurgitated, and watered down in a variety of new forms, discursive and novelistic. The anarchist Utopia is the most virulent of the Utopian forces competitive to the Marxist; and the "Utopia Victoriana," typified by the works of Chernyshevskii, Morris, Bellamy, and Hertzka, is its most genteel dilution. Lenin treasured his executed brother's copy of Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? but clearly Lenin's field of specialization was applied utopistics.

At a time when Utopian formulas still enjoyed a great vogue, two intruders broke into heaven on earth: Darwin and Freud. Popular Darwinism and the new Utopia of science and science fiction that flowed from it at once opened vast new vistas and closed others. The new Utopia to counteract a Darwinian cosmic pessimism was epitomized by the noösphere of Teilhard de Chardin and the scientific Utopia of Bernal, with its marvels of biological engineering and the projection of humanity into outer space as an ultimate destiny. Freud, the trenchant critic of "lullabies of heaven," was followed by an outcropping of Freudo-Marxists, who tried to soften the Freudian sermon on the eternity of aggression. Their works culminated in Marcuse's Utopian "Ende der Utopie," with its exaltation of a new Utopian value that he called sexual-aesthetic. The diffuse manner in which the Utopian imagination has responded to the dystopian forces of Darwin and Freud represents a weakening and an attentuation of earlier ideas and imagery, and suggested the phrase "twilight of Utopia" as descriptive of the most recent period.

The Pluralism of the Commentary

Utopias can be considered from a number of points of view: geographical, historical, psychological, sociological; as a form of belles-lettres; as philosophicomoral treatises; as a new mythology. Just as there have been monist theories that pretend to explicate all myths, so those who have psychologized, sociologized, or historicized Utopias or treated them as a literary genre or a philosophical principle have had a tendency to constrict their significance within the limits of a single discipline….

An easy, though restricted, access to utopia is through its historical geography. The historian of "proper Utopias" twirls a globe dotted with ideal societies on distant islands with specific geographic locations, in isolated valleys, remote mountain fastnesses, underground galleries, caverns in the bowels of the earth, inaccessible jungle clearings. Fortunate peoples inhabit floating platforms in space, the moon, the sun, Mars, Venus; they populate an infinity of worlds.

Much of Western utopia can be related to the acquisition of the known visible world by the peoples of the peninsula of Europe. This development cuts across the individual historical constellations. Imaginary societies are situated along the general path of actual conquests, discoveries, and explorations. In the wake of Alexander's drive to the heart of Asia, Euhemerus, a Hellenistic Greek, found a good order of society on Panchaïa, an island in the Indian Ocean. The trader lambulus, probably a Syrian metic, abandoned to the sea by his Ethiopian captors as a sacrificial offering, told how his boat had drifted to Islands of the Sun somewhere near the east coast of Africa. Other Greek writers claimed acquaintance with the happy Hyperboreans and the men of Ultima Thule on the edge of the European continent. The Romans rarely stretched themselves far beyond the boundaries of the Greek romances; in their imperial triumph many Romans were too complacent and too self-satisfied to dream of ideal polities; for them, Rome itself was Utopia. But after the fall of Rome and throughout the Middle Ages new lands were constantly being incorporated into the Utopian mappamundi from the seas to the west of Europe and Africa. Saint Brendan's Fortunate Isle, the most famous of them, was a Christianized gift of Celtic fantasy. Often the creation of medieval Utopias was incidental to a search for the eastern site of the terrestrial Garden of Eden or to a quest for the Holy Grail, in whose presence the knights would be overcome by feelings of ineffable joy. Eldad ha-Dani, a Jewish traveler of the late ninth century, came upon a perfect society on the other side of the River Sambatyon, where the ten lost tribes of Israel had migrated. And in the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville was carried by his reveries to the mysterious East, to the Isle of Bragmans, where there was "neither thunder ne levening, hail ne snow, ne other tempests of ill weathers; ne hunger, ne pestilence, ne war, ne other tribulations."

Within a few decades after Europeans had broken through their continental shell in the fifteenth century and sailed off in ships to possess the world, Utopia itself was "discovered" by Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese mariner who had purportedly participated in Amerigo Vespucci's expeditions and returned to recount his adventures to Thomas More. For two hundred years thereafter the imaginary encounters of literary voyagers with stranger peoples kept close pace with the real adventures of their seafaring counterparts in America and Asia. Sometimes the Utopias prophetically preceded rather than followed historical landings of Europeans in new places: Toward the latter part of the seventeenth century, at a time when the South Sea islands and Australia were still unexplored, the Utopians outstripped the sailors, and the Huguenots Gabriel de Foigny and Denis Vairasse situated kingdoms in the Mers Australes. For some, there was no longer enough wonderment attached to the coastline of the Americas. Happiness was where they were not, beyond the horizon. During the course of the next century ideal societies multiplied in a balmy region of the Pacific—in Tahiti and on the island of Nouvelle-Cythère— rêves exotiques bred by the real voyages of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville in the same area. After 1800 the wilderness of the American West, opened to travelers, yielded up Utopian worlds in hidden valleys and on the broad plains and plateaus. New territories were progressively annexed to Utopia until the whole face of the earth was covered and men had to seek elsewhere.

The astronomical and mechanical studies of the seventeenth century had already encouraged the Utopian imagination to soar into outer space, giving a strong impetus to explorations that had been begun rather gingerly by the Greeks and the Romans. The Neoplatonists Plutarch and Plotinus, through an ingenious and daring exegesis of Homer, had translated Elysium from the ends of the earth to the moon, and Lucian's mockery of the whole Greek corpus of Utopian expeditions had kept the moon site prominent all through the Middle Ages. But extraterrestrial Utopian societies really began to crowd one another only after 1600, when moon travel dependent upon breaking through the gravitational pull and attaining a state of weightlessness for most of the journey became a theoretical scientific possibility. Johannes Kepler's Somnium, seu Opus Posthumum de Astronomia Lunari (1634) placed a human on the moon to observe the earth, and John Wilkins' Discovery of the New World in the Moon (1638), a popular-science treatise on the mechanics of lunar voyages, though not a Utopia, discussed the feasibility of living on the moon. The Utopian excursions of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, and a host of others were not long delayed once the idea became a commonplace. The universe beyond the earth was peopled in man's fantasy for centuries before the giant step on the moon in 1969; and a proliferation of works of science fiction and predictive science in the twentieth century prefigured the event.

Since the fabrication of Utopian societies and the expeditions to new lands ran parallel, it is not surprising that their two geographies, the imaginary and the real, were sometimes confused. Like the voyages of the Argonauts and of Sinbad the Sailor, Utopian adventures never completely severed their ties to the phenomenal world. At times the utopia-writer lent such verisimilitude to the description of his fantasy land that fictional names, such as those of the East Indian islands in the Huguenot François Misson's Voyage et avantures de François Leguat (1708), found their way into serious geography books and remained there for centuries. The novel by the trader lambulus, preserved in the histories of Diodorus Siculus, was reprinted in Giovanni Battista Ramusio's mid-sixteenth-century collection of voyages (though he hedged a bit about its authenticity, suggesting that it was part truth, part fable), and it survived as an inspiration of Tommaso Campanella's Città del Sole (1602). A great Utopia like Thomas More's exerted a more profound and subtle influence. It penetrated the consciousness of literate men and colored their whole view of reality. More's perception of things stamped the European mind so indelibly that the schema of Book II of the Utopia was adopted in scores of genuine, as well as imaginary, travel accounts, and became an accepted framework for circumstantial reporting on newly discovered lands.

Not content with inventing a fabulous universal geography, the Western imagination has waved a magic wand over many of the great historical societies, so that idealized depictions of Egypt, Sparta, Athens, Scythia, Persia, Rome, Israel have in a way become part of the Utopian corpus. Plutarch's Lycurgan Sparta and Xenophon's Persia, long after the historical passing of these states, assumed separate existences as Utopian polities worthy of imitation by all mankind. Egocentric eulogists have composed self-adulatory Utopias, painting their own societies in colors so dazzling that those not possessed can hardly recognize even the outlines of actuality. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century myth of Venice as the ideal commonwealth would boggle the minds of twentieth-century men were we not inured to the apotheosis of societies whose ugliness and depravity we have beheld with our own eyes. There is hardly a polity so vicious that it cannot be transformed into a paragon of virtue by the power of the imagination interweaving Utopian and historical modes.

Every Utopia, rooted as it is in time and place, is bound to reproduce the stage scenery of its particular world as well as its preoccupation with contemporary social problems. Here analogies to the dream and the psychotic fantasy may be telling. Observers of paranoid behavior report that though the disease remains relatively constant, the mysterious, all-seeing forces that watch and persecute their patients change with time and technology. They maybe spirits, telephones, radios, or television sets in successive periods. Utopias are not an illness; but to a large degree they avail themselves of the existing equipment of a society, perhaps its most advanced models, prettified and rearranged. Often a Utopian foresees the later evolution and consequences of technological development already present in an embryonic state; he may have antennae sensitive to the future. His gadgets, however, rarely go beyond the mechanical potentialities of his age. Try as he may to invent something wholly new, he cannot make a world out of nothing.

If Utopias are classified by the style of their furniture, sociological and historical, and the style is related to a contemporary social reality, the Utopia can be studied as a reflection of the specific crises that it presumes to resolve. That utopia is tied to existing social conflicts and that the Utopian often aligns himself with one side or the other has been profusely illustrated. In Hesiod one senses the state of decline after the heroic epoch of Hellas, in Plato the temper of growing luxuriousness in Athenian life and the impending demise of the polis. The Utopias of Alberti, Filarete, and Patrizi communicate the spirit of a new Renaissance aristocracy of wealth as distinct from a rough, feudal nobility, and the elegant patricians of their ideal cities keep themselves aloof from both the swashbuckling condottieri and the plebeians on the lower levels of society. Thomas More, it is said, is reacting against the enclosure movement, but whether in the name of the new burghers of London or of nostalgic medieval agrarianism or the spiritual ideals of a Christian humanism remains debatable. The great seventeenth-century Utopias strive to mend the political and religious schisms in the Christian world and to reconstitute a universal order on the basis of Christian virtues bolstered by the new science. Many eighteenth-century Utopias with their ever-normal granaries and orderly physiocratic policies directed by a wise paternal legislator and a meritocracy in the spiritual and temporal realms point the way to ending the endemic hunger of the ancien régime and ridding society of its vestigial feudal institutions. Saint-Simon and Fourier had the perspicacity to respond to the economic and psychic dislocations of the new industrial society long before its griefs had become plainly visible. Marx sought to master the same forces at a maturer stage of capitalism and Hertzka at an even later stage, when the problems of industrialism were complicated by imperialist expansion. Presentday Utopians are trying to cope with the anxieties and potentialities of what has been called postindustrial society. But since most epochs in the West have been-turbulent, the proposition that the Utopias they have produced are related to economic and social upheavals becomes truistic. To announce in tones of dramatic revelation that a Utopia mirrors the misery of the working classes or the squeeze of the lesser nobility between the peasants and the royal power is to say something, but not enough. To identify elements in Utopias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as manifestations of Frühkapitalismus , a current fashion, is to mistake a rubric for a statement of content.

Identifying the sources of a Utopia in historical reality can of course be done with more or with less sensitivity. Granted that the utopia-maker reflects the historical moment, in the rare instances where he has genius he reveals the inner depths, the essence, of that moment rather than mere externals. He has the capacity to achieve a measure of distance from the day-to-day controversies of the marketplace and to view the life of his society in the light of its manifold possibilities. Even though he may not be so insightful as a sublime poet, the Utopian can capture the anguish of an epoch in a striking metaphor. In dissecting the urgent requirements of his times, he may also lay bare age-old, if not eternal, needs of man. Limiting an interpretation to the immediate environment of the Utopian, tying him down too closely and mechanically to the precise circumstances and incidents that could have triggered his writing, fails to recognize that he may have something ahistorical to say about love, aggression, the nature of work, the fulfillment of personality. The truly great Utopian is a Janus-like creature, time-bound and free of time, place-bound and free of place. His duality should be respected and appreciated.

Certain historical generations are peculiarly susceptible to Utopian thinking and it is not uncommon to find the same young men possessed by a succession of Utopias and stumbling from one Utopian movement into another. English seekers of the Civil War, though primarily embarked on an individual quest for a way to God, became involved, as they wandered from sect to sect, with the social Utopias related to each new doctrine. Rootless young Frenchmen of the generation of 1798, when they reached maturity under the Restoration, made the rounds from Saint-Simonism to Fourierism to Comtism (not always in that order). The spiritual migrations of the 1930s and the 1960s tell similar stories in the United States. Such concentrations represent far larger numbers than the interplay of an exclusive band of northern Christian humanists, or the Renaissance architects of the ideal city, or the Pansophists of the seventeenth century. And yet in their own small way the young Rhineland academics touched by the Rosicrucian hope of reforming the world underwent psychic experiences that were not dissimilar to those of the French Romantic Utopians. A historical sociology of Utopian movements or, better, affinity groups would have to go back to the Pythagoreans, the Essenes, the radical sectaries of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, if it were not to get bogged down in the parochial though rich nineteenth-century American experience with Utopian communities. We have been preoccupied chiefly with the thought behind these movements, but some consideration of their character and organization throws light on the ideational substance.

Utopias have been powerful dynamic forces in the political arena, though not necessarily when first published. If their astute empirical diagnosis strikes a chord that has resonances among some classes of their society, they become famous; failing, they are forgotten, or may wait in some Utopian limbo to be revived at a future date. The fortuna of the original document is an inseparable part of its meaning, and should be examined along with the changed content that new generations have constantly poured into the old Utopia. A work can hardly escape fundamental transformation as its audience changes: More's Christian-humanist declamatio becomes a revolutionary manifesto; Marx's notebooks in which a young man is trying out his ideas are read as dogma a century later; Comenius' massive systematic manuscript, General Consultation on an Improvement of All Things Human , aimed at effectuating a radical universal reform, ends up as a mere historical curiosity, a scholar's felicitous discovery three hundred years after the author's death and of interest only to limited number of specialists. Of late, statistical records of the past compiled by government officials with one specific intent, when placed in another context have begun to speak a very different language to researchers. Similarly, Utopian ideas assume new meanings as they are moved about from series to series. A commentator focusing on Utopian sexual fantasies will not pluck the same meaning from an account of a Ranter assemblage during the English Civil War as did a contemporary presbyter. The observer of utopia over a period of hundreds of years is constrained to consider each event as having roots in the past and sending out tentacles to the future and to coevals scattered over a broad area. No important Utopian event is encapsulated or autonomous, because future history has embraced it. A critical history, while it can never escape its own historicity, may succeed in combining a measure of distance with its empathy and antipathy.

The changing size of the reading public is part of the commentarythat illuminates Utopias. Thomas More's Latin libellus was originally accessible to a far smaller public than Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward , but it was large compared to Winstanley's Digger Platform or a Ranter sermon that made its way into the hostile report of Thomas Edwards' Gangraena. Marx's definition of the higher stage of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program has surely been read by a far greater number of persons in contemporary China, where it is said to be discussed at peasant study sessions, than it was in the 1890s when it was published. And if we would pursue fragments of Utopias that penetrate the rhetoric of popular movements, we enter a world of diffusion where solids have become gaseous and impossible to isolate. Confronted with a shifting readership and the Utopian's mobile or ambivalent original purpose, the critical historian who reviews the whole process ought not to take too rigid a stance, for the same text tells many different things about Utopian thought at widely dispersed times, and even among different classes of contemporaries.

The Utopian and His Creation

As a mental event, a utopia takes the form of a written document and is usually composed by one man. On rare occasions a group of men may concert together to formulate a Utopian program; for that moment, at least, they give the appearance of being of one mind and they share a common Utopian experience. The Utopian may, as politician, reformer, revolutionary, prophet, use bits and pieces of his own Utopian structure. Others may cannibalize his Utopia and incorporate it into their manifestoes for action, inscribe its slogans on their banners. But every subsequent usage of Utopian rhetoric after the initial creation involves a tearing apart and perhaps even a total destruction of the original. A history of Utopian thought may deal with the preliminaries in the life of the individual Utopian, the dynamic internal psychic forces that climaxed in the recording of the Utopian experience, and the communication, popularization, vulgarization, stereotyping, or rigidifying of the Utopian event in the course of time. But in the process the mental event itself should not be diluted to the point where it is hardly distinguishable from the waters that flowed in and those that poured out; it remains a unique creation.

At a time when individual psychological analysis flourishes, one is tempted to turn to the person of the Utopian for the illumination of his fantasy. Though a poet has related the Utopian mode to youth and the attraction of ideal world systems may be most powerful in adolescence, there are many middle-aged Utopian fantasts, and the Utopian propensity is not restricted to any one stage of the life cycle. More wrote his utopia in his late thirties, Restif and Saint-Simon composed theirs when they were about forty. One version of Rousseau's Utopia was a deathbed revelation and Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville was the day-dream of an aging man. Since the illusory world serves some purpose in the psychic economy of its author, interpreters have undertaken to ferret out and relate the Utopian's hidden drives to major elements of his imaginary society. The effort should not be scorned. For many, such as More, Comenius, Bacon, Jean-Jacques, Fourier, Marx, the data are richly available and the quest is rewarding; for others, the psychological perceptions that can be mustered are severely limited, since we may know nothing but the author's name, perhaps a nom de plume at that, or only a family name as with Morelly, whose Code de la nature was a significant Utopian landmark and played a major part in the intellectual world of Babeuf. But paucity of materials does not discourage the convinced believer in the paramountcy of his psychological techniques. He can reconstruct a personality on the basis of psychological disclosures in the fantasy and then triumphantly interpret the fantasy in terms of its creator. An ideal visionary type, the perfect Utopian, would probably both hate his father and come from a disinherited class. A bit of schizophrenia, a dose of megalomania, obsessiveness, and compulsiveness fit neatly into the stereotype. But the Utopian personality that is more than an item in a catalogue must also be gifted and stirred by a creative passion. The great utopias—and they are not numerous—are marked but not necessarily marred by the scars of their authors. Sometimes the wounds lie well concealed, as was More's hair-shirted and lacerated body beneath the inky cloak of the Holbein portrait.

There is a sense in which the mental act of creating a Utopian world, or the principles for one, is psychologically a regressive phenomenon for an individual. In this respect the Utopian is kindred to the religious, scientific, and artistic creators who flee to the desert, suffer psychic crises, become disoriented by the contradictions between accepted reality and the new insights of which they have a glimmer. In the first instance the Utopian is overwhelmed by the evil complexities of existence. The great Utopians have all borne witness to their anger at the world, their disgust with society, their acute suffering as their sensibilities are assailed from all sides. They withdraw from this world into a far simpler form of existence which they fantasy. The escape from everyday conflicts and disappointments has a childlike quality. And their way back from Utopia, their return to the real world they had abandoned, is often characterized by devotion to a fixed idea with which they become obsessed. They clutch frantically at this overvalued idea that at once explains all evil and offers the universal remedy, and they build an impregnable fortification around it. The one idea becomes a fetish that they worship and defend with marvelous ingenuity. To outsiders they are monomaniacs. These reflections naturally apply only to the select number of authentic Utopians who endure the travail of new birth, not to the hundreds of Utopian imitators who crowd bibliographies as poetasters do histories of literature.

Utopians are almost always tragic or tragicomic figures who die unfulfilled; the future does not begin to conform to their fantasy. Then appear the disciples or curious readers who have not been shaken in their innermost being with anything like the intensity of the original Utopian visionary, and they adapt, prune, distort, refine, render banal, make matter-of-fact the Utopia, so that it reenters the world as a force for good or evil. Compromises with existence are effected; the ironclad formula is relaxed. To measure the pure Utopian theory by the achievements of "applied utopistics" is fatuous, as is any attempt to make fathers responsible for the sins and barbarities of their putative sons. By definition, the Utopian creation born of a yearning for return to a simple haven or of a descent into the lower depths of the unconscious cannot be put into practice.

One of the most prickly tasks for the commentator on Utopia is to assess the commitment of a Utopian author to his own work. Appraisals range from the mere jeu d'esprit through rhetorical declamatio as a didactic device, from the Utopia as wish rather than anticipation to zealous conviction of the need for or expectation of the total implementation of the Utopian principles on the morrow or at most the day after. When the Utopian is torn by doubts, on the manifest or covert level, an evaluation becomes acutely problematic. Restif de la Bretonne, a type familiar enough to modern psychologists, wrote both expansively permissive and obsessively repressive Utopias. Some Utopians wear a mask of harlequin, as Fourier did on occasion, to attract attention with absurdities and scandalous utterances. Many who conceived of their Utopias as popular forms of a Platonic idea would have been content with far less than complete realization in this world. Others, possessed by the spirit of religious ritualism, would not allow for the changing of an iota in their system lest the magical efficacy of the whole be impaired. Both proper and discursive Utopias are literary texts in which ambivalence and ambiguity are very ofteninseparable from the thought itself. Obviously, once they have left their author's hands they lead lives of their own, and the most ironic or hyperbolic positions can subsequently be read as if they were biblical commandments, mathematical demonstrations, or the triumphs of academic discourse in which points are proved and disproved. This applies not only to Thomas More's work, where divergent contemporary commentaries are at last making the Christian humanist tone evident, but to many other Utopias that to this day are interpreted in a doltishly straight-faced manner because the doubt of the author has been ignored. Searching for the Utopian intent, almost always elusive, comes to occupy a significant part of this historical commentary.

Paradoxically, the great Utopians have been great realists. They have an extraordinary comprehension of the time and place in which they are writing and deliver themselves of penetrating reflections on socioeconomic, scientific, or emotional conditions of their moment in history. They have discovered truths that other men have only vaguely sensed or have refused to recognize. The Utopian often emerges as a man with a deeper understanding of the drift of his society than the hardheaded problem-solvers with their noses to the grindstone of the present, blind to potentiality. Perhaps the Utopians stand out because of the tenacity with which they hold to their ideas. They have a penchant for focusing the full glare of their insight on a particular aspect of the world and leaving much unnoticed. But if they are fixated on one face of reality, this face they understand as other men have not. Their knowledge serves them as a springboard for a jump into a future which could be either a total negation of the present or so sharply lateral that others would at first glance consider it chimerical, fantastic, improbable—in a word, Utopian. There is an almost inevitable inclination in a utilitarian society to value most those Utopian visionaries whose "dreams came true," not the best criterion for judgment. The short-term prognosticator can be a bore. He is merely a meterologist, useful in planning an outing or a military invasion.

Eurich on Utopian thought and the rise of science:

The great and eventually startling advances in scientific knowledge and the possibilities it offered for man's betterment were slow in building, slow in reaching even the learned men, much less the general public. Naturally then, the new ideas emerging did not immediately displace all other human visions of the happier state. Traditional notions are hard to abandon and, during this period of transition, some Utopian writers clung tenaciously to the old values and saw improvement through the pursuit of virtue alone; they either deliberately omitted mention of scientific discovery or were ignorant of the new learning….

In the first quarter of the 17th century, however, another group of utopists had come to the conclusion that the new age of mankind was to be the result of science and the new learning. While their visions did not instantly blot out all other views of utopia—we have seen the various solutions of their contemporaries—still their quick and creative adoption of scientific discoveries proved to be the main road to the future that we have traveled. Here are Andreae, Bacon, Campanella, and others who set the stage on which George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have drawn the curtains, leaving man controlled in the darkness of his own creation. In the period of scientific gestation, there was no thought of such a conclusion; the new utopia was flooded with the brilliant light of new knowledge.

Nell Eurich, "The Renaissance and Transition," in Science in Utopia: A Mighty Design, Harvard University Press, 1967.

Without taking leave of reality, Utopians have performed symbolic acts to dramatize their break with the present. They have located their ideal societies at a distance in space—this was the normal device of the Morean Utopia that required the rite of passage of an ocean voyage. King Utopus cut the isthmus that had once attached his newly conquered kingdom to the mainland as one would snip an umbilical cord. In the twentieth century Bernal required a light-year of flight to establish the necessary pathos of distancefor one of his artificial planets. Men have fallen into holes in the earth to get to the ideal center of things; they have crossed impassable mountain ranges to descend into pleasant valleys; they have broken the time barrier of the present through machines or through sleep; they have distinguished between evil prehistory and Utopian history. The critical negation may be incorporated in a separate book and composed after the utopia proper. We now know that More's Book I postdated the composition of Book II; the whole is a study in contrasts. In other Morean Utopias the negative and the positive are intermingled in the same account, as the strangers, or the Utopians (who are sometimes all-knowing), play a counterpoint between Europe and the newly discovered island, or the present and the future. The movement back and forth between heaven and hell is precipitous, so that the reader is constantly made aware of the antithesis.

The Utopians whose repudiation of the present is in the Greek tradition tend to seek a more rationalist and analytical way to expose what to Aristotle were the defects in existing forms. In the Judeo-Christian corpus the revulsion against the pervasiveness of religious sin is more emotive. But the logical argumentative character of the classical search for perfect forms may only disguise the force of the underlying negative affect. The medical metaphor of Plato, diagnosing his contemporary city as suffering from an inflammation, and the summary condemnation in his Seventh Epistle of "all the states which now exist" as "badly governed" dramatize the feeling that preceded or accompanied the analysis.

It would be deceptive to stress the utopia as negation of present reality to the neglect of curiosity, inventiveness, the exploratory drive that has led man on the most daring adventures. The two strains have had changing relative potencies at different epochs. There are times when the utopia of calm felicity dominates Western culture and the imagery of a return to the protective womb of paradise seems to suffuse the emotional atmosphere; then a Promethean element breaks through and Utopian existence becomes the dramatic torch race of which Bacon wrote in Wisdom of the Ancients. Utopians are often intrepid, bold explorers whom many of their contemporaries consider wild because they neither repeat existing rhetoric with variations nor pursue familiar directions. If a Utopia is merely or primarily reflective of existing reality it is trivial. On the other hand, when the imaginary world is cut off from all relationship with reality, it becomes a vaporous fairy tale, formless and pointless, like many voyages imaginaires and songes romans cabalistiques of the eighteenth century and muchof contemporary science fiction, where the Utopian elements are so feeble they are only sedatives, pastimes, narcotics. The great Utopia startles and yet is recognized as conceivable. It is not a sleepy or bizarre vision but one that satisfies a hunger or stimulates the mind and the body to the recognition of a new potentiality.

Cite this page as follows:

"Utopian Literature of the Renaissance - Overviews." Literary Criticism (1400-1800), edited by Jennifer Allison Brostrom, Vol. 32. Gale Cengage, 1996, 3 July 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/utopian-literature-renaissance/critical-essays/overviews>

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How to Think Like a Utopian

Strive to be both idealistic enough to envision a new world and pragmatic enough to steadily build it.

By Malia Wollan

“It’s important that you have some idea of where you want to go, some kind of dream,” says Rutger Bregman, 33, a Dutch historian and author who has written about utopian thinking. Don’t underestimate the power of outlandish ideas. Throughout history, many significant milestones — democracy, the abolition of slavery, equal rights for men and women — began as utopian dreams. “It always starts with people who are first dismissed as unreasonable and unrealistic,” Bregman says.

To engage in utopian thinking, you can’t be myopically focused on the present. There’s nothing inherent about our current political, economic and social realities; people made these systems and can make them anew. To envision something novel, read more history and less news. A sensationalistic daily news cycle can constrict your ability to see the world as anything but dangerous, violent and mean. “There’s nothing as anti-utopian as the product that we call the news,” Bregman says. Let your interests be expansive. Read philosophy and psychology. Look around and think, It doesn’t have to be this way. “Take something like poverty; why does it exist?” he says. “We’ve heard things like ‘the poor will always be with us,’ but is that really true?” What if poverty weren’t taken as a given? Sometimes it helps to imagine what future historians will make of us. What will they see? How will they judge us?

Utopianism doesn’t require you to be optimistic. In fact, that kind of “don’t worry, everything will work out” view can lead to complacency. Instead, be hopeful in a way that moves you toward action. To be a utopian takes grand, ambitious thinking. But when it comes to implementing these ideas into policies and practice, Bregman suggests a humble, tinkering approach; overzealous attachment to utopian blueprints can be dangerous.

You can be a utopian and still enjoy dystopian fictional narratives. “Dystopias tend to be much better entertainment,” Bregman says. Notice, though, if those plotlines start eroding your view of human nature. To think like a utopian, it helps to believe that humans are fundamentally decent. Be cautious if your utopias all involve technological fixes or escapist colonies on Mars. The work of imagining futures is hard. “In this era of climate breakdown and the extinction of species, it’s obviously easier to think of how it all could end than how it could become much, much better,” Bregman says. That better world, that is the work.