[Gutenberg 18638] • Ideal Commonwealths

In Lycurgus Plutarch recounts the life of Sparta's legendary founder Lycurgus and the evolution of Spartan political and social institutions. Sir Thomas More's Utopia is the sixteenth-century classic of a patriarchal island kingdom that practiced religious tolerance, in which everybody worked, all goods were community-owned, and violence, bloodshed, and vice were nonexistent. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, paints "his Ideal Commonwealth in those seas where a great Austral continent was even then supposed to be, but had not been discovered. As the old Atlantis implied a foreboding of the American continent, so the New Atlantis implied foreboding of the Australian. Bacon in his philosophy sought through experimental science the dominion of men over things, "for Nature is only governed by obeying her." In his Ideal World of the New Atlantis, Science is made the civilizer who binds man to man, and is his leader to the love of God. Thomas Campanella urged that Nature should be studied through her own works, not through books. Campanella strenuously urged that men should reform all sciences by following Nature and the books of God. Mundus alter et idem is Joseph Hall's satirical utopian fantasy and description of London, with some criticism of the Catholic church. The narrator takes a voyage in the ship Fantasia, in the southern seas, visiting the lands of Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronia and Lavernia populated by gluttons, nags, fools and thieves respectively.