Dreams are the fire in us.
(Marge Piercy)
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias.
(Oscar Wilde)
The last thing we really need is more utopian visions.
(Immanuel Wallerstein)
So this is utopia,
Is it? Well –
I beg your pardon;
I thought it was Hell
(Max Beerbohm)
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities.
(Thomas Babington Macauley)
Les utopies ne sont souvent que des verités prématurées. [Utopias are often only premature truths.]
(Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine)
The word ‘utopia’ was coined by Thomas More (1478–1535) as the name of the imaginary country he described in his short 1516 book written in Latin and published as Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip[ublicae] statu, deq[ue] noua Insula Vtopia (Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia. A Truly Golden Handbook No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining), and now known as Utopia. The word is based on the Greek topos meaning place or where, and ‘u’ from the prefix ‘ou’ meaning no or not. But in ‘Six Lines on the Island of Utopia’, More gives the reader a poem that calls Utopia ‘Eutopia’ (Happy Land, or good place). As a result, the word ‘utopia’, which simply means no place or nowhere, has come to refer to a non-existent good place.
While most educated people in the 16th century read Greek and Latin, the word ‘utopia’ quickly entered other European languages, with the book being published in German in 1524, Italian in 1548, and French in 1550. Because More opposed translation into English, the book was not available in English until 1551, when it was translated by his son-in-law.
In Utopia, More depicted a ship discovering an unknown island, which has established a society based on far-reaching equality but under the authority of wise, elderly men. It is hierarchical and patriarchal; it has very strict laws with harsh punishments; and it provides a much better life for its citizens than was available to the citizens of England at the time. These are the characteristics of a utopia. They tell stories about good (and later bad) places, representing them as if they were real. Thus they show people going about their everyday lives and depict marriage and the family, education, meals, work, and the like, as well as the political and economic systems. It is this showing of everyday life transformed that characterizes a utopia, and utopianism is about just that transformation of the everyday.
1. Thomas More (1478–1535) was an English lawyer, politician, and author remembered as a prominent Renaissance humanist and an opponent of the Protestant Reformation. He was knighted by Henry VIII for his services to the crown, and executed for refusing to give his oath supporting Henry VIII as head of the church in England. He was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935. His most famous book was his Utopia (1516). This famous portrait of More was painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1498–1543) in 1527
While the word ‘utopia’ was coined by More, the idea already had a long and complex history. Utopias have been discovered that were written well before More invented the word, and new words have been added to describe different types of utopias, such as ‘dystopia’ meaning bad place, which, as far as we know, was first used in 1747 by Henry Lewis Younge (b. 1694) in his Utopia: or, Apollo’s Golden Days and has become standard usage. And to call something ‘utopian’ has, from very early on, been a way of dismissing it as unrealistic.
People have always been dissatisfied with the conditions of their lives and have created visions of a better and longer life and hoped for a continued and improved existence after death. And at some point, some worried about the possibility of a worse existence after death, thinking that however bad this life was, it could be worse. Thus, the first great division in utopianism, between the better and the worse, emerged very early on.
We can never know when someone first dreamed of a better life but must rely on when different individuals in different cultures first wrote down a version that has survived, and such visions occur in the earliest written records we have, such as a Sumerian clay tablet from 2000 BCE. The earliest utopias were very like dreams, completely out of human control, something that would come about naturally or because some god willed it.
All utopias ask questions. They ask whether or not the way we live could be improved and answer that it could. Most utopias compare life in the present and life in the utopia and point out what is wrong with the way we now live, thus suggesting what needs to be done to improve things.
As with most topics, there are definitional disagreements. One issue that regularly confuses people stems from the failure to make the distinction between utopianism as a general category and the utopia as a literary genre. Thus, utopianism refers to the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society from the one in which the dreamers live. And utopianism, unlike much social theory, focuses on everyday life as well as matters concerned with economic, political, and social questions.
The range of the word can be seen in the description by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) of the process by which a word that
emerged as an artificially concocted proper name has acquired, in the last two centuries, a sense so extended that it refers not only to a literary genre but to a way of thinking, to a mentality, to a philosophical attitude, and is being employed in depicting cultural phenomena going back into antiquity.
Here Kolakowski demonstrates the complexity of utopianism as it has evolved. I have called utopianism ‘social dreaming’. The sociologist Ruth Levitas (b. 1949) calls it ‘the desire for a better way of being’, with the utopia as an aspect of the ‘education of desire’. Within these broad categories are what I call ‘the three faces of utopianism’ – the literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory. And, as the quotations at the head of the chapter make clear, the word has come to mean different things to different people.
Scholars today generally use one of two quite similar definitions for the literary utopia: the first is the literary theorist Darko Suvin’s (b. 1930), the second mine:
The verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms and individual relationships are organised according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.
A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here and as an equivalent for eutopia or a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived.
Since writers of utopias keep inventing new forms for the presentation of their ideas, any definition must have somewhat porous boundaries, and contemporary utopias do not all look like what we previously called a utopia. In particular, they are more complex, less certain of their proposals, and intended for flawed humanity.
Utopian practice includes what are now most often called intentional communities, or communes, but were once called by many other things, including utopian communities, utopian experiments, and practical utopias. Here, there is no agreed-upon definition, but many scholars use mine, often with minor variations, which states that
an intentional community is a group of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose.
At one time, utopian practice was generally limited to such communities, but because the word ‘utopia’ is now used as a label for many types of social and political activity intended to bring about a better society and, in some cases, personal transformation, it is a broader category than it used to be. And all utopian practice is about the actual rather than the fictional transformation of the everyday. People joining intentional communities choose to experiment with their own lives, as do, in different ways, those who participate in other forms of utopian practice.
Utopian social theory includes: utopia as a method of analysis; the relationship between utopia and ideology first outlined by the social theorist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) in 1929 and used by others in various ways since then; the ways in which utopianism has been used to explain social change by thinkers like the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) and the Dutch sociologist Frederick L. Polak (1907–85); the role of utopianism in religion, particularly in Christian theology, in which it has been seen as variously heretical and essential; the role of utopianism in colonialism and postcolonialism; and the debates between globalizers and anti-globalizers. All of these approaches are considered in this book.
Utopianism and intentional communities are complex phenomena with long histories occurring in many different settings. As a result, they differ radically from time to time and place to place. Definition at a level of generalization that would capture everything may be a useful starting point but would tell us little about the actual phenomena as they occur. Thus we need to characterize the various sub-categories appropriately so that we both capture the connections and recognize the differences. And in particular, any discussion of intentional communities must be aware that every community has its own life cycle beginning with visions and pre-planning to birth, growth, maturation, and, often, death, with death possible at any point in a community’s life.
And there can be fundamental disagreements over what constitutes a good place. The classic 20th-century case is psychologist B. F. Skinner’s (1904–90) Walden Two (1948), a novel describing a small community that had been established by a behavioural psychologist, which many saw as clearly a good place and even a guide to the ideal intentional community. Some communities were founded on this model and some of those still exist. Others read the novel as a picture of a totalitarian society. And communities are perceived differently by those observing them from the outside and those living in them, and such perceptions change as the communities and the people change. For example, intentional communities are often seen as wonderful places to be a child and terrible places to be a teenager.
Literary utopias have at least six purposes, although they are not necessarily separable. A utopia can be simply a fantasy, it can be a description of a desirable or an undesirable society, an extrapolation, a warning, an alternative to the present, or a model to be achieved. And the intentional community as utopia adds a seventh purpose, to demonstrate that living a better life is possible in the here and now. The utopian views humanity and its future with either hope or alarm. If viewed with hope, the result is usually a utopia. If viewed with alarm, the result is usually a dystopia. But basically, utopianism is a philosophy of hope, and it is characterized by the transformation of generalized hope into a description of a non-existent society. Of course, hope can often be nothing more than a rather naive wish-fulfilment, such as in some fairy tales (albeit most fairy tales turn into dystopias if carefully analysed). On the other hand, hope is essential to any attempt to change society for the better. But this raises the possibility of someone attempting to impose their idea of what constitutes a desirable future on others who reject it. Utopians are always faced with this dilemma when they attempt to move their dream to reality – is their dream compatible with the imposition of their dream; can freedom be achieved through unfreedom, or equality through inequality?
There are good reasons for both the negative and the positive evaluations of utopianism reflected in the quotations at the beginning of this introduction, and those reasons are explored throughout the book. In the 20th century, negative evaluations were strong as a result of attempts to impose a specific version of the good life, particularly Communism in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, but also including National Socialism in Germany and the Taliban version of Islamism in Afghanistan. Others have seen utopianism positively as the primary means of countering such attempts.
While aiming at a comprehensive and balanced presentation, I make an argument here. In its broadest outline, that argument is that utopianism is essential for the improvement of the human condition, and in this sense opponents of utopianism are both wrong and potentially dangerous. But I also argue that if used wrongly, and it has been, utopianism is itself dangerous, and in this sense supporters of utopianism are both wrong and potentially dangerous. Therefore, the conclusion both explores and attempts to rectify the contradictory nature of utopianism.