Utopianism is the imagining of much better worlds than our own, the effort to actually create them, and the results which follow, for good or ill, in actually-established utopias and dystopias. The better worlds themselves have generally been defined by greater order, stability, and harmony than the existing world usually manifests; and relationships between individuals, in particular, which are less competitive and more oriented towards friendship or a type of familial, extended kinship. Up to the beginning of the modern period, most utopian concepts were rooted in an ideal past stage of human development. For the ancient Greeks, a long-lost Golden Age provided an image of peace and plenty which might, philosophers like Plato surmised, be recaptured at least in part through careful social re-organization. Christianity envisioned an original paradisical state—the Garden of Eden, as well as a future heaven for the virtuous—and in monastic life, in pious pilgrimages to the Holy Land or to tombs of the saints, posited a halfway house where the vanity, greed, and vice of everyday life could be at least momentarily superseded and spiritual sanctity attained. If the ideal life lay only at the beginning and end of sacred history, something approaching a halfway state might be achievable in this life. The European Renaissance signalled a widespread effort to recapture this possibility of earthly governments of greater virtue and piety. One text came to embody this pursuit above all others. The publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, with its purported discovery of an ideal island commonwealth in the South Seas, unveiled a myriad of possibilities for humanity's onward progress. Before More, most of the mainstream travel literature had been dominated by Sir John Mandeville's best-selling Travels (c. 1356), which looked backward to classical authors in its discovery of lands inhabited by monstrous beings with dogs' heads, and the like. Christopher Columbus sought, amongst other things, the long-lost earthly paradise in the Americas. Satire to one side, Thomas More hinted at the possibility that a model commonwealth might have long since been established by Europeans which, rediscovered, could serve as a stimulus for their degenerate successors. Most voyages of discovery had gold as their quest, but virtue, too, in a god-fearing age, glittered in the eyes of its beholders. Humanity's greatness might yet lie before it, and opulence, plenty, and order might yet be reconciled. The foundations of the eighteenth-century theory of progress, which would come to dominate modern social thought, were being established.
The two classic early seventeenth-century utopias presented here address these visions in very different ways. First written in Latin, The City of the Sun of the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) appeared in Frankfurt in 1623. It describes a great city some seven miles in circumference located near the equator in the southern hemisphere. Its inhabitants, the Solarians, exhibit all the virtues we would expect a monk to promote, including sobriety, liberality, chastity, and the love of knowledge. The city is formed of seven concentric rings, whose well-defended walls are decorated with illustrations of its inhabitants' piety and love of nature, which are focussed on their worship of the sun, a great temple being located at the highest point of the city. Also portrayed on the walls are their alphabet, maps of the country, its laws, and the types of plants, fishes and animals, trades, occupations and inventions, even the weather. As for Thomas More, the Greek philosopher Plato is a key influence here, though the people are described as originating in India. The government is by an elected high priest, Hoh, who rules for life. He is assisted by three princes of equal authority, responsible for the domains of power, wisdom, and love, who confer with the general population through frequent councils of leaders. Some magistrates are elected on the basis of their capacity, but the majority are chosen by the four "chiefs." Plato's guardian class were communists, holding their property and wives in common. In More's Utopia property is also common, but its ownership is now extended to the entire population. Campanella, like Plato, includes wives and children, and houses and food, too, though apparently only in the city, not elsewhere in the province (p. 50). Private property is regarded as the chief source of self-love; when it is removed "there remains only love for the state," the result being that the inhabitants "burn with so great a love for their fatherland" as scarcely seems imaginable (pp. 50–1). Yet, while not dependent on a mutual exchange of benefits, friendships of many types are widely encouraged. Sexual intercourse, however, is strictly regulated by the prince in charge of Love, assisted by many lesser magistrates. Women who use makeup face the death penalty, and pride is generally held "the most execrable vice" (p. 61). Magistrates ensure the birth only of the most fit, with the time of conception being determined by astrologers. Children are reared in common, and are regarded as "bred for the preservation of the species, and not for individual pleasure" (p. 60). The workday is restricted to four hours, and diet and exercise are regulated to promote the well-being of the population, who are so healthy they usually live to the age of a hundred. There is some division of labour according to sex, the women doing all the clothes-making, the men all woodwork and arms manufacture. Social equality—the characteristic utopian theme—is upheld through a system of universal free education which includes the participation of all in agriculture. Men and women dress similarly in white, and all go barefoot. At meals the young wait on their elders, and also, with some unwillingness, on each other. Here magistrates get larger portions, though they distribute some of this to the more studious boys at their table. There are no servants or slaves (as there are in More's text), and everyone learns many trades, then practises the one they are best at. The government is theocratic, and Campanella hints that Spain is destined to impose God's plan on the world through just such a monarchy. There is a hint here, too, of the promise of scientific and technological discoveries, like ships which can travel without wind or sails. There is only one book, however, called "Wisdom," which contains all the knowledge of the nation. War with the four "impious" neighbouring kingdoms on the island is unfortunately frequent, though all, fortuitously, are invariably defeated.
Scientific and technological advancement is the grand theme of New Atlantis. Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was amongst the leading statesmen of his day, serving not only as Lord Chancellor of England, but making a seminal contribution to knowledge through his cultivation of a scientific, empirically-based method for observing nature. Written by 1617, his unfinished New Atlantis (1626), which reached eleven editions by 1676, represents for us today a crucial, nodal point not only in the history of utopianism but in humanity's quest for mastery over nature generally. The plot of the novel, which invokes Plato's description of the original lost continent of Atlantis, is simple, and was replicated a hundred times subsequently: English mariners discover an island called Bensalem in the South Sea of the Pacific Ocean whose Christian inhabitants are vastly more virtuous and accomplished than their European contemporaries. Chaste and honest, righteous beyond comparison, they are singularly lacking in corruption, especially in politics. Amongst their leading institutions is an establishment, named Salomon's House, the "noblest foundation ... that ever was upon the earth," where "natural philosophy," as scientific endeavour was then termed, is freely explored with a view to improving society (p. 20). In his Instauratio Magna (1620) Bacon had suggested that experimental laboratories might be promoted by the state to advance scientific knowledge. New Atlantis described how investigators aimed to use "knowledge of the causes, and secret motions of things" to accomplish the "enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible" (p. 31) to fulfill the promise of mankind's domination of nature first suggested in "Genesis," where God grants dominion of the earth to Adam and Eve. They engage in voyages every twelve years to secure knowledge from all parts of the earth, and in deep caves and high towers produce artificial metals. Lakes, gardens, orchards, baths, parks, and enclosures are used for all manner of cultivation and experiment, the prolongation of life being of special interest. Instruments of war are also produced, and flying through the air and submarine travel have already been achieved. There is even a house of "deceits of the senses" where impostures and illusions are contrived, a veritable "fake news" factory. This is indeed a veritable scientists' paradise, and those who produce valuable inventions are rewarded liberally and have a statue erected, some of brass, some even of gold (p. 40). Some of their discoveries are hidden even from the state. We learn relatively little of the wider society, though different religions are tolerated. (There are Jews, but they are described as being "far different" from those elsewhere in their acceptance of Christianity.) The happy inhabitants of Bensalem do not permit polygamy, and reject Thomas More's proposal that engaged persons view one another naked before marriage, instead allowing their friends to do so. New Atlantis, unfortunately, remained unfinished. Bacon's vision was parodied in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), which imagined an institute on the island of Laputa devoted to such tasks as extracting sunshine from cucumbers. But Bacon's vision of scientific progress, and a boundless faith in technological innovation, would come to dominate western thought, and eventually that of the world.
What do we gain by reading these works, now some five hundred years old, today? Both, like many utopian tracts, remind us of a recurring vision of political honesty and transparency which jolts uneasily against our own age of cynicism, greed and corruption, when politics is too easily regarded as a legitimate path to private and corporate enrichment. Civic virtue, or the service of the public good, not the pursuit of private self-interest, is highly prized by both Campanella and Bacon, and contemporary societies are shamed by the contrast of its practice and their degeneration. Until fairly recently the moderns combined a nostalgia for a lost past which embodied such ideals, even as Paradise, with the projection of their renewed attainment in a future yet to come. Yet many early modern utopias—even More's own text—also strike readers today as uncomfortably close to being overly-ordered, unduly collectivist, puritanical dystopias. Their simplicity of dress and manners, and hostility to pride and luxury, too, strike us as utterly alien from our own outlook, defined as it is by consumerism, fashion, and obsessive narcissism. Few thus feel drawn to emulate them, or even to use them for criticisms of society today. The history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has also instilled in us a deep suspicion regarding three aspects of what we might term the modern utopian vision. The first is of the imperial fantasy of conquest which so much of the early modern utopian genre helped to promote, but which we today rightly condemn as naked aggression against the less technologically advanced portions of the earth's population. The second respects the dangers of a highly regulated, intensely collectivist society in which the individual is sacrificed to the common good. Nazism and Stalinism, in particular, make clear while such sacrifices may benefit the few, the many sink usually into profound oppression and exploitation. Theocracy we now associate with fundamentalist dictatorship of the type so skilfully described in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985 ). We now reject the type of "eugenics" assumptions about breeding which infuse much utopian thought, though the pursuit of longevity remains undiminished. Thirdly, the liberal ideal of indefinite progress based upon ever-increasing production and consumption, and the extension of life through scientific discoveries, has brought us to the prospect of the near-destruction of our planet through resource depletion, overpopulation and global warming. More than ever, technology, once assumed to be our servant, threatens to become our master, as the approaching robotic age hints at the unemployment of millions in the future. So we see that the definition of the utopia or ideal society is continually shifting, and that the later moderns—at least after the mid-twentieth century—are much less prone to accept coercion, exploitation, or slavery as an ingredient in any utopia. The irony of the failure of these two early-modern utopian visions, however, lies in the fact that we must master our desires, even to the point of once again promoting simplicity, as Campanella had urged, in order to forestall the end which Bacon's vision ever more assuredly forces upon us. The domination of nature has brought the destruction of nature. To respect, and live in harmony with, nature, constitutes the greatest challenge of the present generation and its successors. Arcane as these utopias may today sometimes seem, they can yet teach us much about our current predicament.
Gregory Claeys
Royal Holloway, University of London