‘UTOPIA’ is the name of a book, the name of an imaginary island, and the name of an idea. Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) is responsible for the first two and indirectly for the third one as well. In 1516 he published, in Latin, Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which can be literally translated as A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Salubrious than Festive, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia. ‘Utopia’ is Greek for ‘No Place’, with a pun on the word ‘Eutopia’, which is Greek for ‘Happy Place’. The island does not exist, but it is ‘new’, or at least new to us, and it comes to our attention in the context of a treatment of ‘the best state of a republic’. In fact, the book generally called Utopia is divided into two parts; the first part involves a discussion among learned men of ‘the best state of a republic’; the second part involves a description of a ‘new island’ which seems to answer the requirements of a ‘best state of a republic’, although the narrator of the book (a fictionalized Thomas More) begs to differ. ‘I cannot agree and consent to all things’ that were said about how the island is run, the narrator says. ‘I must needs confess and grant that many things be in the Utopian weal-public which in our cities I may rather wish for than hope after.’1
So, going back to 1516, Utopia is a book and Utopia is an imaginary island. But by the early seventeenth century, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word came to indicate a pair of complementary ideas: either ‘any imaginary, indefinitely-remote region, country, or locality’ or else ‘a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions’. The word was generalized, sometimes as a term of praise and sometimes as a term of abuse—for to call an idea or a proposal a ‘utopia’ could mean that it was ludicrously impractical—and used to indicate the object of either of two kinds, or both kinds at once, of what would still later be called utopianism.
Discussions of utopia and utopianism are inescapably complicated by this multiplicity of meanings: a book, an imaginary island, an ideal state, any imaginary island, any ideal state, and any or all of these things in relation to the many-sided impulse that we call ‘utopianism’. Discussions will further be complicated by the attitudes we bring to bear upon utopianism. If one imagines that history is progressive, that it is potentially progressive, or that it ought to be progressive, and if one thinks of progress as the achievement, so far as possible, of a ‘best state’ run according to principles of universal justice, one may well discuss utopia and utopianism as a legacy and a hope. What Thomas More first started (though not without plenty of precedents, as we will see) was a project as yet incomplete and what we learn from studying that project in the documents of the past is, among other things, how to keep the project going. But if one is sceptical about the idea of progress and if one thinks that one ought to study history and texts on their own terms, in view of their immediate circumstances without regard to subsequent developments or one’s own political inclination, then there is nothing, in a word, ‘utopian’ about studying utopia and utopianism. Studying them might well elucidate many things about the period in which they are found to occur and may help one understand how texts work and a certain range of ideas can be developed, but they are not a legacy and they are not a source of hope; they are only what they are.
Total engagement in a project of utopianism, for which More’s Utopia is a foundational text, or total disengagement from such a project in the name of clarity of intellectual purpose—these are not the only two alternatives available. Surely, there are shades of engagement and disengagement between the two extremes and there are other ways of going about the study of utopia and utopianism entirely. But the two extremes are indicative of the main challenge to interpretative thought that utopia and utopianism present, and not just to us, in the twenty-first century: for the two extremes of engagement and disengagement inherent to the utopian project challenged thinkers of More’s own time and for many years to follow; in fact, they are embedded in the construction of the book, Utopia, itself.
What follows is a discussion, then, of three things: the sources and intertextualities of Utopia and its utopian project, in other words the other texts and historical developments utopia is in dialogue with; the continued development of the utopian framework of thought from 1516 to 1640; and the dialectic of engagement and disengagement that utopianism imposes on people who would respond to it, whether for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries or for us.
At least four kinds of sources of influence can be found in the original Utopia. Chief among them may be what the original title alludes to when it refers to the ‘best state of the republic’. The tradition begins with Plato (c.428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and most especially with Plato’s Republic (c.380 BCE). This is a tradition, in the first place, of the philosophical dialogue; all of the first part of Utopia is a philosophical dialogue in the Platonic mould. But it is a tradition as well of thinking about human community as a political society; the original Greek title (not necessarily the title Plato wanted to give it, but the one handed down by tradition) is Πολιτεία, ‘Of the City’, or more accurately, ‘Of the City-State’. Whether in the form of a city-state or some larger entity that can be called a regional or imperial ‘state’ (in Latin either civitas or respublica), when society is thought of as a ‘state’ it is thought of as an entity of more or less consensual association, where the power of making laws and enforcing them is vested in its institutions and appointed officials. Plato and Aristotle both take the existence of the state for granted, but as they enquire into the nature of the state they also enquire into the nature of the ‘best state’; indeed, for both philosophers, to enquire into one is to enquire into the other, for to know what a thing like a state is requires knowing what a thing like a state ought to be. Plato and Aristotle gave various answers to the question of the best state and were in disagreement on many issues, but they both saw that the perfection of the state relied on the state’s living up to the principle of universal justice. Aristotle thus underlined the importance of what he called ‘distributive justice’, the fair distribution of wealth, goods, and social capital among all the citizens of the state. Plato went further and advocated communism.
A second tradition to which More responds is Christian. There seems little question that one of the things More had in mind when he developed his description of the island of Utopia was the prosperous medieval monastery, with its carefully regulated life, its collectivist spirit, its shared labour and meals, its mixed economy, and—for this is a central part of life in Utopia—its piety. Behind the monastic tradition lay the notion of the early Christian communities mentioned in the New Testament. It is said of one of these communities, ‘Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.’2 But the founding of this communist community in the Bible is a spontaneous, voluntary, and collective act. In a monastery, entry to which often involved the renunciation of all one’s worldly possessions, communal life was compulsory and (in principle) strictly enforced. So it is in Utopia. Utopia enlists the free will of all its inhabitants; without that free will the utopian project would fall apart. The government of the nation is republican. But Utopia was founded—being similar in this respect to many monastic orders—by a single charismatic and authoritarian leader, Utopus, who established the laws of the new republic, and Utopia is controlled as much by the enforcement of its laws as by the consent of the governed. Many of its laws, when looked at closely, are actually quite restrictive, and offences against the law can lead to forced servitude and even capital punishment.
Much of this serious business of political and economic idealism, and of a strictly enforced legal code, however, is mitigated by way of a third kind of influence that More clearly draws upon, the comical or satirical fantasy. When Plato was a young man and the real-life Socrates was holding forth in the marketplace of Athens, there was already a form of writing that made fun of utopianism. It appears most prominently in the comedies of Aristophanes (446–386 BCE); for example, in The Birds (414 BCE), where an Athenian, in an absurd response to the political problems of the day, convinces the birds of the area to form their own city in the sky, called Cloudcuckooland. It is hard to establish with certainty what speculative ideas about the city-state Aristophanes was poking fun at, but we can see that by Aristophanes’s time a literary tradition was already afloat, where writers at once registered the utopian impulse and mocked it. In the third century BC there flourished in the Greek world a ‘cynic’ philosopher named Menippus of Gadara who further developed the genres of social satire in a utopian mould. His writings are now lost, but they had a direct influence on the work of Lucian of Samosata (125–180), a favourite of Thomas More and his good friend, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). Among Lucian’s works was Menippus, a dialogue where the cynic philosopher visits the underworld and sees established a new decree to punish men of wealth in the afterlife for having been wealthy, and A True Story, a rambunctious narrative involving, among other things, a trip to the moon and a view of the puny and ridiculous earth of men from the point of view of the heavens.
‘Menippean Satire’, as literary critics are inclined to call it today—a satire of attitudes and ideas, rather than people, articulated through playful narrative, dialogue, or verse, and often openly implausible—was an important part of the humanist project of early modernity. In 1511 Erasmus published Moriae encomium, punning on the name of his friend Thomas More, to whom he dedicated the book; or, in English, The Praise of Folly. In The Praise of Folly, the person Folly herself speaks and argues, foolishly, on behalf of what she stands for, though in the end she makes serious points about religious worship and love, and all along the Folly’s praise of herself has important things to say about the human condition. Thomas More’s Utopia is in some respects a response to The Praise of Folly. It is certainly an attempt to experiment with the genre of the Menippean Satire in the wake of what Erasmus had already done with it and to write something that was both foolish and wise, addressing itself, through the ironies of satiric form, to practical and serious business of human society. Critics today are apt to speak of the attitude of works like The Praise of Folly and Utopia as ‘jocoserious’, calling attention to the inbetweenness of the discourse, an indefiniteness in attitude and meaning that cannot, and is not supposed to be, ever resolved. Utopia is a form of textual play. Utopia is a joke, even if there is much that Utopia is serious about. And that is one of the main reasons why it can be said that Utopia requires a mixture of engagement and disengagement.
But if Utopia comments playfully on the human condition, in the spirit of the wild tales and dialogues of Lucian, it also addresses itself to some important historical developments. London in More’s day and age was becoming ever more a thriving urban centre; and his Utopia is a predominantly urban society. England under Henry VIII was aspiring to be a world power and constantly intervening, belligerently, in the affairs on the Continent and Ireland; and so too, Utopia gets involved, with arms, in foreign affairs across the sea. The first stirrings of the Reformation were beginning to be felt; Luther would publicize his Ninety-Five Theses just a year after the publication of Utopia and Erasmus himself, though he would never become a Protestant, was an advocate of reform. So too, in an Erasmian spirit, with an emphasis on natural piety, Utopia is religiously experimental. Even more important, it would seem, for the interlocutors in Utopia discuss this at some length, there was an economic development to respond to: economic modernization was putting pressure on the old peasantry of More’s England and controversies over ‘enclosure’, the practice of landlords of fencing off parts of their land for their own use, to the detriment of tenant farmers who had traditionally used such lands ‘in common’, were becoming widespread. Obviously, Utopia has solved such problems by abolishing private property, so that, in principle, absolutely everything, apart from people themselves, are held ‘in common’. Utopia is a predominantly urban society which has solved the agrarian problem through the state-wide abolition of private property and the republican, egalitarian administration of the common weal.
But there was one development more. All of these historical phenomena—the growth of London and urbanism generally, the new English interest in foreign affairs, religious experimentation and debate on the eve of the Reformation, and the modernization of the English economy at the expense of traditional peasants and the feudal system to which they were accustomed—came at the time of the Age of Discovery. The news of Columbus’s first voyage had only arrived in England twenty-three years earlier and the nature of much of the world outside of the Old World still remained, for Europeans, a matter of conjecture. England involved itself in the Age of Discovery on a national level from 1497, when Henry VII sponsored the journey across the Atlantic undertaken by the Italian John Cabot, and though England wasn’t very good at taking advantage of discovery or colonization until the seventeenth century, plans for exploration and colonial expansion were always afoot.
More’s Utopia takes a good deal of its inspiration from Amerigo Vespucci’s Lettera delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (1504–5), possibly by way of a Latin translation that appeared in 1507. Raphael Hytholday, the traveller in Utopia, is said to have been one of the crew members on Amerigo Vespucci’s last expedition who were voluntarily left behind in the New World (so that Hythloday had a chance to move about and explore things on his own). The island of Utopia may be ‘no place’, but it is certainly a part of the New World that was still being explored in More’s day. Utopia inserts the fictional island into the non-fictional, but still poorly understood, geography of the Americas, in which a crewman of Vespucci might have travelled. And More is clearly responding to an element of Vespucci’s letters which make the New World at once attractive and challenging. Parts of the New World, for Vespucci, bring to mind the Golden Age of classical legend, when people were both simpler and more virtuous, and both poverty and wealth were unknown. So the New World can be a place that excites the moral imagination. Its newness can be an innocence. But the New World can also stand as a rebuke to the Old, since its virtue may be held to contrast more than a little favourably with the corrupt life of advanced society in Europe. In a famous essay originally published in 1578, ‘Of Cannibals’, the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) made this rebuke explicit; the barbarity of the inhabitants of the New World, he asserted, was nothing compared to the barbarity of so-called civilized people, doing what they believe their civility warrants them to do—like persecuting each other because of religious differences. More doesn’t go quite that far; but he does explore the possibility that a people of a New World, without the benefit of European civilization, and even without the benefit of revealed religion, might nevertheless live more wholesomely and even more piously than their European counterparts. Although it is a joke, Utopia is also a rebuke.
So there are four of the main influences behind the invention of Utopia: philosophical speculation about the ‘best state’; the communal life of the monastic orders; Menippean Satire with its comic dialogues and fantastic adventures; and the real-world literature of discovery and exploration. Put the four together, along with such ancillary concerns as urbanization, and you have the essential building blocks of Utopia. But if you do put the four together, as More has done, you have the makings for what is at once a highly coherent and convincing bipartite exposition—first a philosophical discussion among interlocutors about politics and then a description of the island of Utopia that is intended empirically to prove the main points of the discussion—and a very unstable idea. Utopia seems to give hope. With one hand it seems to say, here is a new possibility, a new way of thinking about the world, a new way of imagining collective life, where reason and piety rule rather than convention and passion, and the good of the community rules over the pursuit of private self-interest. Let us renew ourselves. But with the other hand the text seems to say, don’t take this new way of thinking terribly seriously. That’s not the point. In the final analysis, there is nothing certain about the certainties of the New World and the imaginary paradises with which we would like to populate it.
So the meaning of Utopia, in short, inspiring though it may be, is inherently indefinite and unstable. More himself signals this to the reader with his infamous word-play. Utopia is No Place. Hythloday, the main speaker of the dialogue, is (in Greek) a ‘Peddlar of Nonsense’. And there is more to the indefiniteness besides word-play. So far as Utopia is meant to entail not a description of a real place, or even a place that is to be ‘hoped after’, but rather a satirical commentary on real-world Europe, its main meaning would seem to consist in that which it attacks. But it is hard to determine exactly what it is that Utopia attacks. As soon as one tries to establish the exact targets of Utopia’s satire, one gets caught up in the same back-and-forth of jocoseriousness as the book itself deliberately dallies with. Utopia is against private property, but maybe not really. Utopia is against the Catholic religion as currently practised in the early sixteenth century, but maybe not really. Utopia is against the modern world of mercantilism, monarchy, urbanism, and High Church Catholicism, but maybe not really. More was himself a high-ranking state official, working for a powerful king, and he was both a representative of the rising mercantile class and a devout Catholic. Besides, just look at Utopia itself: it is full of self-contradictions. It is a nation without any laws, but it actually has plenty of laws. It is a nation that has abolished capital punishment; but it actually practises capital punishment. It is a nation where everything and everyone are alike, equal in dignity. But in fact, there are all kinds of inequalities of dignity and even of power and possession in the island. Perhaps Utopia is not so utopian after all …
Utopia was famous from the day of its appearance in print. Some people seem to have been fooled by it, believing that Utopia was an actual island somewhere in the Americas. After all, More had apparently spoken in his own voice in the text; he had made several real people, including himself, the speakers of the dialogue, Raphael Hythloday apart; and he had framed the dialogue by a picture of real events of the day. But eventually, the idea took hold: Utopia was jocoserious and there was no such thing as Utopia. What seemed to be important about the text was the utopian idea—a point of view about the real world that was not of this world, not confined to its received ideas and dogmatic conventions. And what seemed to be important as well was its utopian jocoseriousness—a way of engaging in literary play, where one both speculated and mocked, where one both asserted and denied. The most famous of all responses to Utopia in this respect was Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French writer François Rabelais (1494–1553); the First Book of Rabelais’s four-volume romp3 includes a description of the ideal society of the Abbey of Thélème, a place where men and women live together for the sake of pleasure and self-fulfilment, and the guiding principle of life is ‘Do What Thou Wilt’. The Second and Third Books contain a number of allusions to the island from Utopia, where the hero Pantagruel is said to have been born, and the Fourth Book tells the tale of a fantastic voyage to islands where the rules of life are vastly different from our own, in a mock-heroic search for what is called the Oracle of the Bottle.
So Rabelais absorbed much of the spirit of Utopia and made it much his own. But if meaning is unstable in Utopia, in Gargantua and Pantagruel it is perhaps even more unstable. Whereas Utopia is sometimes mildly humorous, Gargantua and Pantagruel openly plays for laughs. Rabelais does not hesitate to sacrifice the seriousness of humanist learning to the requirements of farce. And where More might seem to put forward a programme for collective action, even if only half seriously, Rabelais cannot seem to be doing anything of the kind. He is just expressing a fantasy, Do What Thou Wilt, and calling attention to the unpleasant fact that in the modern world one cannot do what one would. It would be better if we could do what we would, Rabelais implies; think of the possibilities. But we can’t. And in any case, though there were certainly some readers in England who were familiar with Rabelais’s work in French, none of it is was translated into English and published in England until 1653; it would not be until 1694 that the whole of Rabelais’s output would be available in English. And, for the most part, writers in England would take a much more cautious approach to the ambiguous jocoseriousness inherent to the humanist utopian project, and a much more cautious approach as well to the politics and social criticism inherent to the utopian project. English writers, generally speaking, wanted to be engaged with the utopian project; but at the same time, they seemed to want to disengage themselves from the radical implications of the project and even, for the most part, from the radical implications of utopian textuality.
A case in point would be the first important work of social thought in England to follow in Utopia’s wake, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531). The Governour is a much more conservative document than More’s. It begins, indeed, by openly disavowing communism and the notion of the republic that informs More’s text, or for that matter Plato’s Republic, and it ends by promoting a humanist, courtly society, presided over by a powerful monarch and a learned, professional ruling class, a society that is more familiar from Erasmus’s (non-satiric) Enchiridion militis Christiani (often translated as The Education of the Christian Prince: 1503) or Baldassare Castiglione’s relatively serious Il Cortegiano (The Courtier: 1528) than from the Platonic–Morean tradition. The Governour makes few jokes; it is not very playful; and instead of challenging the status quo of the social order, though it recommends many reforms, and tries to find a new home for learning and reason in society, it actually apologizes for many aspects of the status quo.
More akin to Utopia in form and spirit, though also much more earnest and far less radical, are two political dialogues. The first of these, the Dialogue Between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, by Thomas Starkey, was completed by 1533; it circulated in manuscript only, not being printed until the nineteenth century. The two interlocutors of the dialogue were historical figures, men of Starkey’s acquaintance, who played a role in negotiating the relation between church and state in response to reformist impulses both of them shared and to Henry VIII’s break from Rome, which Pole (like Thomas More himself) could never fully subscribe to. The main speaker, Pole, is caused to argue in an anti-ecclesiastic mode in favour of an Aristotelian ‘mixed monarchy’, with a strong Parliament and a weak clerical presence, and to encourage a form of happiness in both individuals and the state where the body and the soul are allowed equally to flourish.
Still more motivated by economic considerations was a second humanist dialogue, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of a Commonweal of this Realm in England. It was written in 1549, circulating (again) in manuscript, and found its way into print in 1581, four years after Smith’s death. Smith’s Discourse is a dialogue between five different interlocutors, representing different estates and trades, with a knight dominating the conversation. The interlocutors are concerned about a current ‘dearth’ and troubled by the recent anti-enclosure riots of 1549, which had broken out in several parts of England, climaxing in the protracted Kett’s Rebellion in Smith’s native East Anglia. The knight leads the interlocutors in analysing the dearth and the discontent to which it has given rise, and the problem, on the one hand, of inflation, and, on the other, of the natural avarice of mankind. His solution is to regulate the economy by governmental policies that exploit the selfish avarice of individuals for the sake of general prosperity and the common good. Like Hythloday in Utopia, Smith’s interlocutors are indignant over the displacement of small landholders by great landlords seeking to maximize their profits by raising sheep for wool for the export market. But Smith isn’t interested in what may be called utopian solutions to the problem. In a later work, De Republica Anglorum (written in English, despite its Latin title, and first published in 1583), an analysis of the English constitution, Smith concludes by renouncing the ‘vaine imaginations, phantasies of Philosophers’, including Plato, Xenophon, and More.4
Also in dialogue form, imitating a humanist exercise, but actually something quite different, is Siuqila: Too Good to Be True, written by Thomas Lupton and printed in London in 1580. It is the first work in English since Utopia to adopt the conceit of an imaginary perfect commonwealth and the first to imitate More’s word-play in its use of proper names. Siuqila is the name of the main character—Siuqila being the Latin word aliquis (‘somebody’) spelled backwards. He is an Englishman travelling around the world who comes into contact with an individual named Omen—that is nemo (‘no one’). Omen hails from the country of Mauqsun—that is, nusquam (‘nowhere’). Siuqila is not allowed entry into Mauqsun; foreigners like him are considered too dangerous an influence. But Omen is glad to spend a long while discussing the ‘wonderfull manners’ of the people of Nowhere. As Siuqila never enters Mauqsun, the reader never gets to see it in operation, and though Omen tells him a good deal about the laws and the behaviour of the people of Mauqsun, he never actually describes the country. The text gestures mightily in the direction of the genre of Utopia, but stops short of one of its most important features, the description of the ideal republic. Yet, that is not the only major difference. Although the dialogue works by pointing out the differences between a very real and troubled England on the one hand and a well-nigh perfect imaginary commonwealth on the other, it does not really stem from a deep humanist understanding of how societies operate. It is, rather, a popular work, made to appeal to certain popular prejudices.
Too Good to Be True may perhaps be described as the first Puritan utopia—Puritan (for us) in both an attractive and an unattractive sense. In its attractive aspects, the book embraces Low Church evangelism, personal religion with emphasis on biblical study, universal literacy, moral probity, and, above all, a species of communitarianism, motivated by the rule of charity. As in Puritan leader John Winthrop’s famous lay sermon A Modell of Christian Charity, delivered aboard the Arabella en route from England to Massachusetts (1630), poverty is not so much systematically eradicated in Too Good to Be True as energetically mitigated. Almsgiving and charitable works are central to the moral economy of the nation. But more unattractive, from our point of view, and no doubt from the point of view of anti-Puritans of Tudor England as well, is the intolerance of the state of Mauqsun, with its heavy-handed system of justice and its illiberal sanctimony. Mauqsun, we learn, suffers from no crime, from no outbreaks of licentious or immodest behaviour, from no drunkenness or gluttony or irreverence or fornication. No one suffers from the sins of greed, pride, idleness, dishonesty, or irresponsibility. And the reason for such universal purity is that there are very strict, even harrowing laws against all crimes and all sins, with penalties so severe, including capital punishment, that most citizens are cowed into good behaviour, and those who aren’t are finally eliminated—mercilessly executed. Simply to fail to educate one’s young children, so that they cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, is to expose oneself to very heavy fines; and if one can’t pay the fines, one shall then ‘recyve twenties stripes, every moneth once, untill he have trayned his children Chrisitianlye and obedientlye’.5 Meanwhile, to be convicted a second time for the minor crime of usury, or for having borrowed money from a usurer, is punishable by death. A commercial success, Too Good to Be True was also accompanied by a sequel, The Second Part and Knitting Up of the Boke Entitled Too Good to Be True (1581), which adds a few details but leaves the general picture unchanged. If life were led really as we are encouraged to lead our lives by more earnest church officials and other authorities today, by forces that would come to be associated with the word ‘puritanism’, life would be ‘too good to be true’—only Lupset and his readership clearly ‘wish for’ and maybe even ‘hope after’ a life of that kind.
Utopia itself, with its more complex understanding of how nations work and how writing can make a difference in the life of nations, was translated into English in 1551 by Ralph Robinson, a ‘citizen and Goldsmythe of London’, as he identifies himself, who had been educated at Oxford. Robinson’s translation is faulted by modern scholars for its inaccuracies, but Robinson’s prose is a good deal livelier than many subsequent efforts and Robinson shows himself to be more than a little capable of appreciating what Utopia had achieved. He calls the book A Fruteful and Plesaunt Worke of the Best State of a Publique Weale, and of the New Yle called Utopia and in a preface extols it as much for its style and wit as for its content. The translation was reprinted in 1555 and then five times more through 1641. So even if few thinkers of the time would be openly as adventurous as More in thinking about an ideal state, or in engaging in literary play, Utopia was available to be read in both Latin and English, and perhaps widely read. In a preface to the translation, Robinson goes to the effort of declaring that More’s work belongs to a great new tradition of English letters and that it is only a shame that in subsequent years More refused to take sides with the Reformation, that he was ‘so much blinded, rather with obstinacy than with ignorance, that could not or rather would not see the shining light of God’s holy truth …’6
So the sixteenth century was alive to the new way of thinking and writing that Utopia represented, although it could also be apprehensive about it and the legend of the man responsible for it, and it could imagine ways in which utopianism could be developed in the pursuit of more economic parity and even the enforcement of stricter moral codes. Then, as the sixteenth century came to a close, interest in utopian writing leaped forward: engagement and disengagement were equally transformed by a new kind of commitment to the utopian project. On the Continent, most notably, the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella wrote La Città del Sole (1602), which he later translated into Latin and published as Civitas solis (1623); another Italian, political philosopher Lodovico Zùccolo published a dialogue called Il Belluzzi, o vero della città felice (1615) and another called La Repubblica d’Evandria (1625); and the German Lutheran minister Johann Valentin Andreae published Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619). All of these works follow the genre of Utopia fairly closely, employing the device of a philosophical dialogue where one of the interlocutors reports on travels to another land. And all of them imagine a republic devoted to the common weal, Campanella in the direction of an authoritarian, but mystical and communist state, Zùccolo in the direction of republican-directed distributive justice, and Andreae in the direction of a meritocratically governed and pious communist state.
Clearly, something was in the air in the early seventeenth century, something which More had anticipated, but which was only just now becoming common currency for political thinkers. In England would come the work of Francis Bacon and Robert Burton. Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), one of the great minds of his age, had already written a work from which Andreae had found inspiration, The Advancement of Learning (1605), where Bacon called for a wholesale renewal of scientific research and education in England along the lines of empiricism and collective, collegial enterprise. After his death was published the incomplete text, The New Atlantis, where Bacon imagines a trip to yet another hitherto unknown island of the Americas, a rational, pious, and generous society devoted to learning. At about the same time, Robert Burton (1577–1640) was writing and rewriting what is conventionally called ‘A Utopia of Mine Owne’, a section of the preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, to the mammoth Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–40). Both Bacon and Burton embrace the Morean principle of literary play, though Bacon does so in a very earnest, un-mocking spirit, while Burton does so humorously and sometimes mischievously. But Bacon and Burton are also thinking quite carefully about the nature of the kind of society they would like to live in. And in this they are akin to other early seventeenth-century utopians. Campanella, Zùccolo, and Andreae were actively involved in the political, religious, and scientific turmoil of their day, each in his own way promoting progressive policies and programmes (the erratic Campanella ended up in jail for most of his adult life as a reward for his efforts). Bacon, by contrast, was an establishment figure, a Member of Parliament and eventually (like Thomas More before him) the Chancellor of England; and Burton was a retiring Oxford don. But all five of these figures are united in wanting to change the world, in wanting to make the world run by more rational principles, in the pursuit of material and spiritual prosperity, more or less collectively, and with a view towards promoting learning and the new science.
In contrast to the work of the previous century, these later utopian works are characterized by the intensity of the commitment of their authors to the utopian project. It is a two-sided commitment, to be sure. On the one hand, these utopias are urgent; the writers want to think past what they take to be the contradictions and limitations of their time; they want to imagine how things might be done. On the other hand, the utopias are highly speculative. They are not weighed down by conventions of the present day, as most of the utopias of the sixteenth century could be said to be. They all involve audacious flights of hypothetical fancy. Neither New Atlantis nor ‘A Utopia of Mine Owne’ goes so far as to embrace communism, it is true; the latter in fact openly renounces communism and other apparently impractical ideas in favour of proto-capitalist development and the accumulation of capital. (In some ways, that makes ‘A Utopia of Mine Owne’ the most modern of all these works.) But Bacon’s and Burton’s utopias are nevertheless urgent efforts to rethink the bases of civil society, to repair what Burton thinks of as the ‘melancholy’ of modern social life, and what Bacon seems to imagine as its disappointing inadequacy. And they are highly imaginative, openly removed from the pressures of the here and now, from popular prejudice and received opinion. Bacon takes his readers to the Island of Bensalem, off the coast of Peru, to view what it would be like, among other things, to live in a society dedicated to acquiring the ‘light’ of scientific knowledge. Burton keeps his readers at home, but he defies them to imagine a home country transformed into a uniformly prosperous, vibrant, and happy whole.
Somewhat in the same spirit as the work of other utopists of the early seventeenth century, but taking a new tack, comes one last major utopian text: Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). The Man in the Moone is presented not as a dialogue but rather, like New Atlantis, as an adventure narrative. This time, however, the destination of the adventurer is not to a better society, where human beings have learned how to organize their lives for the good of the whole, but an otherworldly society, the society of moon people, whose nature is different from that of humans. The tale was written at about the same time as a somewhat similar text by the great astronomer, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Somnium, published after the astronomer’s death in 1634, where another trip to the moon is imagined. But Godwin puts flesh and blood to his story, giving it the tone and trappings of the picaresque novel, a form of writing which originated in the late sixteenth century in Spain. The hero of Godwin’s story is one Domingo Gonsales, harnessing the power of high-flying geese, where the protagonist Domingo Gonsales visits a paradisiacal society of giants. It is probably not an exaggeration to credit The Man in the Moone (and not Kepler’s Somnium) with being the first work of science fiction ever written, putting into novelistic form a tale which considers the impact of scientific and technological innovation in an imaginary time and place. The technology isn’t much; the story is not very sophisticated, either from a scientific or a literary point of view; and the paradisiacal world of the giants, though it answers to some of the commonplaces about the classical Golden Age, doesn’t provide the reader, or even the protagonist of the story, with much guidance. But technology, whether earthly or lunar, is the point of the story. The point of the story, that is, is to underscore the promise of technology to compensate humanity for its physical and moral insufficiencies. Unlike New Atlantis, The Man in the Moone shows us not an ideal society that would be worth imitating if only we could, but a world that we cannot imitate because of the limitations of our nature. It asks us instead to look for other kinds of solutions to the problem of the state.
One other text that is often mentioned with reference to early modern utopianism is Mundus Alter et Idem (1595), written in Latin by English clergyman Joseph Hall, and later loosely (but vividly) translated by John Healey for an edition of 1609, entitled, The Discovery of a New World. Hall’s work is a satirical text, more influenced by Gargantua and Pantagruel, perhaps, than Utopia. In it one Mercurius Brittanicus (the ‘British messenger’) undertakes a voyage to Terra Australis Incognita, a region that the fable locates in the regions of what we now call Antarctica. But what he discovers is no model commonwealth. The Terra Australis is a world turned upside down, imagined as a place where the faults and foibles of contemporary English society are ridiculously exaggerated—alter et idem, different yet the same— the better to point out their inherent absurdity. The book is an extremely negative work, a dystopia rather than a utopia, and so far as it takes aim against the ambitions of free-spirited individuals of contemporary England, holding them up to dystopian ridicule, it anticipates Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1721), not to mention satires closer to home such as Ben Jonson’s comedy, The Alchemist (1611).
Whether Mundus alter et idem should be counted as a ‘utopian’ text is debatable. Its negativity would seem to count against it. So too would be the fact that unlike, say, Francis Godwin’s Domingo Gonsales, Mercurius Brittanicus has nothing to offer his readers except his story. He learns nothing in his travels; he finds nothing in the ‘other world’ to admire. But Mundus alter et idem would seem then, at the very least, to have something to tell us about the nature of utopian engagement. For in it we see what happens when, for all of the literary power inherent to imaginary voyage, and for all the fun a writer and his readers may have with it, the utopian imagination has nothing to offer but criticism of the present. In it we see what happens, in other words, when the utopian imagination leaves us with nothing either to wish for or hope after.
The production of any utopian fiction would seem to require a measure of dis engagement. Fictionality seems to demand it. Utopian fiction is inherently ironic precisely because it is fictional. It is inherently about something that is not, and very likely cannot be. But when that disengagement is carried to an extreme, when it is not also coupled with engagement, though the fiction itself may prosper, the text as a whole may well be, in a word, un-giving. More’s Utopia may be inherently unstable, but it clearly has something to give its readers. So it was in the case of most of More’s prominent imitators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Thomas Elyot to Francis Godwin. Even Rabelais’s silliness (which Rabelais would suggest is actually not so silly) has something to offer. But Mundus alter et idem gives us nothing, even if we are willing to be receptive to it. On the other side of its cynicism about the world as it is lies a kind of complacency about the world as it is.
What the counter-example of Mundus alter et idem may call our attention to, therefore, is that, if it is to work as utopian writing, a utopian fiction will have to couple its disengagement with engagement. But what, then, is the nature of this engagement? Speaking only of work from 1516 to 1640, one is tempted to say that what the writing is engaged with—both in the way it is written and in what, however ironically, it advocates—is what we now call ‘modernity’. Utopia is a ‘new island’ and all the major utopian works of the period attempt to engage with that which is new. This is not newness for its own sake. It is newness for the sake of the betterment of the human condition.
Shortly after the period under consideration, and indeed already percolating in England and the rest of Europe during the 1630s, would come a veritable explosion of utopian writing, with results as varied as the industry-minded Macaria by Gabriel Plattes (1641), the radical communist state imagined in The Law of Freedom in a Platform by Gerrard Winstanley (1652), and the constitutionalist Oceana by James Harrington (1656). In these works the commitment already noticeable in early seventeenth-century utopias is redoubled; it becomes so intense that the boundary between fiction and reality becomes blurred and the ironies of utopian writing come to serve the realities of the utopian project, rather than the other way around.
But how we are to view this transition from the work of people like Bacon and Burton to the work of people like Plattes and Winstanley depends in large part on how we view the development of intellectual history generally. It depends on whether we allow ourselves to see anything like progress in it. It depends as well on how we feel about the project of modernity. And it depends, finally, on whether, as we review the documents and political projects of the past, we allow ourselves to find anything we may still wish for or hope after.
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