Utopia

Utopia

Introduction

A utopia is an ideal community whose inhabitants live under perfect conditions. The term was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More in his book Utopia, the two volumes of which described both the faults that characterized Christian European societies of the period and the contrasting merits of the fictional island of Utopia. Utopia themes have been common in literature at least since ancient times, with Plato's Republic often cited as the definitive model. Writers have used both straightforward argument as well as satire to express utopian visions, which have considered such matters as governance, work, distribution of resources, and social roles.

Book I ends with More's request to hear further of Utopia and Book II (which was written first) contains Raphael's description of the happy island state where all things are held in common, gold is despised and the people live communally. The work ends with More's ambiguous reflections on the story: there are some things in Utopia he cannot agree with and others he would like to see implemented in Europe, although he doubts that they will be.

Interpretation of Utopia

Interpretations of Utopia (the name plays on two Greek words eutopos, 'a good place', and outopos, 'no place') are many and diverse. It has been seen as a program for an ideal state, a contemplative vision of the ideal, a satirical look at contemporary European society, and a humanist “jeu d'esprit”. Models for More's island state can be found in earlier literature; Plato's Republic is explicitly mentioned, while Plutarch had described an ideal Spartan commonwealth, and the most perfect island possible crops up in medieval theological debate. After the publication of Utopia, Italian humanists preoccupied themselves with works on ideal states, the most significant being “Tommaso Campanella's La città del sol” ('The City of the Sun', written c. 1602).

Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) was one of many such works in the 17th century, when 'Utopian' became current as an adjective. The ambiguities of More's island, whether it is ideal, possible or even desirable, continue in subsequent Utopian literature, as does More's use of imagined strange lands for satirical purposes (Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Butler's Erewhon). 'Dystopian' was first used as an adjective in the late 19th century by J.S. Mill, to suggest an imagined state which was not desirable. But the desirability of Utopia is deliberately open to question even in More's own work. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four describe apparent Utopias that reveal them to be dystopian.

Recent years have witnessed many claims about the 'end of utopia', precipitated by events such as the collapse of communism regimes and by claims that utopian thought is necessarily authoritarian if not downright dangerous. Yet some geographers have argued for a revitalization of utopianism to counteract pronouncements that 'there is no alternative', and in the process sought to re-conceptualize utopias not in terms of blueprints but in more open and process-oriented ways. For the utopian is a vital moment in critical theory. This gives a central role to desire and ...