UTOPIA

Utopia

Utopia

Introduction

Utopianism is the systematic use of utopias—that is, forms of thinking that depict a desirable but impractical state of things. The term utopia derives from the eponymous book (1516) by Thomas More, who coined it to designate the imaginary ideal society that he described in the second part of his book. More intentionally, it played with the ambivalence of the term, since u-topia, from ancient Greek, can be a contraction of both eu-topos (the “good-place”) and ou-topos (the “no-place”). This, as we shall see, would have enduring consequences. With time, the term came generally to mean all ideas or proposals that are good but unrealistic or even impossible (Parker, 2007, pp. 1597-99). As Karl Mannheim famously put it, a state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the reality within which it occurs: Utopias break the bonds of existing social order. This entry discusses the concept of utopianism by reconstructing its forms, its functions, and, finally, its prospects in the contemporary world.

Forms of Utopianism: “Good-Place” or “No-Place”?

Generally speaking, researchers distinguish between two forms of utopianism. The first is the literary genre that followed the example of More's Utopia. Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891) are all examples of such a genre. The description of the good-place often takes the form of a narrative by a traveler who discovers the land of utopia, typically an island or at least a territory separated from the others. Soem works in this genre are negative utopias, such as Orwell's 1984 (1949), which describes the dreadful dream of a disciplinary and totalitarian society ruled by Big Brother (Kumar, 2004, pp. 859-62). These works are also at times called “dystopias”—from the Greekdys, which means abnormal, faulty, or bad.

The second form of utopianism is that of works that are not part of the literary utopian genre but nevertheless enclose significant utopian elements. Political treatises such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) or Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) contain important utopian moments in that they depict societies that are good-places but also no-places. The degree to which they are realizable is still a matter of controversy: Rousseau portrayed a direct democracy where human beings stand as free and equal, whereas Kant's Perpetual Peace defined the articles of the hypothetical international treaty that would put an end to the international condition of anarchy and war (Bottici, 2011, pp. 2687-90). In synthesis, a work contains utopian elements when it expresses the belief that some (or all) social evils can be eliminated and a better society created.

Discussion

The purpose of writing this paper is to present a compare and contrast paper on the work of two different historians regarding their work on Utopia. In this paper, the author selected the work of Thomas More and Auroville who was founded as a great work by Sri Aurobindo Society on Wednesday 28 February 1968 by Mirra Alfass. The author presented in a complete descriptive form so that the readers got a complete idea what actually the author wants to say.

Thomas More's Utopia

Thomas More was a diplomat, a humanist friend of Erasmus. In his book Utopia, he described a wonderful island which he named specifically Utopia, and flourishes ...